BOLT OUT OF THE RED

For those of you excited by .NET4.0’s new features and wanting to test Revit commands compiled with .NET4.0, you’re in luck. Before I show you how, a few caveats:More...

Jeremy nicely summed up the issues with the RevitAddUtility.dll . I thought I’d document my solution which uses interfaces to solve the issue. The problem is the loader exception fires before your application can catch it. By using interfaces you can utilise the appropriate assemblies which maintaining a single main application and no file copying.More...

Steve’s post on IFC and the comments that follow, mirror discussions I’ve had on IFC on numerous occasions. I’m going to be more blunt than Steve though ;-) . Don’t get me wrong, an open interoperability layer is vital for BIM but IFC is not the long term solution.  More...

I’ve had some requests for compiled assemblies of the Autodesk Revit 2011 API SDK samples. They’re useful for those of you who don’t have Visual Studio installed or don’t know how to compile them.  Or if you’re wondering what’s supplied in the SDK and just what’s possible with the API.More...

To be honest I’m loathed to single out a single standout feature from the new API’s. There is no doubt Updaters are going to be widely use. They plug a major gap in the API’s capabilities, the Updater API is well designed and are fast. However, there is a single API that does standout and in my opinion allows developers to begin the process of seamlessly integrating Revit into users BIM workflows unlike anything that has been possible before.More...

API performance has always been of interest, even more so as large projects regularly hit >300Mb now. With the new API’s such as updaters and the DocumentChanged event performance testing has got a lot more complicated. Throw in transaction and regeneration issues and it soon became obvious a different approach was required. I’m not ready to talk about this approach but I thought a little test on transactions speaks volumes about some of the additional design decisions API authors need now consider.More...

At the beginning of the year I showed you how to add your own tab to the Revit Ribbon. I’ve updated this now for Revit 2011.  However, I’ve taken the chainsaw to my code for 2 reasons. The API wasn’t very elegant and the 2011 ribbon seems to behave itself a lot more than the ribbon in Revit 2010.More...

For those who thought the ribbon and Revit were a joke. Well I’ve got news for you. Thanks to the power of the Visual Studio 2010 Phone 7 series development tools and the Revit Ribbon, I’ve been able to get Revit 2011 running on the emulator with the minimum of effort. Although it is a little slow in the emulator.

Here’s a screenshot of the port of Revit 2011 Architecture running on the Phone 7 emulator. Fantastic stuff. Looking forward to a decent iPad sized device from Windows in the coming months.

As Jeremy noted Revit 2011 API has had a major refactoring of the namespaces as well as splitting into 2 assemblies.More...

So apparently we can talk about Revit 2011 now and wow, can we talk about Revit 2011 and the API…More...