BOLT OUT OF THE RED

On a fairly regular basis I’m asked questions along these lines:

• “We’ve been asking for multi-threaded Revit for years. How hard can it be? <Insert usual ADSK expletive>…”(1)
• “Why doesn’t Revit utilise all my PC’s cores like <insert application>…”
• “Revit isn’t a real database, and it’s slow according to our DB expert…(2)”
• “If ArchiCAD can use multiple cores then there should be no reason Revit can’t do it.(3)”

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Yes I have taken my medication and no, I have no crystal ball or prior knowledge ;-) I’ve generally stayed out of the debate over the ribbon UI in Revit 2010. However, this post says too much about Revit development within Autodesk to go unchallenged. No, I’m not saying “if they don’t fix the ribbon in Revit 2011 the world will end”. The issues I’m going to discuss are considerably more fundamental than that…More...

After a considerable amount of work I’ve finally managed to complete what is by far my most significant Revit API command to date. In trying to figure out what would attract AutoCAD users to Revit I hit upon what I consider to be the missing link. This command will also be very useful for Revit experts.More...

As I explained in part 3 if a command fails to run other than in the Revit executable directory, there is a good chance it’s because of the command assembly was loaded into the wrong binding context (LoadFrom() ) by Revit. In this part of the series I’m going to explain how we can fix this so you can place a command in any directory..More...

Compared with the path only option previously available, passing the Button data an ImageSource is a vast improved in the Revit 2010 ribbon implementation. However, manipulating Image objects in .NET3.5 is quite different to Images in .NET2.0. More...

You’ll see from the preview information out there that Revit 2010 requires .NET3.5 . There wasn’t anything stopping you from using .NET3.5 with the Revit API in previous releases, but now it’s official there isn’t any excuses not to use one of the coolest aspects of .NET3* .More...

As I mentioned in part 1 , using the advanced classes in System.Configuration in Revit API commands won’t run out of the box. That’s a bit of a generalisation. With a standard installation of Revit, an API command that is using System.Configuration’s more advanced classes such as ConfigurationSection will only work from one location. The directory of the Revit executable (Revit.exe). On XP32 this is usually C:\Program Files\Revit Architecture 2009\Program . More...

Out of interest I took the same code I used in this post and with the required changes for using in VSTA, ran the macro against the same project in the previous post.More...

As Matt has said the Revit 2010 API release is impressive. From a feature perspective the Family creation and editing API are a standout for me. Well designed, they largely mirror what you can do in Revit as a user.More...

I’ve been doing some planning for a number of RevitAPI commands that can best be collectively referred to as practice integration. The problem with the current RevitAPI is that you can add toolbars and menus but you can’t provide the level of integration a large firm desires. This leads to training issues, duplication of functionality and code design problems. The standard API is no longer enough…More...