BOLT OUT OF THE RED

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...

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...

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...