Continuing the update of my development environment for Revit 2020, I now turn to the Visual Studio Revit add-in wizards.
I'll also highlight a couple of recent interesting AEC related job offers, an AI 101 intro, and some really important suggestions on how to ask a question well:
So far, for the Revit 2020 API enhancements, I discussed the following aspects and migration steps:
I now turn to the migration of my C# and VB Visual Studio Revit add-in wizards to Revit 2020, which turned out to be easier than ever before.
I just cloned the existing repository for Revit 2019, then globally searched and replaced the string '2019' by '2020'.
I skipped a very few occurrences, e.g., in the copyright notices, tested, committed the changes, and that was that:
No code changes were required at all, as was to be expected, seeing that the migration of the much more complex Building Coder samples required only one single trivial modification.
The new version is VisualStudioRevitAddinWizard release 2020.0.0.0, and you can see the changes I made by perusing the diff to the previous release.
There seem to be more and more people getting started with the Revit API, so many beginners are asking questions in the Revit API discussion forum.
One of them prompted me to explain some important aspects of how to ask a question well and intelligently.
As we all know, there are no false or stupid questions.
Still, there is a lot you can do to motivate people to answer you and support them in doing so.
In fact, this is such a fundamental topic that it has already been discussed hundreds of times in the web, both for life in general and programming in particular.
This question on section view motivated me to explain in more detail:
Question (abbreviated (very slightly)): Why does my program not work?
Here is the code...
Sorry, I am a beginner...
Answer: Thank you for your query.
If you are new to the Revit API, and maybe to programming in general, I first of all welcome you to this topic and forum!
Before diving any deeper into programming more complex tasks, I would suggest that you work through the Revit API beginners material, especially the video tutorial.
That will explain all the important basics, deepen your understanding, and clarify many questions up front.
Also, please be aware of the importance of understanding Revit and the BIM from an end user point of view before trying to achieve anything programmatically.
Otherwise, you might quickly find yourself in a situation where your add-in is trying to work against the BIM system instead of making proper use of its powerful built-in functionality.
Once you have a good grasp of the basics of both the Revit API and the end user view of the BIM task you are addressing, it is time to research how to solve your task programmatically.
If you run into an issue after you know what you want to achieve, have ensured that it makes sense in the BIM workflow, have ensured that it can be solved programmatically at all and have done research on how to address it, the time has probably come to ask a question about the specific problems you encounter.
When you ask a question, it is important to do so in an intelligent and intelligible manner. For instance, please ask your question in full.
I have no idea what the code snippet that you share is supposed to achieve. You need to tell me.
Please explain your goal, the context, the workflow, the expected behaviour, the actual real behaviour, and why that is a problem for you. Do all that, and at the same time keep it really brief and to the point.
I cannot guess what you are trying to achieve.
The Internet will gladly provide a few thousand good suggestions on asking questions well.
However, much more specifically, here are several extremely helpful and important recommendations on asking a question about solving a programming task:
Please read, understand and follow these recommendations.
It will help you and the entire community tremendously.
I hope this helps.
Please understand that I do not want to criticise your question. I just want to help you get an effective answer.
I wish you much success getting started with the Revit API and look forward to further questions from you in the near future!
Autodesk is currently hiring all over the planet.
If you are interested in joining us, please check out the open position of interest to you at www.autodesk.com/careers.
Here are a couple of recent interesting AEC related ones in my part of the world:
Finally, let's close with this nice, short yet in-depth introduction and overview of AI for all, also available for local download as a PDF document.