DevDays Online and Add-In Migration

I share a contribution from fellow blogger Eric Boehlke and the announcement of the upcoming yearly DevDays Online presentations:

Add-In Migration – Update API references

Eric Boehlke of truevis BIM Consulting wrote a blog post about how to upgrade a Revit API add-in to a version of Revit.

Says he:

You may already have done this thousands of times. One of the reasons to write these posts is to remember for myself how to do such things a year from now. Hence: Upgrading Revit API Apps For Newer Revit Versions

Here is a 75-second video reiterating the same instructions to make a dry subject more fun:

The cautionary message on not confusing RevitAPIUI.dll and RevitUIAPI.dll is due to personally running into that issue once.

Removing the existing Revit API references, adding the new ones, and setting Copy Local to false is the foolproof way to upgrade.

In many cases, though, you can do this all in one single step by just adding the new references.

This overwrites the old references and retains the Copy Local false setting.

However, that is an unimportant detail.

It's not actually much effort to create such a video from a blog post. lumen5.com makes an initial "AI" attempt at turning my blog posts into videos. Then I just refine it. It takes 10 or 15 minutes. They say: "We automatically create Instant Videos for you based on your RSS feeds. "

Here's another one of Eric's videos, on how to get coordinates of an existing Revit View, then use them for placing other Views in Dynamo.

Addendum – NuGet Package and .NET Framework Version

Jason Masters adds some important notes to this in his comment below:

In terms of upgrading Revit API versions, I'd highly recommend switching from references to the SDK to referencing the NuGet package published by Matthew Taylor (Revit_All_Main_Versions_API_x64):

NuGet package Revit all main versions API

This package contains all the Revit API references across all versions. Using NuGet means that any other developer opening your repo won't necessarily need the SDK to build it, it will integrate more easily into CI/CD pipelines, and checking against different API versions is as simple as changing which version of the NuGet package you're using.

Also, if you need to migrate to 2020, you're going to need to first change the .NET target framework version of your project to 4.7, then update your references to the 2020 API.

Many thanks to Jason for these important notes!

Join us for our DevDays Online Webinars

We welcome you to join us for our special series of webinars where we’ll be going over the current important development topics. Some of them were already covered last year's DevCon events. These webinars are a great opportunity for you to learn about Autodesk Forge and where Autodesk is taking the desktop platforms in the coming year.

Click on the links below to register for the webinar(s) of your choice.

All webinars start at 8am PST (4pm GMT, 5pm CET, 11am EST). If the session timing is inconvenient for you to attend (which is true for most of our partners in Asia), you can rest assured we will be recording all the sessions and will post them on the web for your later viewing.

Registration is open to all except where noted below:

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinars.

DevDays Online 2020