Wednesday, 25 August 2010

Autodesk Revit 2011 with .NET Framework 4.0

I discovered yesterday that Autodesk Revit 2011 does not play nicely with .NET Framework v4.0
 
If you have an external command built with .NET v4.0 that utilizes the RevitApi.dll it will not run from witin revit, as Revit only supports up to framework v3.5
 
For something that is named for next year (there release cycle is April = Date.Now().Year() + 1)
It is not great especially since their whole UI seems to be based on WPF.
 
I have found a solution with the help of Redbolts.com
 
To get my External Command to run i have had to change the Revit.exe.config file to include
 

<startup uselegacyv2runtimeactivationpolicy="true">

<supportedruntime sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.0" version="v4.0">

<supportedruntime version="v2.0.50727">

</startup>

 
just before the closing tag
 
This allows any of our external commands .NET v4.0 and .NET v3.5 to run
 
I have not had any issues as of yet with this change, but i am dreading publishing the Command and having to change the Revit.exe.config on our users computers.
 
Common Autodesk this is not ideal.
 
I am also using the new RevitAddinUtility.dll to setup the addin
the project that includes this also has to have the above snippet in its app.config file.
 

Thursday, 12 August 2010

iMap on Windows Phone 7 (with screenshots)

I have now been able to setup the iMap map control to run on the Windows Phone 7 emulator.

I have had to revert the code back to Silverlgiht 3 as I was getting errors due to the different versions of mscorlib between Silverlight 4 and Silverlight for Windows Phone 7.

At this point in time iMap is kind of slow on WP7 but I am able to show 3D buildings and change the pitch of the map.




The Bing/Local tile layers seem to stall in loading which is why the screenshots look a bit odd.



I assume this is because although the building models are not in the visual tree, they are still using memory.


Here is a side by side comparison of the Silverlight 4 Web aplication and the WP7 application



I have also been able to load the building floor plans on the WP7.


The floor plan is fully rotatable, pitch and angle, just like the web version as it is essentially the same code.


I think this is pretty cool, just need to make a few optimisations to impove perfomance but i seems that WP7 would be a viable platform for iMap handheld.

Now I just need to get my hands on some actual hardware and we will see how it runs.

Please if you have any thoughts or comments please leve them below.

Monday, 9 August 2010

New Performance Improvements

Welcome to another installment about the development of 3D onto Bing Maps Silverlight control (University of Otago - Interactive Campus Map, iMap)

Recently the performance of iMap has become rather slow, which an increase in displayed elements.

I have started to improve performance of loading/usability by removing objects (buildings) from the visual tree if they do not fit in the current viewable area, then adding them back in when they are within the viewable area.

One performance downside of this is that the adding and removing of a large number of UIElements form the visual tree such as when going from viewing the whole of the Dunedin campus to viewing the Invercargill campus is slow and the application freezes and the view does not transition to the new location it just jumps.
There may be some background way to remove these items without the performance loss, which is something I will look into.

Thank you for the positive comments we have received for the application and please if you have any please use the "iMap Feedback" button at the bottom left of the application to send us any feedback.

Duncan