Autodesk University 2008 is over with...

Well - I feel guilty... They gave me an "AU Blogger" ribbon for my badge - and then I didn't manage to Blog during the show. It was an incredibly busy week, including:

- Setup of the Altogether Smarter Challenge stations for Avatech (I'd like to throttle somebody at UPS who thinks that 11/21 to 12/1 constitutes 3-day delivery)...

- The Autodesk Developer Network DevDays conference... for my money, the best day of guidance you can get from Autodesk... Although this year there was a little bit more talk and a little bit less specifics than in previous years.

- We launched our new BIMreview application, which helps check your Revit models for standards and practices, to great feedback from Revit users! The crowd was 3-deep for most of the open exhibit time.

- I did my first solo class - CP315-4: Getting Down to BIM, Advanced Revit API to a crowd of perhaps 60-80 people. That went well (the contents should be posted on the AU site this week... after a little while there, I'll release it more broadly).

All in all, though - an incredibly busy week. And I only got to see about 1/3 of the sessions I had wanted to see.

While I can't share the specifics (much of the ADN stuff is under NDA), my general impressions of what's to come is that:

• Autodesk continues to invest significantly in AutoCAD, even around 3D and other topics which you might imagine that they would delegate to the vertical products.
• Autodesk continues to find ways to leverage the Media & Entertainment division software into the Design software side of things.

There's not much more I can say until whenever they free us from the blackout...

Oh yeah - and I think most people know it, but 2010 WILL be a new DWG format, and will break many of the existing applications out there (they plan this - only once every three years).

Jeremy Tammik is a MACHINE!

Recently I mentioned that Jeremy Tammik from Autodesk was starting a blog about developing software with Revit... and he's kept it up at a "blistering" pace - one very solid post every other day just about. It's scary.

It's particularly scary for me, since I'm doing an "Advanced Revit API" class at Autodesk University this year. It's a good thing that Jeremy only started recently - otherwise he would have overrun my class content :) within a few months.

But seriously, though - if you're interested in the Revit API, and how to push it beyond the basics, Jeremy's blog is building a wealth of knowledge.

Speaking at AU on the Revit API

I (finally) got an invitation to speak at Autodesk University this year on the topic of the Revit API.

CP315-4: Getting Down to BIM: Advanced Revit API

I'd been planning to cover topics such as:

• Essential Tools
• Understanding Parameters in Depth
• Filters: New Searching Mechanisms
• The Challenges of Phases
• Extracting Geometry
• Spotlight on: Room Objects

But I've got some time where I can add or remove topics to cover... Are there other areas of interest out there? I'm sure that there will be a ton of other Revit API classes - particularly introductory and VSTA classes... So I'm interested in anything else people would be interested in hearing about.

I'm also interested in adding one topic of my own - an interactive discussion of "What kind of application are you interested in building?" - to try to answer people's questions about whether the application they're thinking about CAN be built using the API... But I'm not sure if this is the right place for that...

Any other suggestions?

-Matt

Autodesk AEC DevCamps

I spent much of last week in Wakefield, MA at the Autodesk AEC DevCamp...

While the venue and the food was somewhat weak (compared to a sales conference - go figure) - the content of the various classes was reasonably good.

Our company had 7 people attending, so we spread out among the 5 conference tracks.
In particular, I learned:

More about the Revit Certified Application process
While the SDK contains the guidelines, it's nice to hear it explained in person... At this point, nothing will be certified prior to the Revit 2009 releases, but it will be a pretty straightforward process - unless you have a structural application to certify.

Because Autodesk has done so much work with structural application integration, they have 10 additional pages of required workflow and element support to meet the certification.

I'm not sure when in the future we're going to release a retail application (which might be worth certifying) - for the moment, while we're doing custom work and promotional applets - it's not in the cards.

As always, my opinion is the biggest challenge in certification is having a good installer (in particular, one that senses the presence of the various flavors of Revit and offers to install into any or all of them - as appropriate). We're about 1/2 way there - but it's a non-trivial bit of work.

Revit API with Revit MEP: What can be done now?
This meeting demonstrated a good number of sample applications, showing how you could make valuable automation of the MEP product just using what is already available in the API - mainly just driving parameters and modifying Family Instance types.

Examples included things such as sizing Air Terminals based on the rooms that they are supporting.

Keynote
The keynote was Jay Bhatt (VP of the AEC division) talking about the building market in general, as well as the influence of Green Building and BIM on the marketplace. While I had seen a variety of the slides before in other Autodesk presentations - it was well done.

Revit Families
A great talk by Steven Campbell, a QA Analyst at Autodesk (who is really in charge of all the Revit content - at least in the US)... Steven compressed his Autodesk-internal training class (which is 2 weeks) into a little less than 2 hours... There is just so much that goes into creating good Revit families - it was great to be able to hear someone who has been doing it for 6 years elaborate on what is the right process to follow - as well as just some background on what all those special lines and planes are within the content templates.


Next Up: Manufacturing DevCamp next week.

ADN Dev Days are coming...

For those of you in the Autodesk software development world, the season of joy (and occasional pain) is coming.

ADN Developer Days (and of course the larger, Autodesk University conference) provides a sweeping look at everything new that is coming in the world of Autodesk this year.

I say "joy", because Autodesk is typically demo-ing new products and new features - hopefully both the things that we've always wanted, and the things we never knew we wanted. I say "pain" because inevitably there will be features that STILL after begging, pleading, business cases and everything else - still didn't make the cut.

I'll be blogging from the show more actively this year, but most of the ADN content still happens on just Tuesday.

The other challenge will be figuring out what I'm aloud to say... The ADN conference is all technically under non-disclosure... So while I'll be learning all about new things - I'm probably restricted from blogging about them. So we'll have to see how we walk that tightrope. I believe that things covered in the AU general session (which usually has it's share of sizzle) will be fair game for blogging.

Case in point - I think that Shaan Hurley made the first public announcement that AutoCAD 2008 will have a 64-bit version. Now that's out of the bag - and although I've "sort of" known that it's been coming for 6 months, I'm still grappling with what it will mean for us... How quickly will our customers move? How are all of my developers going to build and test 64-bit versions?

Finally, we're entering the season where I'll have lots to talk about - new releases of all of the Autodesk 2008 product line, and their corresponding APIs... But that's still a ways off yet.

In any case, it's an exciting time of year.