Through the Interface

NEST in Zürich

Yesterday I headed across to Zürich for a number of different meetings. One that I wanted to talk about on this blog is my visit to Empa, the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, and – in particular – their NEST building. NEST is a testbed and showcase for emerging techniques in the construction and operation of buildings. They have a heavy focus on modularization, pre-fabrication and robotics. I’d been invited to visit by Reto Largo, Director of NEST, along with Philipp Mueller from Autodesk’s Education team. Reto wanted to hear about Dasher 360, while I wanted... Read more →

One man’s trash... Bjarne Stroustrup’s The C++ Programming Language

I came across this classic tome while wandering the halls of the Neuchatel office, this week. It’s one I remember reading when in my last year at University (in fact I’m almost certain I have a copy gathering dust in my basement). This particular volume once belonged to James Carrington (at least that’s my best guess from a Post-It on the inside that mentions his first name), who was an early member of the Developer Support team at the ESC (European Software Centre) in Neuchatel, way back when. This edition is from 1986, which I’m pretty sure makes it... Read more →

Autodesk TechX 2018

This week I’ve been in Detroit for Autodesk’s annual internal share-fest, TechX. In previous year’s we’ve had Technical Summits and X-Summits (for eXperience), but this year is the first combined event welcoming 1,000 Autodesk employees to the Motor City. A lot of the content from the event is – of course – internal, but here are some shots I can share. Being a Delta hub, flights to Detroit from my part of the world mostly seem to go via Amsterdam or Paris. In fact I’m heading out via Schipol and back via Charles-de-Gaulle. In an attempt to mitigate the... Read more →

Migrating Dasher 360 to use the Forge viewer v4.2 - Part 2

Last week I mentioned the effort to update Dasher 360 to use v4.2 of the Forge viewer (the most recent version, at the time of writing, and a fairly big jump from our previously-used version, v3.2.1). Here’s how Dasher 360 is now looking after these various changes: In this post I’m going to give more details of what specifically was involved in refreshing Dasher 360 to the latest Forge viewer, in the hope it’ll help people make decisions around their own use of the viewer and hopw/when they migrate their applications. Background As we’ve developed Dasher 360, we’ve done... Read more →

One man’s trash… T-shirts from Autodesk Neuchatel

Here’s some fun memorabilia from Autodesk’s Neuchatel office: T-shirts from a couple of different events held in recent years. Both are brand-new and have never been worn. The first comes from an internal event that was held back in 2015 to highlight the importance of taking security (particularly product and information security) seriously. The T-shirt is red and of size XXL: The second comes from the first Design Night Switzerland held at the end of 2016. The theme for this event was robotics, so there’s a picture of a robot on the back. the T-shirt is white and of... Read more →

The Forge DevCon (and AU) 2018 call for proposals is now open!

This year will be the 3rd edition of the Forge DevCon. Once again it’s being held in Las Vegas on the Monday before Autodesk University 2018 starts, which for this year means November 12th, 2018. The “call for proposals” website is now live, and will remain open until June 11th. If you’re interested in submitting a class for this year’s DevCon then head on over: we’d love to hear from you! This year’s event will have the following tracks: Forge Platform and Roadmap Getting started with Forge and Forge APIs Community stories and case studies General web programming Complementary... Read more →

More on AutoCAD Web at Google I/O

After the previous day’s excitement of seeing AutoCAD Web on mainstage at the Google I/O developer keynote, on Wednesday our very own Marcus O’Brien, Senior Product Line Manager in the AutoCAD team, took to the stage during another session at Google I/O – entitled “Building the Future Web with WebAssembly” – to talk a bit more about AutoCAD’s history and the path that led to this latest incarnation of AutoCAD Web. Here’s a video of the session. It’s probably worth watching more of this one, but for your convenience I’ve set the below video to start with the AutoCAD... Read more →

AutoCAD Web featured at Google I/O

As a great way to demonstrate the promise WebAssembly holds for software developers, AutoCAD Web was showcased during yesterday’s developer keynote at Google I/O. This is well-deserved recognition of the important work done by the AutoCAD team on the Fabric project (and on AutoCAD Web itself, of course). Congratulations to all those involved! Read more →

Migrating Dasher 360 to use the Forge viewer v4.2 - Part 1

Over the last few days I’ve been battling with migrating Dasher 360 from using v3.2.1 of the Forge viewer to the latest & greatest at the time of writing, v4.2. Somewhere around the v4.0 release, quite a few changes were integrated into the viewer that relate to UI theming and docking panels. Some of these are really interesting: the UI feels a lot cleaner than it did with v3.x, for instance. To give a sense for how some of these changes might break an application, here’s what happened when I simply upgraded the viewer and stylesheet references in Dasher... Read more →

Happy Star Wars Day

To help celebrate Star Wars Day, I’ve decided to talk about an incredible concert I was lucky to be able to attend with my wife and friends last weekend. It’s funny: I remember booking tickets for the concert way back during our round-the-world trip: it was a rainy day in Sao Paolo when I found out about it and immediately snapped up seats. The event was a ciné-concert of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope held at the Théâtre de Beaulieu in Lausanne with accompaniment by the 21st Century Symphony Orchestra. I hadn’t realised before, but “film concerts”... Read more →

Bringing geometry from Dynamo into Revit

It’s been a quiet week on the blogging front, mainly because of the May 1st holiday on Tuesday, but also because I’ve been heads-down on projects I can’t really talk much about. One thing that does seem worth sharing is an approach we’ve been using to take geometry from Dynamo into Revit. The project itself relates to the use of Generative Design for urban planning. I can’t yet talk about the generative aspect – which is extremely cool – but once the design is basically finalised there’s a need to bring the geometry into Revit. The ideal scenario would... Read more →