The Boss'

Here’s a worthwhile video, and there ain’t many of these on the ole’ interwebs these days. It’s a remarkable story of commitment between a husband and wife.

Robertson  McQuilken quit his job as a university president to go home and care for his wife, who’d been suffering with Alzheimer’s. Prior to making the decision to go home, the university had tried various ways to care for Robertson’s wife, so that he could keep coming to work. At different times his wife even escaped from their home where she was being looked after, and would attempt to walk to the university, where she knew she would find the love and protection of her husband.

There’s also a four part audio series that Family Life Today did with Robertson a while back.

This post is technical.

If that’s not your cup of tea, move along. Nothing to see here.

For two full days, I struggled with this issue. I was trying to add a custom ‘add-in’ to Revit Architecture 2010. I built my custom add-in dll with Visual Studio, and followed the steps to modify the Revit.ini file so that my add-in would be loaded when Revit starts. Despite following the instructions meticulously…failure. The INI file was rewritten. My changes were tossed out and Revit recreated the INI file from scratch.

Follow instructions again. Failure. Uninstall Revit. Reinstall Revit…failure.

Repeat the above process complete with hair pulling and eye poking for two full days. At last, I broke down. I decided to make use of our Autodesk Developer Network membership and ask for help.

In just a few hours, the kind folks over at ADN Support sent a link to this knowledgebase article, where someone else was describing my exact problem, and the solution. And it was so simple.

Issue

I modified the Revit.ini file to add information about my addin and now Revit keeps rewriting Revit.ini on every startup and so my addin does not load. What could be the problem?

Solution

If you compare your modified Revit.ini file with the original one in a binary viewer then you can see that the UTF-8 BOM (Byte Order Mark) is missing from the beginning of your file – possibly the text editor you used did not write out that part -, and so Revit finds the file corrupt. If you modify your file in Notepad then it should add the missing bit and it should work again. 

After reading this, I added my external command to the Revit.ini file in Notepad and, sure enough, works like a charm.

I post this in the hope that it may save someone else the frustration that I had to go through.

Here are a couple of rough models I threw together to get a feel for a new kitchen design that I’ve been working on.

Above, you see the existing space. Our small dining area is to the far right. Through the door on the left is our laundry room. I’d like to relocate the laundry and then remove the wall that separates the two spaces. Like so…

It’d be nice to get rid of the large rectangle that you see clad in brick, but it houses an old chimney, as well as a lot of mechanicals for the upper floor of the house. I’m considering wrapping the whole thing it brick as a shout-out to the chimney within it, and also to add some texture to the space.