The Revit Clinic

Revit 2012 Hotfix Available for .NET 4.5 Contextual Tab Behavior

For Revit 2012 users affected by Microsoft .NET 4.5, a hotfix is now available.  The original post describing this issue has also been updated:

Revit 2013 \ 2012 Contextual Panels do not display or update

The hotfix link is included below:

Hotfix - Autodesk Revit 2012 - Ribbon behavior due to .Net 4.5 installation

This hotfix corrects the behavior of the ribbon panels after .Net 4.5 is installed.

Make sure that Update Release 2 has been applied prior to adding the hotfix. Verify that the build number of Revit 2012 is 20110916_2132. If the build number is 20120126_0600, it indicates that Update Release 2 and the Memory Allocator Hotfix has been applied.

USACE Revit Templates

Our friends over in Autodesk Consulting have been busy helping the Corps create Revit Platform Templates to help increase adoption and improve delivery quality and consistency.  I thought it would be great to share this with our readers.  

Links to the templates are available from the Autodesk Building Owners page.  You can access them by clicking on that link and going down to bottom of the page.

Here is a little more detail on what this is all about:

The Process

The USACE and Autodesk collaborated to create a BIM Template Team consisting of seasoned CAD/BIM Managers with a working knowledge of Revit. Each member has specific disciplinary strengths and shared a draft working district specific Revit template with the team. Each of the district’s templates were critiqued and tested by the group, and by teams going through BIM Implementations. The feedback was debated and the group decided on revisions and enhancements that supported the intent, purpose and general needs of the USACE.

The Payoff

The upfront time and effort required to set up, configure, and coordinate a Revit project and environment, be can be minimized significantly by deploying a Revit template file (.rte). Revit templates will increase graphic and non graphic consistency across teams, districts and divisions. Templates will provide a team with a common starting point and will improve the overall USACE product and brand.

 

Windows 8 and Revit

With the release of Windows 8, we are getting many questions regarding support for Autodesk products in this new environment.

We have released the following Knowledge Base Document, which lists the Support Products in Windows 8, along with our policy regarding support.

Windows 8 Support for Autodesk products

NOTE: As mentioned in the document, it will be updated as new information becomes available, so make sure to check in every once in a while.

RSN.ini and File Extensions

As the RSN.ini provides the Revit application workstation  which Hosts are visible during file navigation, as well as determines which Hosts can be accessed through the Revit Server Administrator from an Admin Server, it is one of the more important files in the Revit Server Network.

We have seen that even though the RSN.ini is in the proper location, the workstation cannot see any Host Servers in the Revit Server Network, or the Admin Server cannot access Host Servers through Revit Server Admin.

In a few of these cases, the issue was that in certain environments, Windows hides the file extension for known file types, Text documents being one of them.

Therefore, a user may think they have created an RSN.ini file, when in reality they have created an RSN.ini.txt file, which Revit does not recognize.  

 

 

 

 
The fix is to make sure the Type for the RSN.ini says "Configuration" as in the screenshot above.

To have Windows show the file extensions go to Control Panel  > Folder Options > View > Advanced Settings then make sure "Hide extensions for known file types" is unchecked, as in the screenshot below:

Revit LT

In case you missed it earlier today Autodesk announced Revit LT!  The Revit LT page with additional information is available here:

Autodesk Revit LT

Feature comparison between Revit LT and Revit \ FAQ:

Compare Autodesk Revit LT and Autodesk Revit

Revit LT FAQ

It moved...

In 2012 Revit products, things got moved and switched around when dealing with the Revit.ini file. 

Who moved my Cheese (Files) ? - Important File location changes for Revit 2012

In 2013, an additional tweak has been made, the UserDataCache directory has been moved from the Program Files directory over to ProgramData.  This makes things a little bit less dicey (as Microsoft doesn't really want user modified/customized stuff to live in Program Files).  If your doing any Revit.ini updating, its good to know that the new UserDataCache directory is over in C:\ProgramData\Autodesk\RVT 2013\UserDataCache. 

For some additional goodies on UserDataCache and the Revit.ini check out the 2013 wikihelp:

 

• What is the relationship between the Revit.ini files?
• What happens to the UserDataCache and user profile file structure when Revit
  runs for the first time?
• The Revit.ini File

 

Revit MEP to FABmep Add-in Missing in Revit 2013

With the release of the FABmep Add-in for Revit MEP 2013, we have seen some cases where the Add-in does not appear in the Ribbon in Revit. A new Knowledge Base document has been created to address this issue.

Autodesk Fabrication FABmep 2013 add-in not appearing in the Autodesk Revit 2013

Credit to Nick Hyland and Peter Jackson on the FABmep team.

An Explanation of Multiple Host Support in Revit Server 2013

The following post comes from Mike in our QA group for Revit Server.

Revit Server 2013 supports the deployment of multiple host servers throughout the Revit Server Network.  Some users believe that these host servers function as mirrors to each other, such that a model stored on one host would be transparently mirrored to another, akin to a RAID 1 disk array.  However this is not the case.  A more accurate mental model is that of multiple file shares on a network.  Just as a network can be configured with several shared folders for the storage and organization of shared content, the Revit Server Network can be configured with several hosts for the storage and organization of Revit models.  Each host is independent of every other, and there is no mirroring or replication between host servers.

Using multiple host servers affords several benefits:

• Improved fault tolerance.  For instance, if one host server is disrupted by a power outage, the content at the other host servers is still available.

• Opportunities for performance optimization.  Models can be stored and moved throughout the network to keep them as close to the “center of activity” for a project as possible. Furthermore, server role configurations can be dynamically adjusted to accommodate project needs as they evolve.

• Improved utilization of network resources.  Using multiple host servers can help distribute and balance the network traffic required for effective collaboration.

When multiple hosts are deployed, each accelerator has the ability to cache content from any host server in use.  If a particular instance of Revit Server has host and accelerator roles enabled, the accelerator will not cache the content stored on that server as a host (there is no need to; it is already there) but it will cache content stored on any other host.

The Revit Server wiki help has a supplemental video on this topic, located here:

Revit Server Network Deployment

Revit 2013 \ 2012 Contextual Panels do not display or update

We’ve had a few users report missing panels or contextual panels one command behind in Revit 2012 and 2013.  The symptom looks similar to the image comparison below:

Revit 2013 – Incorrect Result

Notice on selection the expected contextual panels are not displayed.  See the image below for the expected result:

Revit 2013 – Expected Result

This behavior can be reproduced when Microsoft® .NET® 4.5 is installed.

If you are experiencing this behavior with Revit 2012 or 2013 there are 2 updates available:

Revit 2012

Hotfix - Autodesk Revit 2012 - Ribbon behavior due to .Net 4.5 installation

Revit 2013

Revit Architecture 2013 Update Release 2

 

File is being accessed by someone else and is not available

This post is contributed by Niranjan Kamath who supports Revit on our team in India.  

While working with a workshared file, Revit will report an error whereby the central file is not accessible.

 

This issue occurs only when the clients had a different OS version. We could not recreate the file access issue if the clients were both W7, or both XP for example.

The reason being:  Windows 7 client communicates with the server using SMB2, while the Windows XP client uses SMB. This difference in version may cause some file handling issues.

To resolve this issue disable SMB2 from Server and Win 7 users.

To disable SMB 2.0 for Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 systems that are the “client” systems, run the following commands:

sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/nsi

sc config mrxsmb20 start= disabled

Note there's an extra " " (space) after the "=" sign.

To enable back SMB 2.0 for Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 systems that are the “client” systems, run the following commands:

sc config lanmanworkstation depend= bowser/mrxsmb10/mrxsmb20/nsi

sc config mrxsmb20 start= auto

Again, there's an extra " " (space) after the "=" sign.

In order to disable SMB 2.0 on the server-side computer, follow these steps:

Warning!
This document contains instructions for editing the registry. If you make any error while editing the registry, you can potentially cause Windows to fail or be unable to boot, requiring you to reinstall Windows. Edit the registry at your own risk. Always back up the registry before making any changes. If you do not feel comfortable editing the registry, do not attempt these instructions. Instead, seek the help of a trained computer specialist.

• Run "regedit" on Windows Server 2008 based computer.
• Expand and locate the sub tree as follows.

HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters

• Add a new REG_DWORD key with the name of "Smb2" (without quotation mark)
  
  Value name: Smb2
  Value type: REG_DWORD
  0 = disabled
  1 = enabled

• Set the value to 0 to disable SMB 2.0, or set it to 1 to re-enable SMB 2.0.
• Reboot the server.