It's All Just Ones and Zeros

Twice the Doug, Twice the Redmond

2012-02-24T09:36:11-05:00

The Autodesk Developer Network is putting on their biennial DevCamps this year. There is one for Manufacturing and one for AEC, and I’ll be going to both of them. I’ll be lecturing on how to diversify your stock portfolio. Just kidding, I’ll be hosting classes about the Vault API. If you don’t know what a DevCamp is, let me give you my rundown. It’s basically 3 days of API related content. There are a variety of classes offered, covering all the major APIs. There are also the DevLabs were you can hang out and get API help from the experts....

6 Hours of video on the Vault API

2012-02-17T08:34:03-05:00

My webinar series on the Vault API is over. As promised, here are all the recordings. These videos will take you from the basics (how to connect to the Vault Server) up to advanced topics (event handling). The downloads are broken up into the presentation portion and the sample code demonstration, which doubles as a lab. Slide decks and source code are included in the downloads.

vLogic

2012-01-31T08:45:18-05:00

As promised, I came up with something for those of you who want to customize Vault through the use of scripts. I decided to use PowerShell as the scripting engine since it has a lot of tools ready-to-use for this sort of thing. If you are not familiar with PowerShell, you can find tons of information on the internet, including the Microsoft web site.

Better Error Messages

2012-01-27T12:04:59-05:00

The goal for today is to display up a better message when our programs run across an error from Vault. For example, instead of “303” as the error message, I’ll show you how to display “PermissionDenied” or whatever else you want.

Webinar registration links

2012-01-20T08:02:11-05:00

Here is the quick list of registration links for my upcoming webinar series. See my earlier post for full descriptions of each one.

Building Property Pages

2012-01-18T12:20:50-05:00

By default, Vault Explorer provides the View Properties Grid which provides a list of all property values for the selected object. This is a nice default view, but us developers commonly want to have customized property views (aka. property pages). So here is a quick primer on creating property pages in Vault Explorer.

Vault API Webinar Series

2012-01-12T07:52:49-05:00

If you are getting started with the Vault API, there is a lot of information out there. Unfortunately, it’s all over the place. Some of it is on this blog, some of it is on AU Virtual, some of it is on ADN. Here is my attempt to fix all that. I’ll be doing a 5 part webinar series, covering all the major aspects of the Vault 2012 API.

Elephant Dancing

2012-01-09T09:50:06-05:00

Jim Quanci, the director of the Autodesk Developer Network, has started a new blog. Dances with Elephants focuses on how small companies can leverage big companies to build their business. I think Autodesk is one of the elephants, but I’ve never been good with allegories. Anyway, put your dance shoes on and head on over.

A Quick Performance Tip

2012-01-05T08:13:35-05:00

The below code will save you a round-trip for each of your Vault API web service calls. System.Net.ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue = false; If you have your own Vault client, you should put the code sometime during startup. If you are running inside an Vault client from Autodesk, this value should already be set to false. I don’t have much more to say on this. You find out more about the Expect100Continue property on MSDN.

Web Service Invoke Events

2011-12-22T08:21:30-05:00

The third type of event we introduced in Vault 2012 is the Web Service Invoke Events. The purpose of the Invoke events is to give you a single choke point for whenever your code invokes a web service call to the Vault Server.