Autodesk 2023 Recipes & Resources

Well, what can I say, at least it’s not as late as last year? 😳 2023 has introduced even more issues with uninstalls, which I will cover in detail in a blog post on Friday. But the short story is that 2023 is even worse than 2022 was, and REALLY figuring out what is going […]

Title says it all

The Situation This post is way, Way, WAY overdue, and for that I know an apology doesn’t really address the issue, but I offer it anyway. This year has been a rough one for me as much as anyone else, and more than anything I have had a massive case of tunnel vision. I started […]

New School Deployments: 3DS Max 2021 & stalled install automation

Autodesk is transitioning to a new approach to Deployments (hereafter referred to as “new school”), and there are some issues to be aware of. For those of us in AEC 3D Studio Max is where this comes up, so let’s look at it. Many offices use a PowerShell based automation to manage software installs and […]

Revit 2021 deployment content

The Mess If you have started building your Revit 2021 deployment you may have noticed a BUNCH of new content being installed, and no way to choose NOT to install it. You’ll have a ton of template files in many different languages, and you’ll have language specific folders in your Libraries, with nothing but some […]

A better way to do ADSK Deployment Logs

Well, it’s that time of year again, and I have been madly building & testing Autodesk deployments and Px Tools recipes. And, as in previous years, I have been frustrated with the way deployment logs work. But this year, I think I happened upon a solution! Default Behavior First off, a little background. When you […]

Photo in the public domain, courtesy of Pixabay

Down the Uninstalls Rabbit Hole: Installment 3, Dynamo Uninstalls

In the previous two installments of this series, we looked at “old school” uninstalls, and “new school” Microsoft Store uninstalls. Those installments acted as an introduction to Uninstalls in general, in part because the examples were pretty simple. In this installment we’ll be looking into Dynamo uninstalls, and there simplicity, consistency, even rationality go out […]

Photo in the public domain, courtesy of Pixabay

Down the Uninstalls Rabbit Hole: Installment 1, Basic Uninstalls

Recently I got a request from Daniel Hurtubise at RPBW, to look into automating the uninstall of ALL installed flavors of Dynamo. That led me to digging into the nasty details of Dynamo uninstalls, and uninstalls in general. I thought it would be worth sharing what I discovered. But that’s going to be a long […]

Down the “Exit Code” rabbit hole

Over the last few weeks I have been neck deep in reworking the way Px Tools handles Exit Codes, which has included extensive notes on the vagaries of Exit Code usage by Autodesk and others, to ensure that Px Tools 4.0 handles this better and more flexibly/extensibly than 3.X. Error Codes are, of course, numeric […]

PxTools Pin to Taskbar issues in Windows 10

Last year in Px Tools 3.4.2 I implemented some “experimental” tasks, to test a variety of situations. One of those was ManagePinnedShortcut_Ex, which gave us back the Pin to Taskbar functionality in Windows 10 that Microsoft had blocked. This solution was somewhat… kludgy, but it seemed to work without side effects. A few weeks ago […]