2019 Move Report and Spring Update

Ah, Spring again. And this time I am freshly moved, and to a flat of my own for the first time since I moved to Europe 5+ years ago. Wooo, I feel so grown up! 😉 So, with housing sorted, and long term residency sorted late last year, and new Autodesk stuff to play with, it’s time to get some work done. So, for those who are interested, a quick update…

• ADSK 2020: I think all the 2020 Autodesk products are available now, and my downloads are done, deployments created & tested, resource data is being gathered, and recipes are being created & tested. I’ll start posting recipes and resources on Monday, 6 May.

• RFO Benchmark: While RFO is having some issues at the moment (that I know Klaus is furiously trying to solve) I am working on the 2020 migration. By 10 May I hope to have a working set of journals based on previous years, and I will be looking for a few beta testers to give that a thorough going over. I would especially like to get some testers who have had trouble benchmarking in the past, as the second task for this year is working out some of those bugs. Once that is done, the new feature for this year will be addin benchmarking, hopefully with Dynamo and Enscape benchmarks included in the download. How the changes in Dynamo affect this remains to be seen.

• Px Tools 4.0: Ah, the difficult topic. For the last two years I have started January with high hopes of getting the new version out by April. Last year I did manage to get Px Tools 3.4 out, with some new features and experimental tasks. This year I started January with an unsettled housing situation (finding a flat in Rotterdam as an expat is hard, finding one with a landlord that isn’t bat shit crazy, even harder) but high hopes for 4.0. And I have made progress. But… much of that progress has been realizing even more needs/deserves a rewrite. Lots of code is still from 5 years ago, and I have learned a ton since then. So, Px Tools 4.0 is basically going to be a 100% ground up rewrite from 3.3. The Rules subsystem from 3.4 is 100% transportable, but the rest really needs to be new code. New, more flexible, more stable logging. Improved XML handling with meaningful errors rather than forcing you to validate XML on some third party web site. Improved, more stable set, package and task handling. And then the new stuff, like multiple Conform Sets, Nested Sets, Nested Tasks, and the big one… Jobs. Lots of new code, lots of rewritten code, a little code that remains but only after a thorough review to make sure it doesn’t suck.
  So, rather than talk about dates, I will just say, it’s getting there, and it’s good, and I am excited to finish it up and get in your hands. And it will be done when it is done… right.
  As soon as all the 2020 recipes are complete, 4.0 becomes the primary focus again. Lets Do This!