Revit 64bit API discussions

[r.howarth]

I've loadd this in our office and have ran into a couple of issues, see my blog post about it here:
http://roddotnet.blogspot.com/2008/1...revit-api.html

I thought I'd start up a thread for others to share their problems and resolutions as well. Have many others played with this yet?

[mmason.65315]

Rod,

I was planning a post on this as well, as soon as I hear back from all of the beta testers of the Revit Utilities (64-bit edition).

So far, if you're using the "Any CPU" platform, and you're using purely .NET (no COM, Win32, or other funky 3rd party libraries) - then I think the code side of things is fine.

The installer, on the other hand, can cause some challenges.

-Matt

[Danny Polkinhorn]

I've been lucky so far I guess. I built a project on x64 and have successfully used it on 32-bit machines. The code was compiled for "Any CPU" and contains the Office and Excel COM references. It's the only one I've done this way so far.

By the way, the 3.5 SP1 version of the .NET framework will treat security for assemblies on your LAN the same as Local Computer, so managed DLLs stored on mapped network drives should run fine. I haven't tried it, but that's what I hear.

Hope that helps,

[r.howarth]

good information about the security, I might have to install Vis Studio 2008 by the looks of things!

A problem I had was that I was calling 'dsofile' which is a microsoft office com tool for changing custom properties of files, and the dsofile was 32bit, so therefore I couldn't call it in my 64bit app. Lucky the dsofile code is open source therefore someone compiled it into 64bit. problem is i'm going to need 2 versions of this dsofile.dll on a users machine, which is annoying. But that's not really revit related!

I think you're right in that really security in .net 2.0, and the calling of 3rd party libraries are the main problems with any 64bit .net app really, with possibly one exception I've found.

Which begs the question, what advantages can we get out of 64bit in our .net api code? is there anyway we can code to get better performance etc? or is our stuff too high level for that.

[krispy5]

The only issue i've encountered so far is with a logging add-on i have. but that is because it was saving to an access database (the jet interface doesn't work on 64bit) it was an easy fix to switch the database over to SQL and then a one line change in my code for the connection string.