• Imperial vs. metric

    I've been involved in a couple of discussions on communities about imperial vs. metric workspace.

    Here's a good illustration about why we engineers outside of the US don't understand a thing.

      

     

  • sitestandard and project configurations

    For those who have followed my blog about configuring Microstation, here's a little bit more in-depth information about our sitestandard and project configuration files. I'll go through some of the most important definitions here, and explain them.

    sitestandard.cfg

    This file is placed in the Workspace\standards folder, and includes definitions for your company workspace setup.

    _USTN_PROJECT = $(_USTN_PROJECTSROOT…

  • Configuring Microstation

    Configuring Microstation seems like a difficult task in the beginning, as Windows users being used to graphical interfaces might miss something.

    In fact Microstations configuration file based approach in my opinion makes things a lot easier. Many state of the art programs, like the internets most used webserver, Apache, use this approach, and with good reason.

    Here's how we have done that at NODE.

    1. Install Microstation…
  • GUI proposal #2 / Architecture

    Placing walls has become much more complicated after Architecture has begun to make use of datagroups in my opinion. The reason is that place wall has got a very user-unfriendly interface. While the division into single layer walls and compound walls probably makes sense, the devision into exterior and interior wall definitely doesn't make sense to me at all. It just makes things incredibly crowded. It would be much better…

  • GUI proposal #1 / Structural

    This is the first of a couple of blog postings I have in mind, where I want to take up things which I find a bit annoying, and which I would like to have changed in future releases.

    Right now Structural Modeler uses 11 different icons for placing members based on profiles. In my opinion one icon would be enough, thus freeing a lot of space for productivity. Instead of Bentleys way of grouping members, we would very much…

  • Fair use

    I've recently file a Service Request to Bentley, regarding a missing license for Engineering Configuration for Inroads (to be honest, I don't even remember if this name is correct). We've got an answer today, that this product was discontinued after XM, and will not be available anymore in the V8i series. If you remember, this was a product which was included in Microstation, alongside with Triforma - also a product…

  • Networking the workspace

    We have just recently finished a very thorough and long Service Request, whose consequence was that our whole network setup for Microstation was changed. Especially I would like to thank Gundula Wolpers who did not stop digging in that issue.

    Until now our configuration was done in that way.

    • configuration files including msconfig.cfg are on a network drive. This includes modified versions of vertical application configuration…
  • Norwegian Building Design / BA-Nettverk

    I've been to a seminar in Bergen this week from BA-Nettverket, which is a forum for everyone doing design in the building industry in Norway. Just want to share some personal views which I took from the seminar.

    • Revit and Archicad seem to be the 2 most commonly used software products for architects at the moment. While Revit has gone mainstream in the large companies, Archicad seems to be the most commonly used…
  • My top 3 Service or Change Requests

    One of the main reasons why I encouraged my previous employer to switch from the-other-CAD-program was a far superior support regarding bugs and wishes. That was about 5 years ago. Things became very much worse when Bentley implemented a new customer relation programme about 2 years ago, and many people - including myself - became frustrated. Fortunatly things have become much better again, and I really would like to…

  • Troubleshooting damaged configurations and files

    Once in a while things get messed up a bit in Microstation. Now usually that doesn’t mean any trouble, as Microstation saves incrementally. And we all have backup systems that work, don’t we?
    Microstation configuration problems
    One of the main problems here is a corrupted user preference file. These are files ending with .upf. A simple method to fix that is to delete your .upf file. A new one will be generated…
  • License server - a worst case scenario

    No question - I do very much like the new Bentley license system. Our office uses the Bentley hosted thing, so we even don't have to think about how things are working.

    But now let's think a worst scenario.Bentleys financial experts have heavily invested in Leprechaun gold - which we know disappears after a while. The company goes bankrupt and is sold to a new company called "Bazookas", situated…

  • Wiki-license

    Some time ago I wrote a message on the charter_member_by_invitation_group_forum about my questions on the legal point of view for Wiki articles on Bentleys community server, you can read the statement here.

    As you can see when reading the posts, Phil Chouinard from Bentley has tried to anwer my question by referring to the BE community Terms of Use, which you can find at http://communities.bentley.com/be/TermsOfUse…

  • Cells - and headaches

    Coming from the Autocad world some time ago, none of the areas has caused bigger headaches at our office, than working with cells. In Autocad you have blocks. Blocks are a part of the drawing, nesting usually is no problem. Pretty straightforward, in fact.

    In Microstation you have a couple of varieties.

    1. normal cells
    2. shared cells
    3. compound cells
    4. feature cells
    5. parametric cells (done by PCS)
    6. cells…