I recently updated an informal V8i training document written during my pre-Bentley consultancy days to CONNECT Edition. The object of these documents is to highlight some of the fundamental operational features of MicroStation and related applications…

Background For decades canny administrators have been locating MicroStation's user preferences on a server share for ease of management and, most importantly, to enable user profiles to roam with each user in situations where IT does not roam user profiles…

Previous articles have described how to use ConfigurationSetup.cfg to redirect your applications to a networked configuration. Another common question asks how to use our applications when out of the office or working at home (obviously pertinent to the…

We have been asked how setting out coordinates for building components can be provided using real world coordinates, when we recommend modelling close to the Design File Origin. Recent enhancements to our Reports feature combined with knowledge from our…

Series Index - Setting Up in the Real World In the case of linear infrastructure it is fairly obvious that each major facility along a route will have its own GCS. Other cases may be less clear cut. Take an airport. This diagrammatic example (the runways…

As items drift down a blog's timeline they can be overlooked, so here is an index for this series of pieces:

Series Index - Setting Up in the Real World ’ve been picking away at the whole issue of where to model in 3D space for a long time. One of the sources of confusion is the use of ambiguous names or descriptions for some of the key concepts. The following…

Series Index - Setting Up in the Real World Following the techniques used in Setting Up in the Real World – GeoReferencing Update, a similar approach uses individual facility/building footprints as the guiding geometry. This allows the individual…

This is a handy tip for configuration management in Windows 10. If you select dissimilar items in Windows File Explorer, in this example, a WorkSpace folder and it's CFG file, copying them obviously results in <file/foldername> - Copy.xxx, etc. However…

Lookup tables are a good way to avoid manual data entry and ensure consistency. Item Types now have a lookup tables capability. Combined with storage of Item Types in shared DGNLIBs and the Pick List feature this is very powerful. The outcome of the steps…

For some reason Microsoft decided that hiding file extensions in Windows was a good idea. This is fine if you are just wanting to distinguish between,say, Word or Excel documents. However once you get beyond the obvious icons, as we often do in AEC, not…

Series Index - Setting Up in the Real World What is SnakeGrid? [updated with Jim Turner's comments; thank you Jim!] SnakeGrid takes a linear alignment and lays it out on a flat plane maintaining low distortion along a strip approximately 20km wide each…

When creating drawings the names of the containing DGNs would ideally all be known in advance allowing these to be entered as files are created. Sometime this is not possible or project requirements may change after files have been named. Drawings created…

Bentley View CONNECT Edition was first released on Monday 4 February, Update 12 is now available. This is Bentley's free file viewer for DGN files and ALL the other formats that MicroStation users will be used to accessing: It is a viewing application…

The Line Style creation tools have not been updated for many years so the user interface and process and the dialog boxes involved in creation can be quite challenging. However, Line Styles are a powerful tool so worth getting to know as discussed in…

Series Index - Setting Up in the Real World AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition Update 4 introduced new tools relating to the Solids Working Area (SWA). The importance and use of the SWA has been discussed in detail in previous articles in this series…

We have some heat map display styles available for certain attributes through Thematic Mapping. These apply to the situations they were designed for. There are a host of other situations where heat map style symbology can be useful. James Manfield of…

Focus is where input from the keyboard will take effect. Unlike an application such as Microsoft Word, where the input focus is essentially either in the document or in a dialog; MicroStation has several points where keyboard input can be applied. While…

Series Index - Setting Up in the Real World In MicroStation CONNECT Edition Update 10 (and AECOsim Building Designer Update 4) we have introduced the ability to edit the description of an attached GCS. Previous articles in this series utilised individual…

The CONNECT Edition Configuration variables dialog is considerably more user friendly than its V8i predecessor, offering more space, column sorting and other improvements. However, one apparent limitation is that any changes made are saved to the current…

Batch Process Utility Use for straightforward repetitive operations. The MicroStation Batch Process Utility enables you to select groups or folders of files then run a series of key-in commands on them. The commands are stored in a simple text file as…

AECOsim Building Designer’s DataGroup enables the creation, manipulation and reporting of business data associated with DGN graphic objects of various kinds, generally building elements or components. The DataGroups Scheduling tools can produce sophisticated…

We provide the ability within CONNECT Edition applications to create new WorkSpaces:  and WorkSets:   For many users these are useful tools; however in organizations where there are strict procedures about project creation, where projects are often created…

Series Index - Setting Up in the Real World This article is an update of the earlier Setting Up in the Real World – GeoReferencing piece with a slightly simplified workflow to create the transformed GCS and using different example data. Background…

In CONNECT Edition Display Rules have been added as an additional option for Display Styles. Display Rules are a platform feature that are available in MicroStation and all other CONNECT Edition applications based on MicroStation's core. This simplified…