Let me get one thing straight, this isn’t meant as an attack on any one group and I’m not trying to single any group out. This is just my opinion on where I think the effort and skills should come from after almost 20 years in the industry.…
Let me get one thing straight, this isn’t meant as an attack on any one group and I’m not trying to single any group out. This is just my opinion on where I think the effort and skills should come from after almost 20 years in the industry.…
It’s a subject that has fascinated me for most of my working life. Why are companies so against training staff to get the experience they are after? I don’t mean training in how to do the job, but why overlook a very good candidate purely because they…
Working in the design/drafting industry was not my first choice in career, more something I fell into after a shoulder accident left me out of work for more than a year and in need of surgery. It was one of the darkest periods of my life, not knowing…
It’s probably the most asked question for any new starter when it comes to playing with cfg files and setting up your own build. As far as many of us are concerned, the golden rule of cfg editing is:
‘ Don’t edit any of the delivered cfg files…
In last nights tech tip:
http://communities.bentley.com/other/old_site_member_blogs/peer_blogs/b/bear_blog/archive/2013/12/11/tech-tip-easy-method-of-locking-variables.aspx
I mentioned that the lock cfg files will only effectively work if we bypass…
Not long to go now to Christmas so I've got a bit of catching up to do. I hope to have a few more blogs out to keep you all going until after the Chrissie break.
Tonight I was to go through a really easy way of locking your variables from a single…
I've always tried to share what I can as it's hard enough to find admin docs on many of the applications Bentley now own, and my recent dive into ProSteel on MicroStation (PS) was no different. In fact, it's probably been one of the harder applications…
There has been a few conversations on custom linestyles so I thought I'd post up a good basic example of setting up stroke line styles and then combining several of them into compound styles. These are just road line markings, but are a good example of…
There have been a lot of discussions on how you can access your build and set variables for user, project and even custom variables for client and so on. Over past blogs I have shown a lot on how these can be controlled and set using hta files, but if…
Probably one of the most underutilised tools available to you in any Bentley package are Context Menus. The most common of these are the right click menus that change depending on the tools and element you have selected. Right click in an empty part of…
Ever come across a situation where the view your modelling in looks almost jagged when you render it? This doesn't just apply to MicroStation.

Well, best bet is you’ve turned off Clip Front and Clip Back in the view attributes:

Probably one of the most annoying things missing from the structural tools is the ability to match the attributes from an element already placed member.
The fact is you can. There is a keyin:
match element fromcursor
edit your function key menu and add…
http://communities.bentley.com/communities/other_communities/askinga/w/askinga/using-named-expressions-to-drive-interface-items-a-sample.aspx
This was a great starting platform for me, but also left a few questions.
The first of these was how exactly…
Lets get it out there right to start with. I know this could be a LOT slicker and in environments I manage on my own it is, but this is a good alternative where you have users who may need to edit this without a LOT of vb knowledge.
Now we have that…
Big thanks to Barry Lothian for the basics of this code.
In the past, firms I've worked for have had vb in place that checks where you open files from and alerts you based on a level or security.
Level 0
Nothing happens. Pretty much a free for…
OK, I admit it. This is one beast of a build and the collection of a LOT of work and work arounds, but what if you want to use something more traditional? No problems, it's very easy to use the same principles we have gone through to date in a much more…
As you can gather by now, I don't like to edit delivered Bentley files and avoid using any installed directories when it comes to users files. To that end I've always used a custom area, something along the line of c:\Apps and had a series of batch files…
Hard part done. By using the location of CADmanage.hta as a start point, we've now been able to go ahead and set the variables for our critical locations, but what does this mean for the config files we've been using to date? Well the first of these that…

The end goal of everything I've been doing has been to be able to deliver the ultimate portable build. Over the next series of blog's we'll be looking at how we can use relative pathing that is usually associated with html together with our hta file…
I hope this goes some way to making it easier to get a coordinated list of what I've posted to date:
Articles
‘Who is That Masked Man?’ – The CAD Administrator Looking to Employ Superman Where Has All the Training Gone? CAD Administrators…How many times have users come to you complaining they wait ages for a file to load only to find they have every model attached with rendering turned on. Drives me nuts as users just won't turn them off to speed up model loading.
Well, if they won…
Got to admit I was a little peeved with some of the changes to the GUI when XM first came out, but one of the changes I really like in V8i is the move to include Task Workflows in the interface. The big plus of Task Workflows over regular tasks is that…
I have to admit it, I'm a bit fan of using the AutoRun vb when it comes to being able to control certain aspects of applications. One of those is a frustration I continue to have with Structural Modeller, now part of AECOsim, and the ability to lock what…
A little bit of html knowledge is going to be a big help with hta files. One of the abilities within html is to use relative pathing to set the location on files, directories and more. These paths all relate back to where you're running your hta file…
SPS_APPL.CFG, SITE.CFG it doesn't really matter what you call it, but this cfg files is the lynch pin for the whole system. The idea here is that any cfg file located in the \MicroStation\appl\ directory is read each time MicroStation or the verticals…