Dynamo Development - London Hackathon 2019

There are multiple ways to improve Dynamo creating your custom functionality, with varying levels of difficulty. Learn the basic of custom development and more advance improvement using c#.

Learning objectives

• Learn about the different types of custom Dynamo nodes.
• Lear how to set up the Visual Studio environment for development and debugging with Dynamo
• Learn how to develop, test and deploy a Zero Touch node
• Learn how to implement a custom UI
• Learn how to develop, test and deploy explicit custom Dynamo nodes
• Lear how to publish your nodes using the package manager

Table of Contents

Development in Dynamo

Get a high-level understanding of the different approaches to follow in order to customize and create new features on Dynamo.

Custom Nested Nodes

Section to briefly introduce and/or refresh what Custom Nested Nodes are and their benefits/disadvantages.

Python Script

Python is one of the best first options to use text-base programming within the Dynamo environment.

ZeroTouch Nodes

Learn to develop custom nodes in Dynamo using ZeroTouch.

Explicit Nodes

Learn to develop nodes with custom UI in Dynamo using Explicit nodes.

Extensions

Power-up your development by extending Dynamo's capabilities by adding your custom logic and UI on top of Dynamo.

Tools we’ll use

• Visual Studio Community 2017
• Dynamo 2.0.1

Additional Resources

Visual Studio Templates

One of the most daunting process if you are not familiar with Visual Studio or C#, is how to setup your environment to seamlessly develop for Dynamo. The ZeroTouch Nodes > Setup chapter goes in detail on how to configure Visual Studio an it is a highly recommended reading.

Although is important to understand how and why Dynamo requires a particular setup for Visual Studio, it would be nuts to do it every time you want ot create a new project or even just a quick test. That's where the Dynamo Development Starter Kit can come in handy. This project is a Visual Studio Extension that adds some Dynamo Project Templates to your environment, so setting a new Dynamo project is just a matter of a couple of clicks to have it up an running.

Go to the project's repository to learn more about it, or download the latest release to install it.

C Sharp

• C# Interfaces: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/csharp/csharp_interfaces.htm
• C# Classes : https://www.tutorialspoint.com/csharp/csharp_classes.htm
• C# Namespaces: https://www.tutorialspoint.com/csharp/csharp_namespaces.htm

WPF

• WPF Tutorial: https://www.tutorialspoint.com//wpf/index.htm

Dynamo & Revit API

• Revit API online documentation
• Dynamo Primer: http://dynamoprimer.com/en/09_Custom-Nodes/9-1_Introduction.html
• How to Create Your Own Nodes: https://github.com/DynamoDS/Dynamo/wiki/How-To-Create-Your-Own-Nodes
• Zero Touch Plugin Development: https://github.com/DynamoDS/Dynamo/wiki/Zero-Touch-Plugin-Development
• Adding Icons for a Zero Touch Assembly: https://github.com/DynamoDS/Dynamo/wiki/Add-Icons-for-a-Zero-Touch-Assembly

Acknowledgment

Big part of this material is based and reused from the AEC Hackathon Dynamo Workshop, which in turn is an extended version from @teocomis's original Dynamo User Group Computational Design Workshop.

It also recaps some of the contents taught during the Dynamo Developer Workshop on AU Las Vegas 2018.