ADT - Recommended Reading?

I work for an MEP design firm that is presently rolling out ADT... however,
of course, this is being done by IT people, not MEP people. I have 10+
years of experience w/ AutoCAD, and am comfortable with everything from
creating blocks, writing LISP, VBA, and writing custom ARX and DBX
applications.

Can anyone recommend a good book that would provide some background on how
ADT works, so I may gain some insights on how I may be able to customize it
for our particular use.... i.e., I am aware that it has scheduling
capabilities, and would love to take advantage of it. I'm sure there is
tons more...

I know there is a Building Systems package... I'd love to get my hands on
it.. however, I'm stuck w/ what the boss's pocket book will bear.

Thanks for any pointers... I'm sure B&N or Amazon has what I'm looking for,
but just wanted some input before spending $50 a pop!

 

Paul Aubin's book is well received in the ADT groups. You might also want to
check on training from your reseller as the learning curb is a bit higher on
that product compared to plain AutoCAD.

 

We already received the ADT training... what a joke... most of what they
showed us as 'new' ADT features were actually features that exist in
Acad2000.... I didn't glean any insights about anything that ADT has to
offer that would actually help us. Sure, they showed us how to cut a
section, and how walls clean themselves up, etc... however, that is
available on the Demo CD as a tutorial The functionality I believe that
would help us is the Scheduling, and they didn't even touch on it.

 

If you're MEP why aren't they getting you Autodesk Building Systems???
http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=3290651

 

Perhaps you didn't read the original post... it is not my checkbook...
people in my company make uninformed decisions.

Since I'm a student (working on a second Master's - in business this time,
basically to answer the question "Why do people in business not care that
they make poor, and uniformed decisions."), I can get building systems for
$150... at least I'll know what I'm missing, and will be able to learn how
to use it.

 

Hi Martin,
I've got good and bad news for you. There are no books beyond the docs that
ship with ADT on customizing it. The good news is that there is a newsgroup
on this server specifically geared for ADT customization. Perhaps one of
the nice moderators will post a link as I'm much too lazy to get it myself
at the moment

In general**, if you want to customize ADT you're going to be doing it via
the COM libraries that adesk provides. Unfortunately, the provided object
models often fall short in functionality. If you're an ADN member you can
apply for the Object Modeling Framework which is the C++ SDK for ADT.

If you're mainly interested in the scheduling features, then you're in luck.
That COM API is fairly well developed and you can quite easily tag ADT and
non-ADT objects with scheduling data. Many of the ADT objects will
automatically populate the schedule data. For instance walls can spit out
info such as surface area taking into account doors, windows, and openings
cut into it. You can also create user defined data fields and have your
code or even your end users populate it. This data can then be put into
schedules right in a drawing or pulled into another package.

HTH,
--
Bobby C. Jones
www.AcadX.com

**There are some programmers out there that have become adept at hacking
into the DXF entity codes of some of the ADT objects. I'm not one of
them...

 

Building Systems costs more than ADT?