Autodesk has been working on improving the Desktop Connector as a critical connection to the cloud. Check out this blog post on using Desktop Connector to share Dynamo Graphs and Packages.
What do you think? Would you do this? Why or why not?
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Call me slow, but I just saw this nearly three-month-old blog post a few days ago. I was intrigued, because:
- We used to host packages used for office standard graphs on our network, despite all of @jacob.small’s admonitions to the contrary. It worked okay at the time, but to be fair few users here were actually using it outside of our Design Technology support team.
- We now are set up to push packages to users’ local machines, and have them look there. That worked, at least for the first pass, but has a lot of moving parts that are under the province of several different people. Given the relatively rapid pace of innovation and new versions, I am not convinced that what we have in place will allow for rapid and smooth updates when there is an update, or a new package is needed.
- This methodology, if it works well, seems to resolve distribution issues. Any of the currently four of us could add a package to our Dynamo ACC project and it would, in theory, be available to all users.
- Anything John Pierson says (or writes) in a professional setting is inherently intriguing.
I have only just started to play with this, so I have not put it through enough use to feel comfortable that it will work well (particularly for those end users who are willing to open Dynamo Player, find the graph, and push Run, but not much more than that). My main computer is still running 15.8.01827, because the 16 series broke Ideate Software Sticky, which we use. But I have an old beater Surface that I use to test deployments, and I put the latest version on that and set things up on that machine. (So far, only testing for Revit 2024, on more-or-less out-of-the-box installations, as we have yet to set up a company-customized deployment.)
The packages seemed to be immediately available on that computer (perhaps because the packages were being uploaded through it), but not so much on my main computer. I did find that if I manually synced the folders/files on my main computer, that the packages did then show up on that machine.
Ideate Software has released an update that supposedly fixed the issues with the 16 series of Desktop Connector. So working in a mixed 16/15 environment will likely not be a requirement by the time we would implement this.
I would like to hear if anyone else has tried this, and how well it worked.
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I will add that being able to share a graph with outside consultants without worrying about the use of nodes from packages is also a reason for my interest in this method. I plan to see if I can work from home without installing the packages there by connecting to the Dynamo ACC project, too.
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In my research for that post, the target was definitely v16 of desktop connector (DC16). One thing that was really nice was that DC16 seems to make these files available very quickly. It also is more of a “Dropbox-ey” experience where you can make files available offline, drag and drop, and other right-click contexts.
Admittedly, my post was primarily researched-based and not as much in an actual office context as we (Parallax) manage deployments and dynamo in other ways (deployment tools with Pragmatic Praxis).
If I were still in an office setting though, I feel the workflow is worth testing further and could open some really cool doors for managing this stuff. Also, with some of the ideas for development in the public roadmap, I think the cloud and desktop connector is a worthy investment from a time/ value add POV.
A few years ago, when the team added the properties to Dynamo files (description, thumbnails, etc) I was immediately telling people to use them. A few folks dismissed the feature because it didn’t immediately do much. However, Revit 2023’s Dynamo player made that effort worth it. I think this situation is similar.
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Thanks for your insights. I was able to connect to the Dynamo project I set up from my home computer. I still have the 15.8 Desktop Connector there, and thought I would see how it worked there. I still need to do additional testing, but I was able to get the packages to show up. In what little I have done so far, I will note that the node search was super slow. I do not recall that being an issue at the office. And since the package files are all synchronized to the local machine here, I would not think that any differences in effective internet speed would be a possible cause of that.
Sadly, there are only so many hours in a day, and I have other things to do tonight, so I will have to defer further experimentation here for another day. I do plan to eventually upgrade to the latest 16.x version to see if that makes a difference.