File Upgrader for Revit Vs the Content Batch Upgrade Utility

I read the posting over at Autodesk //Labs_ It’s Alive in the Lab about the File Upgrader for Revit June ADN Plugin of the Month and wondered why they had released this when there is already the Content Batch Upgrade Utility and what the actual difference is between the two.
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So I emailed Scott Sheppard who passed it on to Saikat Bhattacharya, who is a Senior Developer Consultant in the Autodesk Developer Technical Services team, and happens to be the one who developed the File Upgrader for Revit

Saikat kindly took time out to explain to me in detail about the differences, knowing I can’t be the only one out their asking this question I asked if he would grant me permission to post his email here for other interested parties, you can guess the answer as the email is below:-

"The Content Batch Upgrade Utility is quite similar to the Revit File Upgrader utility since both of them are aimed to help migrate/upgrade existing content from previous versions of Revit to work with Revit 2012. However there are some differences in both the tools in the way they so the upgrade and what they do. Following is a brief list of differences between the two tools  –

1)     The File Upgrader utilty also upgrades the RVT, RTE and RFA files where as the Content Batch Upgrade utility helps mostly in upgrading in RFA (family) files.

2)     The File Upgrader has a user interface which allows you to select the folders from where files are to be upgraded (called source) and a destination folder outside of source folder, where you would have the latest set of Revit files for Revit 2012. The Content Batch Upgrade Utility  differs since it upgrades an existing folder of RFA files there itself (without creating another copy of it).

3)     The File Upgrader works with files that are marked as read-only too whereas the batch content upgrade tool does not.

4)     In case of any errors, the File Upgrader makes a note of it in the log file and the user interface dialog and completes upgrading the entire set of files. At the end, the user is expected to go back to the list of failed files and manually open the files to determine what might have gone wrong. In case of Content Batch Upgrade Utility , it stops the upgrade if any of the files are not upgraded due to any error or if they are marked read-only. So the users in this case might have to check the list of files that have been successfully upgraded and delete them from the list and then start the process again for the remaining files.

5)     The File Upgrader uses Revit .NET API and thus can be used as reference by other developers who want to use Revit API to enhance Revit’s functionality. Or even if they want to include some of the code from this utility in their applications.

6)     The File Upgrader currently cannot close the last open file and this has to be manually closed by the user after the upgrade, whereas the batch upgrade tool has no such limitation.

. . .

The users now have both the options to achieve the end goal  - which is to provide some bit of automation in upgrading old Revit files to work with Revit 2012 faster (without the initial upgrade that Revit does each time it opens an older version file). And so users are free to use any of the tools which they feel best fulfills their requirement or the one that they are most comfortable working with."

So now we all know ;0)