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Saturday, June 21, 2008

SolidWorks 2009 Beta 1

SolidWorks 2008 was a nightmare for many third party add-in developers such as myself. I am pleased to report that SolidWorks 2009 will not be a repeat show. At SYCODE, we have updated our SolidWorks add-ins (all 16 of them) to work with SolidWorks 2009 Beta 1. We are now testing them to check for weird behaviour. So far everything looks good and I sincerely hope that it stays that way till the final release.

In my opinion, people may adopt SolidWorks 2009 much faster than they adopted SolidWorks 2008. In fact, I will not be surprised of the early adoptors are the ones that skipped SolidWorks 2008 altogether.

What do you think?

posted by Deelip Menezes at 11:15 PM

8 Comments:

  • Your so-called "nightmare" was precipitated by the change in the compiling environment of SW2008.

    By moving to this new environment, there are multiple benefits to be had - support for x64, developers become more productive, support for new technologies like WPF, support for new OSs like Vista, the code gets migrated to remove old deprecated Win32/CRT APIs, bugs in toolkits like STL are found sooner. The list goes on...

    You seem to be advocating that SolidWorks should never evolve and remain on VC6, a 10-year old programming environment just so that add-in developers don't have to do a little bit of work to make their add-ins work with the latest version of SolidWorks.

    Sorry to disappoint you, but the roadmap is pretty obvious. Microsoft will continue to release new development environments, new APIs, new OSs with breaking changes and SolidWorks will continue to evolve along with them for the better.

    Of course, it is your prerogative as an add-in developer to stop supporting new versions of SolidWorks if you feel the work you need to do for it does not justify the expense.

    Microsoft released VS2008 (VC9) this year. It's pretty obvious that SolidWorks will migrate to VC9 at some point. Now are you going to be proactive and be ready for the change or are you going to moan and b*tch about it when it happens ?

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 2:02 AM, June 23, 2008  

  • Yikes, in this day and age any developer big or small that releases product that causes interruption that can be measured in financial terms has much to look at from a quality control point of view and is irresponsibly negligent.
    I saw little wrong with Deelip's comments, harsh but heh that's fair if someone else's mistakes cost another time and money.
    His comments didn't warrant that critical spray from a person not game enough to disclose their identity.
    If you are not proud or confident enough to put your name to your comments best say nothing at all if it does not further the argument!
    R. Paul Waddington.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 4:33 AM, June 23, 2008  

  • Anonymous,

    Autodesk moved to VC 8 with AutoCAD 2007. McNeel moved to VC 8 with Rhino 4.0. I didn't moan and bitch then. Why? Because in both cases the transition was smooth, not like SolidWorks 2008.

    SolidWorks pulled the plug on developers and decided to block their add-ins at the last moment. That is the nightmare I am talking about, not the fact that they changed to VC 8.

    The nightmare didn't stop there. It took 3 service packs and months for SolidWorks API support to finally ship out a VC 8 template that we could use to build our add-ins.

    And now the icing on the cake. We recently found out that our add-ins work with SolidWorks 2008 SP0.0. Which implies that the problem was not with the SolidWorks software, but rather with the VC 8 template that the SolidWorks developers gave us initially to build add-ins for SolidWorks 2008.
    How is that for a nightmare?

    So we put SolidWorks customers all this trouble and headache for no good reason. If SolidWorks developers were given enough time to get their act together, I am pretty certain they would have come up with a working VC 8 template at the time SolidWorks 2008 was released, not months later. This just goes to show how burdened they are with this annual release cycle that they have going on.

    Paul, it's perfectly all right that anonymous didn't choose to disclose his identity. I am sure he has a good reason not to do so. I allow anonymous comments on this blog so that we can hear people like anonymous.

    By Blogger Deelip Menezes, At 9:54 AM, June 23, 2008  

  • I think people will migrate to solidedge now that they have synchronous technology. I suspect that both are in the same price range and it will take a long time for ACIS to catch up.

    By Blogger Unknown, At 7:53 PM, June 23, 2008  

  • What? ACIS? SolidWorks uses Parasolid. Do you really think companies are going to switch platforms just like that? I don't. Lets look at this for a second. Small company, 4 or 5 seats of SolidWorks with maintenance, been using for 6 or 7 years. They might have something like 20,000 files on the system, maybe more, maybe a lot more.

    Are they going to switch to SolidEdge? In the UK SolidEdge is about £5500 plus maintenance - maybe a £6.75k investment per seat. That is over £25k investment.

    Add to that the sheer hell of changing platforms in terms of retraining, file conversion, reworking etc you are talking - easily - 20% of a user's day for the first 12 months.

    4 or 5 users, at £30k a year average, say £30k cost in year 1. So the actual cost of switching to SolidEdge in 12 months is easily £50k.

    How much time will ST actually save? Nobody REALLY knows because nobody is using it yet.

    In the same time frame who knows what SolidWorks will introduce. 12/24 months down the line they might be running the CATIA v6 kernel, they might merge SpaceClaim, who knows.

    You can tell I get p*ssed off with all the marketing nonsense :-)

    BTW those figures are ones we did ourselves from an internal audit and we are a very small company....

    You NEVER see those costs on the ROI web pages from any software vendor!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 1:51 AM, June 24, 2008  

  • I think Deelip is exactly right about users skipping 2008 and moving to 2009. 2009 is what 2008 should have been. 2008 was a disaster for end users too, not just developers. In 09 everything (or most everything) they started in 08 has been completed, and things are finally making sense in the interface. There were several backpedalling changes that happened during the course of 08 service packs, which is as much an indication as anything. I'm talking from an end user point of view, not a developer. 09 has had a couple of minor interface confrontations between beta testers and SW, but I feel optimistic that it will all be ironed out for the best by sp0.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 8:42 PM, June 28, 2008  

  • When I discovered Solidworks a couple of years ago I was really astound it was so easy to use and I learnt quickly to use Solidworks. I installed Solidworks 2008 and it was a major disapointment because of the user interface. It is like another program. It doesn't explain itself anylonger, now you have to learn it and I can no longer recommend it to others as easy to learn. I am busy going through what I have saved as SW2008 versions and then I am going back to 2007.
    Aloso it looks silly, it looks like an old version of MS Word. The only thing I like about SW2008 is the different pictures when it starts up, the rest of the changes moved too fast. Major Failure by the guy who made the final decision about this user interface.
    Sorry guys, I hate it!

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 11:15 PM, August 03, 2008  

  • I feel sad about the new user interface, it is like an end of an era.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, At 11:18 PM, August 03, 2008  

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