Deelip.com

ODA Cracks DWG 2010

2009-07-15T21:21:00.003+05:30

Today the ODA let its members know that they could download DWGdirect 3.0.0, the alpha release of the new version of the DWGdirect SDK that can read and write the DWG 2010 format.

The new SDK supports DWG as well as DXF files created by AutoCAD 2010. However, some new objects introduced in AutoCAD 2010 such as AcDbGeoData, AcDbSubDMesh and constraint related objects are loaded as proxies. But I guess that will change in due course of time.

When I met Neil Peterson, the CTO of the ODA, at the ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland, I asked him how DWG 2010 was treating him. "Not too bad", was his reply. He went on to explain his plan. "We will first release a version of the SDK that reads and writes the current set of entities so that our members can add initial DWG and DXF support to their products. Thereafter we will add native support for the new entities and other stuff that has been added to the DWG 2010 format." Seems like things are going according to plan. Full support for DWG 2010 is expected at the end of year.

I have always wondered why Autodesk has this self imposed three year cycle for the DWG format. Since it takes about a year for the ODA to completely reverse engineer a new DWG format, if Autodesk changed the DWG format every year, that would keep the ODA on its toes all year round. And that would give it less time and resources to do other stuff like building an alternative DWG based CAD platform, which is far more damaging to Autodesk than a reverse engineered DWG read/write SDK. In fact, I once posed this question to a senior Autodesk executive. His reply was noble, to say the least. "We do not believe in troubling our customers more than we need to. We understand that file format changes can create a lot of inconvenience to our customers and affect the way they collaborate with other people. That is the reason why we have decided to change the DWG format every three years."

But he wasn't quite ready for what I asked him next. "That's great", I said. "But then why do you change the Inventor format every year?" Needless to say, he did not have a noble answer to that one.

I guess Inventor customers have a higher capacity for pain.

Alibre Design V12 Sneak Peek

2009-07-14T22:56:00.003+05:30

Max Freeman of Alibre has a video showing some of the new stuff to be released in the next version of Alibre Design - V12. However, I should warn you that the video is 40 minutes long. But it does show a lot of stuff in great detail.

If you are an existing Alibre Design user, the video will serve as a quick (no pun intended) tour of the stuff waiting for you. If you are a 2D user (AutoCAD or otherwise) who is toying with the idea of going 3D, I suggest you take a look as well. Now is as good a time to get a "complete 3D design, verification and drafting" system for a three digit dollar figure. I am not kidding. You can get Alibre Design Standard at NOVEDGE for $799. A reseller here in India is offering two licenses for the price of one. Too bad they are still promoting V9.2 and V10 on their web site when the current version if V11.

There are a lot of small enhancements and useful features added to V12. But in my view the most important one seems to be the significant improvements that Alibre claims to have made in handling large assemblies. Previously, Alibre Design's graphics pipeline used to render portions of the scene even if they were out of view. This led to a significant reduction in the amount of 3D data that it could handle. The V12 graphics pipeline renders only the portions of the model that are visible to the user as he navigates around the scene, thereby significantly increasing performance.

In the video Max loads a close to 2000 part assembly with around 500 unique parts and effortlessly navigates around the model. Incidentally, I first saw something that closely resembles that particular large assembly on the splash screen of SolidWorks. The one that you can see here. I take it that Max is trying to make a point here. I also noticed that the newly redesigned Alibre web site does resemble that of SolidWorks to an extent.

And by the way, the "OBJImport" menu item you see on the Alibre Design menu is not part of V12. It has been added by OBJ Import for Alibre Design, SYCODE's Wavefront OBJ file import add-in for Alibre Design.

The Search for an AutoCAD Alternative Ends

2009-07-13T18:12:00.004+05:30

Four months ago an architect, who has 5 licenses of AutoCAD LT 2006 and 2 licenses of AutoCAD 2006, posted a question on the IntelliCAD.net forum wondering whether it was worth switching to an AutoCAD clone. Autodesk was due to retire AutoCAD 2006 and he was not too happy with the fact that he was being forced to upgrade, especially since AutoCAD 2006 was more than enough for his work. In his words, "This force upgradation after every three releases by Autodesk is really sucking my hard earned money."

What followed was a lively discussion with other members offering advice and sharing their experiences with various AutoCAD clones. Today the architect arrived at some sort of conclusion. He wrote, "IMHO there is no AutoCAD Clone at present which is as fast as AutoCAD. ...[snip]... I have come to a point where I am willing to pay the price of AutoCAD for its stability and speed. It is really unfortunate that no clone can do this (speed as well as stability). Since recently I am also fed up trying out every other AutoCAD Clone. I am now once for all settled for AutoCAD!"

They say quality comes at a price. The question is whether you can afford it. An equally important question is whether you have a viable option.

As far as this reluctant Autodesk customer is concerned, the search for an AutoCAD alternative has come to an end, not in the way he hoped it would.

Wanted - Kind-Hearted Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 1.0 User

2009-07-10T16:42:00.006+05:30

At SYCODE, we are doing the final testing of our Pro/ENGINEER data exchange plug-ins. I have Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 1.0 (actually it was called just Wildfire), 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 Preproduction on my development and testing computers in office. My problem is that for some weird reason Wildfire 1.0 crashes on startup. I am trying to resolve this issue with PTC technical support. I just spent two and a half hours on the phone with a PTC technical support engineer. I gave him control over my computer via WebEx, he changed all the possible settings he could think of and then finally reinstalled Wildfire 1.0. No joy. We are going to have another go at it tomorrow.

I would like to believe that we have built our plug-in DLLs so that they work in Wildfire 1.0. But I cannot be sure as we have no way of testing them. So I am looking for someone who has Wildfire 1.0 on his computer and who would be kind enough to test one of our plug-ins. If you happen to be that kind person please download "STL Import for Pro/ENGINEER" from here. This is our Stereolithography STL file import plug-in for Pro/ENGINEER.

After installing the plug-in, please read the ReadMe file carefully for plug-in loading instructions. Unlike other CAD systems, Pro/ENGINEER has an antiquated method of loading plug-ins, which involves locating or creating a text file in a specific folder and specyfing the exact path of the plug-in DLL for your version of Pro/ENGINEER, among other things. Its a bit complicated, unlike other CAD systems wherein the plug-in installer does everything and you simply fire up the program and start using the plug-in.

After loading the plug-in you will see new menu added to Pro/ENGINEER called "STLImport".

Click the "Import" menu item and select a STL file to import. If you need one, a sample STL file is copied into the "Samples" folder.

I just need to know if the plug-in loads properly into Wildfire 1.0 and successfully imports a STL file. If any other Pro/ENGINEER user with a later version of Wildfire wants to test our plug-in, that would be great. We have plug-in DLLs for Wildfire 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0 Preproduction as well.

You can drop me a line at deelip (at) sycode (dot) com. Thanks in advance and have a great weekend.

Autodesk Authorized Developer Logo

2009-07-10T13:30:00.003+05:30

In an earlier post I wondered how GreatStar, an ITC member, could put up the "Autodesk Authorized Developer" logo on their web site, especially since I could not find any mention about them in the Autodesk Partner Index. An anonymous comment pointed me to this page on the Autodesk web site. The page is the Autodesk partner page for CADAddOn.com, an Autodesk Authorized Developer, headquartered in Plano, Texas.

What's interesting is that CADAddOn.com is a division of GreatStar, and not surprisingly, CADAddOn.com's product AutoXls Table is listed as one of GreatStar's products as well. So it appears that GreatStar took the liberty of using the Autodesk logo meant for CADAddOn.com on its web site and decided to call itself an Autodesk Authorized Developer.

Autodesk lawyers are busy dragging the ODA to court in their fight against SolidWorks dealing with orange squares and a three letter acronym. Here is company pissing all over the Autodesk logo and it appears that their high flying lawyers cannot do a damn thing about it. Looks like they charge Autodesk large sums of money and end up picking the easy fights.

All said and done, the people who actually end up paying the price are laid off Autodesk employees and Autodesk customers.

Inventor Fusion on Design News

2009-07-09T22:29:00.002+05:30

Beth Stackpole, a Contributing Editor to Design News, has written an article on Inventor Fusion titled "Autodesk Labs Serves up a Taste of Fusion". So why am I linking to it here? Click the link and you will know why ;-)

A Lost Sale

2009-07-09T22:06:00.003+05:30

At SYCODE, we get our fair share of weird emails. The other day we got one from a prospective customer wanting to buy one of our AutoCAD plug-ins. We helped him with his initial queries, successfully ran his data through our plug-in and showed him the results. Today the prospect was kind enough to let us know that he would not be purchasing our plug-in. Why? Because he could not find a "working crack" for AutoCAD.

Apparently, he could just about afford our $195 plug-in, but not AutoCAD.

The 15 Minute Lockout

2009-07-09T20:05:00.009+05:30

This post is a humble request to all Pro/ENGINEER developers out there to help me solve an extremely irritating problem. First let me begin by explaining my problem.

Unlike most CAD vendors, PTC does not give away their SDK (Software Development Kit) for free. So if you want to customize Pro/ENGINEER by means of plug-ins you need to purchase a license of something known as Pro/TOOLKIT, basically a C API used to develop what PTC calls auxiliary applications, or plug-ins. As a PTC partner I have a Pro/ENGINEER and Pro/TOOLKIT license on my development computer and only a Pro/ENGINEER license on a second testing computer. Now the thing is that plug-ins that I develop on my development computer will work only on a computer that has a Pro/TOOLKIT license. In order that they work on the testing computer, or for that matter, any other computer with just a Pro/ENGINEER license, I need to "unlock" the plug-in DLL. No other CAD vendor I know has such a system, but I guess PTC has a good reason for doing so. One obvious reason for locking the plug-ins is that someone without a Pro/TOOLKIT license should not be able to develop plug-ins.

My problem is that the unlocking program works in a weird way. When you start the program and supply it with a DLL file name to unlock at the command line, it just sits there for 15 mins and does nothing. After 15 full minutes, it unlocks the DLL within a fraction of a second. Yes, you read that right. But I will repeat anyways. The unlocking program sits idle for 15 (fifteen) minutes before it eventually unlocks the DLL. So if I make a change in my plug-in and want to see how it works on the testing computer, I need to wait 15 minutes between each and every change I make. Also, if I have ten plug-ins (I am developing 14 actually), I need to spend a total of two and a half hours doing nothing before I can unlock all of them and proceed to build my installers.

Obviously, developers found this extremely irritating and probably let PTC know about it. I say this because in Wildfire 3.0 or 4.0 (not sure), PTC changed the way the unlocking program worked. Now the program immediately unlocks the plug-in DLL, but ties up the Pro/TOOLKIT license for 15 minutes thereafter, thereby preventing another unlocking operation for the next 15 minutes. Same difference. The only advantage here is that the person testing the plug-in can do so immediately, and not have to wait 15 minutes. But he will still have to wait 15 minutes before testing the next change to the plug-in.

In my opinion, this new arrangement has the same nuisance value as the earlier one. A plug-in that I was developing was working perfectly fine on my development computer (they normally do) but was crashing on the testing computer. So while debugging I had to wait 15 minutes before I could change my code to see if the change that I made stopped the crash on the testing computer. I took three hours to find and fix the bug, something which would have been done in ten minutes had this weird 15 minute lockout not been there.

So why exactly does this 15 minute lockout exist? I have no damn clue! When PTC changed the unlocking program they also added a feature whereby you could supply multiple plug-in DLLs to unlock at once. Earlier you could unlock only one DLL at a time. So if I have a thousand plug-in DLLs, I can now have them all unlocked at one go in a few minutes. Of course, I will not be able to unlock another DLL for the next 15 minutes. But that does not really matter anymore because I could have added it to the list of thousand DLL's that I had just previously unlocked. So if the reason for the 15 minute lockout was to limit the number of DLL's that could be unlocked in an hour, a day or some time interval, the new unlocking program offers a way of bypassing that limitation. But as I found out the hard way, tying up the Pro/TOOLKIT license for 15 minutes after every unlocking operation poses serious problems while debugging a plug-in.

Instead of speculating I decided to ask PTC for the reason for the 15 minute lockout. When I was at their headquarters in Needham, I put the question across to a few people there. To my surprise none of them knew the reason for the 15 minute lockout. So maybe I was asking the wrong people. After I returned to India I logged a technical support call. The engineer who responded to my call was frank enough to admit that he did not know the reason either, but promised to find out and let me know. I never ever heard back from him. I have since asked a few other developers but none of them know the reason.

I have resigned to the fact that as a Pro/ENGINEER plug-in developer I have to live with the 15 minute lockout. What I cannot live with is not knowing why the lockout exists in the first place, especially since it can be such a pain while debugging. I would be extremely grateful to the person who enlightens me with the reason for the 15 minute lockout. Its killing me not to know.

I hope that there is a very good reason for the 15 minute lockout and not that some wise guy put it there decades ago and now nobody knows why it is still needed.

Are Printed Publications Relevant in an Online World?

2009-07-07T11:22:00.004+05:30

The other day the first anniversary issue of DEVELOP3D landed in my office. As a rule they usually do not ship to India, but I guess there are few exceptions to that rule. I took the magazine home to read and as I did I started asking myself whether printed publications actually have a place in a world that increasingly getting online. In recent times we have seen more and more print publications winding up or going online, and not always out of choice.

This is the way I look at it. In my view, printed publications, such as magazines, have little value when it comes to news. For example, DEVELOP3D's first item in the news section read "PTC's Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0 to deliver real time model regeneration". I didn't read a word of it. Why? Because that news is a month old. Ironically, one of the first places I read about it was at DEVELOP3D's own blog. The situation with the other news items in the magazine was no different. I get the daily news delivered straight to my inbox by the the Tenlinks Daily email newsletter. For breaking news I have bloggers reporting from live events which gets picked up by my feed reader instantly. And of course there is Twitter. What's more, I don't even need the press to interpret what a company said in a press release. I simply add the company's press release RSS feed to my feed reader and I get to hear it straight from the horse's mouth, and that too instantly.

Having said all of the above, I feel that printed magazines have something that the online world has been trying to get for many years now - the complete and undivided attention of the reader. And that is precisely what gives them an edge over online publications. I need to explain this a little. For that I need to take you to my world.

From the moment I enter office, all that my brain can think of doing is getting my body to work - in my case, write C++ code. In fact, my brain is already organizing my day while I am still in the car. So as soon as I sit at my desk, I start Outlook and reply to my emails as fast as I can. The emails that need time to reply are saved as drafts to be attented to later in the day. I then quickly scan what my feed reader has accumulated for me. This is the time when one half of my brain is fighting with the other over whether I should spend my time reading something or not. If the headline or the first few words do not interest me in a big way, I find my finger click the mouse on the next item in the list. If I have not spent a significant amount of time in my feed reader, my brain may allow me the time to check on what the people I follow on Twitter are saying. After this last excercise my brain heaves a sigh of relief and wastes no time in putting itself in programming mode. While I am programming, the infighting in my brain stops completely and both halves think about nothing else but C++.

Now compare this to how I read the issue of DEVELOP3D. I read the cover story on Marin Bikes after dinner while relaxing on my couch after my boys were tucked away in bed. I read the Autodesk Inventor 2010 review the next morning sitting on my easy chair, on the front porch of my house, with a cup of tea at my side, while birds chirped above me. The only thing disturbing me was my dog licking my toes. I read the Solid Edge ST2 review that evening, again on the front porch. This time my dog figured that playing fetch with my five year old son in the garden was more interesting than licking his master's toes. And to top it all, I read the uPrint 3D printer review while crapping. My point is that for every word that I read and every image I saw, both halves of my brain were in total harmony and I ended up giving total and undivided attention to the author or advertiser. To be brutally frank, if the cover story on Marin Bikes had appeared on the DEVELOP3D blog, I would never have read it. But I read each and every word of it on the DEVELOP3D printed magazine.

And this brings me to another equally important point, that of advertising. Advertising is the thing that makes a publication possible, whether it is printed or online. Thanks to all these years of looking into a web browser, my brain (both halves) has mastered the art of blocking out everything except the thing that I want to read. I can look at a web page with a million ads, brightly colored, animated or whatever, but my brain will only show me the words that I have come to read. I have almost never clicked on a Google ad, mainly because my brain filters it out for me, even though Google ads look quite similar to the text that I am reading. My brain treats a web ad as part of a universe that does not interest me. My brain takes the entire HTML content of a web page, isolates the portions that interest me and strips out the remaining. Ironically, this is exactly what my feed reader does. It shows me only the text and images that are referenced by the text. Everything else is gone.

I guess I am not the only one whose brain has evolved in such a way. I say this because there are online publications that inject ads right in the middle of the text that a reader has come to read. I think this is a desperate attempt to get the attention of the reader. I also believe that this is the most stupid way of doing it. Come one, do they actually think that the reader will stop reading the article, completely derail his line of thought, read the ad, understand and appreciate its content and then get back to reading the article. I definately would not. And I definitely do not. Such ads can only add up to nuisance value, nothing else.

On the other hand, I actually took the time out to look at every advertisement that appeared in the DEVELOP3D printed magazine. Page 6 contained a full page ad of SolidSolutions, a SolidWorks reseller, showing an ice carving of a motor cycle. I remember looking at every detail of the carving and then reading each and every word that followed it. I did that because my brain was at ease and did not have something hastenning it to get on with the next thing. I don't believe I have seen a printed magazine that injects advertisements in the middle of an article. They don't need to. The ads are either full page ads or are neatly tucked away in a corner of side of a page. They know that even though the reader is in the middle of reading an article, eventually the ad will come to his attention, quite simply because he has all the time in the world to look at it.

As an advertiser, if I want to advertise my brand or product, I would prefer putting in a place and time when my target audience is in the best position and state of mind to read and understand my message. Shoving something in front of a reader's eyes when he is reading something that interests him is like a nagging wife constantly interupting you when you are watching your favorite sport on TV.

I have never picked up a magazine to read it in a hurry. The very act of picking up a magazine indicates that my mind is at ease. Neither have I picked up ten magazines and rifled though the pages to read only the articles. Yet, this is exactly what I do with online publications every day.

There is something else that I don't understand about online publications. Some have now started to offer RSS feeds for their content. That is plain and simple crazy. Its like taking a printed magazine, tearing out all the pages that contain ads and then sending it to readers. Why the bloody hell would a company want to advertise on an online publication that offers RSS feeds? This is like the filtering that my brain does when it see ads on a web page, just that my brain does not need to take the trouble any more. The content is already filtered by the RSS feed. Somebody please explain this to me.

So to answer the question "Are printed publications relevant in an online world?", I would say that they most definitely are. In fact, I would go further and say that their relevance increases in a world that getting more and more online. Its sad to see that an increasing number of them are closing down or taking the online route.

Maybe after they grow up my kids will read the local newspaper in their web browser. But I will always read it on my front porch with my dog licking my toes. I just cannot bring myself to read it any other way.

AutoCAD Scale Nightmare

2009-07-06T09:50:00.002+05:30

Having recently built my house using AutoCAD as one of the CAD systems, I can relate to this story. A UK couple who are building their 1 million pound dream home are fighting a battle with authorities who are looking to tear it down - all because the blue prints were automatically scaled down by 4 percent to fit the page.

"When the plans have been printed out, we didn't realise the printer had reduced them by 4 per cent and these were the plans that were passed", said Colin Walker, the 50 year old owner of the house. "The trouble is that the plans were drawn up with AutoCAD and it's dangerous to use a scale ruler because printers often have these discrepancies with computer aided design. This is why the plans clearly state that all the dimensions should be checked or measured on site and not scaled from the drawing. However, plans containing full dimensions were subsequently submitted to West Lancs building control."

Unfortunately, the plans approved were the original scaled down drawings and the authorities are now taking the stand that Walker is building a house 4 percent larger than what they approved. Walker has already lost an appeal against the enforcement notice and now hopes that the High Court will stop the demolition of his four bedroom home. Apart from the scale problem, there are 15 other discrepancies between the approved plans and the currently built structure. I wish him luck.

Source

Inventor Fusion Is Finally Out, But...

2009-06-25T19:43:00.003+05:30

...it is not what they say it is. At least, not yet. All that marketing talk about "uniting direct and parametric workflows" is just that - talk. Inventor Fusion Technology Preview 1 is just a preview of the direct modeling workflow and has nothing related to the history side of things. And this is precisely how the brains at Autodesk Marketing appear to have planned it. According to the Autodesk press release, the "technology preview is the first step in delivering the full vision of Inventor Fusion". So instead of releasing their "full vision", Autodesk intends to dish it out in installments, thereby dragging this issue for as long as they possibly can. I am not sure whether this approach is designed get people like me to write about Fusion as much as possible, although it certainly looks that way. Frankly, after all that noise, I don't think so the world is interested in seeing part of their vision, especially the part which just about every other CAD vendor has already implemented.

Don't get me wrong. I have been playing around with Fusion for the past three weeks now and its direct modeling capabilities are great. But truth be told, Direct Modeling has ceased to amaze me, especially after seeing what SpaceClaim, Synchronous Technolgy and the other CAD systems that came before them can do. What will amaze me is the "fusion" part. The part where Inventor Fusion will let me open a history based model, let me thrash it around and then let me save it back to a history based model. This will be part of Technology Preview 2, which is due to be released late summer.

Kevin Schneider, Product Manager, Manufacturing Emerging Products and Technologies at Autodesk, could not be more explicit when he told me exactly what Fusion will eventually be able to do:

"[Technology Preview 2] will allow history free edits made in Fusion on Inventor native data to be read back into Inventor and converted into features. And this is not tweak features at the end of the tree. The changes will be to the source features. This allow users to make traditional parametric edits to their Inventor data using Inventor or use Fusion to make history free edits to the same data and then have those edits be converted automatically as parametric feature edits if they need them. This is truly giving customers the best of booth."

Usually companies spend years on a new technology using code names and shrouded in secrecy. Then when they are ready they go ahead and make a big splash. Someone at Autodesk decided to do exactly the opposite.

This is more like a strip tease and I am pissed because I am not yet feeling horny. Wake me up when she's about to take it all off.

I Love My Company But...

2009-06-25T17:15:00.001+05:30

...maybe not this much.

The Magic of COFES

2009-06-25T15:41:00.004+05:30

As I was asking the bartender for a beer at the Scottsdale Plaza during COFES 2009, so was another person. We shook hands, introduced ourselves to each other and began a conversation, which then spilled over to another beer.

This person was Francis Cadin, the CEO of DATAKIT, a French CAD software company that specializes in data exchange software. Technically, DATAKIT and SYCODE are business rivals because we have have a few products that overlap. So needless to say, Francis and I, knew quite a bit about each others companies, but we knew absolutely nothing about each other. However, a warm handshake followed by a couple of beers had changed all that. We really enjoyed our conversation, at the end of which, we exchanged business cards and decided to stay in touch.

And stay in touch we did. So much so that today DATAKIT and SYCODE issued a joint press release announcing a collaboration to offer hi-end Data Exchange solutions. DATAKIT's strength lies in their ability to read and write native file formats like CATIA, Pro/ENGINEER, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, Inventor, etc. whereas SYCODE's strength lies in developing plug-ins for a wide range of CAD systems. DATAKIT also developing plug-ins, but not for as wide a range of CAD system like SYCODE and SYCODE also has the ability to read and write native file formats, but not as wide a range as DATAKIT. So by simply adding the two together we will now be able to offer hi-end native file format import and export plug-ins for almost all the major CAD systems.

Its a win-win situation for everyone - DATAKIT, SYCODE and our customers. Funny thing is that this kind of a partnership never struck either of us in all these years. Its a wonder what a couple of beers and the right kind of atmosphere can do to business rivals.

And that, precisely, is the magic of COFES.

Linear and Non-Linear Modeling

2009-06-16T11:31:00.004+05:30

For those interested in the Direct Modeling and History Based Modeling discussion, I strongly recommend that you read this post at the Solid DNA Blog on Linear and Non-Linear Modeling. I don't believe the idea here is to throw another couple of terms and add to the confusion. Rather, the author uses the terms "linear" and "non-linear" to put his views across in a simple and straightforward manner. Definitely worth a read.

ODA and LEDAS Get Constrained

2009-06-15T15:02:00.005+05:30

Earlier I had mentioned that there were some interesting things going in the ODA on the technology front. Today I can tell you what. The ODA and LEDAS, a Russian software company, formalized their partnership by issuing a press release announcing that LEDAS would implement their LGS 2D Geometric and Dimensional Constraint Solver into DWGdirect, a main component of the ODA Platform. This will give all ODA members (and hence ITC members as well) the ability to have a 2D constraint system in their applications, something that was introduced in AutoCAD 2010. So when the ITC does come out with IntelliCAD 7.0 (whenever that may be), every ITC member will be able to license the constraint technology from LEDAS and offer a similar constraint system as AutoCAD 2010.

At the ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland, this April, LEDAS presented their proof of concept - A DRX plug-in running inside Bricscad, the only DWGdirect hosted application in the market. Earlier the same day, Siemens had made a similar presentation, showing their 2D DCM (Dimensional Constraint Manager), the constraint management system licensed by Autodesk for use in AutoCAD 2010. It looks like LEDAS beat Siemens to it.

I had a feeling that it would turn out this way. I remember the Siemens presentation ending with the presenter saying something like, "If there is sufficient interest among ODA members then we can consider working towards implementing 2D DCM into ODA technology". Then later in the day, LEDAS floored the audience with their Bricscad plug-in. "We have already done it", was how the LEDAS presenter started his presentation.

It will be interesting to see how good the LEDAS constraint system turns out to be. 2D DCM is seasoned technology used in a number of CAD systems for a number of years. LEDAS is basically a outsourcing company that uses its revenue earned though it outsourcing activities to fund the development of technologies like LGS 2D and 3D (yes, they have a 3D solver as well). But as far as high end scientific and mathematical software like solvers is concerned, the Russians do it like no other. Also, as far as licensing cost is concerned, I suspect that LEDAS would be able to offer ODA members a sweeter deal than Siemens.

I don't think we will need to wait for long to find out. I suspect LGS 2D will soon find its way into a not so distant version of Bricscad.

Critical Bugs and Stop Ship Issues

2009-06-15T09:18:00.003+05:30

After reading my opinions in the last couple of posts and comments on the issue of bugs and known issues some readers of this blog think that I have lost it. I now know why. It appears that my readers and I are not talking about the same thing, and maybe I am to blame for that.

Throughout this discussion I have used the word "crash" in conjunction with "bug" to signify that I am talking about bugs that cause a crash, not "this-tool-does-not-work-that-way or that-tool-does-not-work-this-way" kind of logical bugs. I am talking Crash! Boom! Bang! here.

As always, things are best explained by means of an example. So I will use one that I talked about on this blog earlier - the AutoCAD PolyFace Mesh issue. After I reported the problem to Autodesk (for the second time), they analyzed it, admitted it was a bug, limitation or whatever you want to call it, after which they arrived at the conclusion that it was not a "stop ship issue". Means it didn't cause a crash. Means there was no need to stop shipping the product. Surely reporting that a mesh has -1218 vertices and 0 faces (see image) is as big a bug as can be. But it didn't cause a crash. So they went ahead and released AutoCAD 2010 with this bug/limitation. And this kind of a bug is precisely what I have NOT been talking about.

Compare this to what Kevin Quigley said in a comment:

"I am talking about bugs that are logged in the system as bugs, that are perhaps not critical but cause features to fail or behave inconsistently. These are bugs, they are logged as bugs and they are released as known bugs - just look at the release notes of any application under 'known issues'. In your utopian programmers world no software should be released like this? Really? That is a recipe for bankruptcy."

Clearly we are talking two very different things here. Lets be clear. Bugs that cause crashes are critical bugs, stop ship issues or whatever fancy term that a developer many choose to use to describe them. My point is that no self respecting developer, whether it is a mammoth company like SolidWorks or a puny outfit like SYCODE, will (or rather should) ship a software with a critical bug that causes a crash. And if they have to release the software for whatever reason, they will (or rather should) convert it into a known issue by hard coding a check just before the crash occurs which make the operation abort gracefully. I don't think I can be more clear that that.

Now if any user (SolidWorks or otherwise) can show me a critical bug (which caused a crash) that was reported and which was not addressed in a future service pack or new version, I would appreciate it.

Of course, contrary to what some think, I happen to live in the real world and can understand if a few critical bugs slip though the cracks. But for users to come up in arms like the way they have, these issues have to be much more than just a "few".

Bugs and Known Issues

2009-06-14T21:22:00.004+05:30

In the comments to my last post "Users and Non-Users", a couple of SolidWorks users leveled what I believe to be a pretty serious accusation against SolidWorks. They claim that SolidWorks finds bugs in their software, does not fix them due to lack of time and goes ahead and releases the software. As a software developer I find this pretty hard to believe. But then maybe that's because I draw a clear distinction between "bugs" and "known issues".

Known issues are problems in the software that programmers have come to know of and are unable to fix for a variety of reasons, some of which may be beyond their control. For example, the compiler used to create the software may have a bug that prevents a fix. The data being sent to the software for processing may be just too large. In such cases, programmers hard code in a check just before a problem can occur so that the software aborts gracefully and does not crash. This information and the behavior related to it is then passed on to the people writing the documentation and they add it to "Known Issues" section of the product documentation. This is perfectly fine with me and should be fine with any reasonable user as well.

A bug, on the other hand, is something that the programmers have come across or users have reported, the cause of which is yet to be ascertained or the solution to which is yet to be implemented. Personally I consider releasing software with such unfixed bugs, without converting them to known issues, is sacrilege. It is unpardonable. It is like Boeing shipping a plane to a customer comforting itself with the hope that the chance of it crashing is fairly low. OK, maybe I am exaggerating a little here, but I think you get my point.

Earlier I mentioned that programmers may not be able to fix bugs for a variety of reasons. Time should not one of them. That's why, in principle, I am against this annual release cycle thing that some CAD software vendors have got going. Now we all know that it makes good business sense to do that. But having said that, I would like to share something which an extremely successful businessman, Bob McNeel, said to me at COFES 2009 when I asked him when Rhinoceros 5.0 would be released. He replied, "I don't know". I almost spat out the beer that I was drinking. He went on to explain, "Of course, we do have a date in mind, but it all depends upon how the software looks like at that point in time. We have never had an annual release cycle. That would just makes a mess of everything."

Great minds think alike, eh?

User and Non-Users

2009-06-13T11:23:00.006+05:30

In a comment, Matt Lombard asked me to comment on something that I have been trying to avoid talking about for quite some time. He asked:

"To the best of my very poor memory, all of the proponents of Direct Editing as the New World Order for CAD are non-users, and the proponents of history are users ...[snip]... Any comments on that?"

If you are a so called user, please forgive me if you find some of what you are about to read offending. It is not my intention to offend anyone. Definitely not Matt whose blog, I believe, is one of the best CAD blogs out there, not just for the content, but also for the way he puts it.

I want to keep Direct Modeling out of this discussion and only talk about this concept of users and non-users that Matt brought up. Over the years I have been reading comments from users which imply that the CAD media, analysts, authors, etc. have their heads in the clouds and do not know what they are talking about because they do not do real modeling work. I have even heard pretty derogatory comments (especially from SolidWorks users) saying things like, "The programmers at SolidWorks should be made to use their own software."

This kind of thinking is similar to questioning the wisdom of asking a priest for advice on your marriage. After all, what the hell does a priest know about married life, right? And yet they are very effective in sorting out marital problems. I don't know about the West, but here in a place like India, they are wizards. For a doctor to be able to write a prescription for a patient, he does not need to be ill. Furthermore, the patient does not even know or care how other patients in the clinic feel. But the doctor does. All that matters to each patient is his health, that's all.

My point is that a user normally thinks only in terms of the software that he is trained to use. For the most part, he is unaware of features and methods implemented in other software. I see this every day at SYCODE. We specialize in developing data exchange plug-ins for almost all the major CAD systems and we get questions from customer of all shapes and sizes. The kind of queries that we receive make me sometimes wonder whether users wear blinders that prevent them from looking at all the other stuff around them.

Now coming to the view that the CAD media, analysts, authors, etc. do not use CAD software. I will let others speak for themselves. But before I have my say, let me list the CAD systems along with their versions that are currently installed on my computer in office.

Acrobat Pro Extended (9.0)
Alibre Design (11.0)
AutoCAD (2000, 2000i, 2002, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010)
Bricscad and dozen other IntelliCAD variants
Cobalt, Graphite (V8)
CoCreate Modeling 2.0
DoubleCAD XT and Pro
Inventor (10, 11, 2008, 2009, 2010)
IRONCAD & INOVATE (11.0)
KeyCreator (7.5)
KOMPAS 3D (V10)
Moment Of Inspiration (1.0, 2.0)
Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire (1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0 Preproduction)
Rhinoceros (3.0, 4.0, 5.0 Beta)
SketchUp (6.0, 7.0)
Solid Edge (ST)
SolidWorks (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009)
SpaceClaim (2009)
TurboCAD (15.0)
VectorWorks (2009)

And these are just general CAD systems, not specialized CAD software like industry specific solutions for Rapid Prototyping, Reverse Engineering, etc. Now these CAD systems don't just sit there and occupy my hard disk space. I use these systems on a daily basis. I have spent the last decade solving people data exchange problems by figuring out how these CAD systems work internally. Apart from a few personal projects like designing my house and the stuff in it, I do not create a lot of design data. But I sure as hell modify data created by others. The data I am referring to here is live data from customers (or should I say users?), often sensitive information for which I need to sign Non Disclosure Agreements. The kind of stuff that eventually end up as products, buildings, etc.

But what is more important to understand is the fact that at SYCODE, we do not offer design services. Rather we offer plug-ins and custom solutions that automate the tasks of creating and modifying design data. So I need to wear the hat of a user as well as a programmer to be able to automate a user's workflow in his CAD system or between his CAD systems. So when someone refers to me as a non-user, you can imagine why I would find that a particularly difficult pill to swallow.

And lastly coming to the view that programmers should be made to use the software that they develop, I believe that apart from reflecting insolence, this kind of thinking shows stupidity in its purest form. I think this is best explained by means of an example.

Like I said before, at SYCODE, we specialize in data exchange plug-ins for CAD systems, one of which is SolidWorks. I find myself using the Import Diagnosis feature of SolidWorks a lot on models imported by our import plug-ins. It is not uncommon for the Import Diagnosis feature to not fill all holes and close all gaps because its success or failure depends upon the quality of the imported data. But sadly, it is also not uncommon for me to hear customers bitch about SolidWorks not being able to do a good job. Now consider this for a moment. A user will use a feature like Import Diagnosis probably a few times a month, if at all. Can you even imagine how many times the programmers who developed this tool used this feature to create, update, test, debug and continuously maintain their code? As programmers we use the software that we create after every tweak in our code and after every rebuild. We use our software with all kinds of design data that we can gather or conceive. We sometimes programatically create data that a user would normally never create, just so that we can stress-test our software. Heck, we use our software so much that we often need to write code that continuously runs data though our software on a dedicated testing server 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Think about it. If you are amazed at the speed at which demo jocks work, I suggest you take a look at programmers. Just because they work in the back room invisible to the world, it does not mean that they do not use the software they create. They use it far more than these so called users do. The reason I call this line of thinking stupid is because its more like a cab driver scoffing at a bunch of automobile engineers who designed the car that he is driving.

And while I am at it, I would like to draw attention to another thing I find quite repulsive. When a user creates a design and it fails or does not work as intended, he goes ahead and modifies it and gives it a revision number. In programming parlance the failure is called a Bug and the revision is called a Service Pack. Users should start calling their failures bugs and revisions service packs and then they will be able to appreciate the saying "to err is human".

I often hear users say that CAD vendors should sort out all the bugs before releasing their software and not make paying customers debug their software for them. I have even heard some users say that the CAD vendors should pay them for reporting bugs. I can turn this argument on its head and ask users to design products that never fail so that people who paid money for the products they designed do not have to pay the price for their "revisions" as well.

Sounds fair, doesn't it?

Is the Direct Modeling Honeymoon Over?

2009-06-12T09:29:00.005+05:30

In a comment, Matt Lombard remined me what Dan Staples, Director of Solid Edge at Siemens PLM, said to him last October:

"Ten years from now history based modeling will not exist"

Today, Dora Smith, Director - Global Social Media at Siemens PLM told me something which appears to quite the opposite:

"We have no plans to deliver NX or Solid Edge without a history-based option."

I believe 10 years is a very long time in the world of technology and would prefer to go with Dan Staples. I also feel that Dora is merely addressing the immediate concerns of her customers.

I simply cannot bring myself to believe that the best way to create and modify a solid model is by cooking it up in a sequential manner all the time. Features are here to stay, at least for the length of my lifetime. Whether they need to be created and maintained in an orderly manner is something that I am not comfortable with.

But there is another solution, something which just about everyone I have spoken to, including myself, feels is next to impossible. That is, to have a history tree containing features and allow the user to make direct edits to the features, but not add these direct edits as new features at the bottom of the history tree. Rather directly edit the existing features in the history tree. If such a solution exists then probably I could live with the history tree because I would not need to figure it out before I make any change to the model. Current history based modelers do only a fraction of this. I say fraction, because you can push/pull only those faces which have a clear relation to an underlying feature. Case in point, Instant3D by SolidWorks.

However, Autodesk claims that Inventor Fusion will do exactly what I said above was next to impossible. If that is indeed the case, then this year's Nobel Prize (doesn't matter which category) should go to the person at Autodesk who figured this out. I can think of few cases when this solution may be made possible, but there would be severe limitations to how much you can mess with the solid model. But then maybe I am not Nobel Prize material.

So to answer the question, "Is the Direct Modeling Honeymoon Over?", I say "No". I would say that probably the marriage between History Based Modeling and Direct Modeling has only just begun and they are now fighting over which one of them is wearing the pants.

Siemens Holds on to History

2009-06-11T21:02:00.009+05:30

In an earlier post titled "PTC Joins the Direct Modeling Bandwagon" referring to PTC's announcements and demos at PTC/USER 09, I wondered:

"So does that mean that like Siemens, PTC is abandoning the history based feature modeling approach that they pioneered years ago?"

As it turns out there was something fundamentally wrong with the question. I have access to Solid Edge only and assumed that Synchronous Technology was implemented in NX in the same way, which apparently, it is not. An anonymous commenter pointed out:

"In NX, you can CHOOSE to have Synchronous features seamlessly integrated with the 'old' history-based modeling approach, OR, to go with a completely history-free approach. It is UP TO THE USER TO DECIDE. In Solid Edge, it seems you have to choose one or the other.

... [snip] ...

It is very unfortunate that the differences in implementation of ST between NX and Solid Edge are being confused (by everyone, from Siemens to the blog media etc)."

This is precisely the reason why I allow anonymous comments on my blog. So after I was enlightened I decided to get it straight from the horse's mouse. So I asked Dora Smith, Director - Global Social Media at Siemens PLM Software, two specific questions:

(1) Will Siemens continue to develop new technologies that are based on the “history based” parametric modeling?
(2) In the future will Siemens ship a version of Solid Edge and/or NX that will not have the “history based” parametric modeling option.

Her reply to question 1 was:

"We have definitely NOT 'abandoned' history-based modeling. We continue to invest in history-based modeling AND synchronous technology. The feedback from our customers so far is they want the best of both worlds: history-based and history-free modeling."

In response to question 2, Dora said:

"We have no plans to deliver NX or Solid Edge without a history-based option."

So there you have it. As far as Siemens is concerned, history is not going to be history. I was pretty alarmed by something that Al Dean said in a comment to the same post:

"I've heard of users reevaluating their Solid Edge licenses, some even dropping it and moving to another direct editing system that's more mature. Why? because of this notion that history is being dumped."

If Al is right, then maybe Siemens is not doing a very good job getting the message across to its customers. Either way, I am still trying to figure out the reason for implementing Synchronous Technology differently in Solid Edge and NX. It is quite obvious to me that giving a user the option to integrate Synchronous features in the history based modeling method is far better than not giving the option. So why is Solid Edge being left out of the party? Is Siemens facing the same problem that Dassault is facing with smaller brother SolidWorks stepping on the toes of bigger brother CATIA? Or is there something that I am not seeing here?

If any of you know the reason why Synchronous Technology was implemented differently in Solid Edge and NX, I would appreciate it if you could enlighten me a bit further.

GRX - Another ObjectARX Source Compatible SDK

2009-06-11T09:25:00.005+05:30

Today the Chinese IntelliCAD developer, GStarSoft announced that they would be releasing GRX, an AutoCAD source compatible SDK, in a couple of months. According to the press release, "GRX, short for GstarCAD Runtime eXtension, is highly compatible with AutoCAD ARX interface. With GRX, one set of source codes can support two platforms (AutoCAD and GstarCAD)."

I think I should maintain a list of these ObjectARX source compatible SDK's, because I don't believe that we have seen the last of them. Here is the list:
1) BRX from Bricsys. This SDK is in production use by many AutoCAD plug-in developers.
2) FRX from Graebert. This is part of their new Argon platform which is still is Beta.
3) ObjectDRX from ZWCAD. The only information about it is as cryptic as the Chinese can make it.
4) GRX from GStarSoft. To be released in a couple of months.

The press release has a link to www.gstarsoft.com. If I remember correctly their web site was located at www.staricad.com. I wanted to see what had changed and so I clicked though and began looking around. I finally found myself on the About Us page staring in disbelief at the Autodesk Authorized Developer logo.

I thought Autodesk didn't partner with people who make AutoCAD clones. So I searched for "GStarSoft" or "GreatStar" or whatever name they go by now at the Autodesk Partner Index page. The search turned up empty.

I smell something fishy here. Do you?

The ODA Finally Gets It

2009-06-10T14:35:00.009+05:30

More than seven months ago, in a post titled "DWGDirect and DRX Explained" I wrote:

"Take a look at their [ODA's] web site. This is what you see on the home page:

'The Open Design Alliance is a non-profit membership-based consortium of software companies, developers and users committed to promoting the open exchange of CAD data now and in the future. In addition to setting standards for CAD data formats, the ODA also focuses on the practical matter of developing software libraries of exceptional quality that enable ODA members to develop applications capable of reading and writing the popular DWG and DGN CAD file formats. ODA members use the following ODA software libraries to support their efforts of developing CAD solutions'

…and they go on and talk about DWGdirect and DGNdirect, about how these libraries can read and write DWG and DGN files. Absolutely nothing about anything I said above. No mention whatsoever about the DRX SDK. You need to click on a cryptic link called 'Public Downloads' to even know that they offer something called the DRX SDK."

Go take a look at the ODA web site today. This is what the home page says:

"The Open Design Alliance is a non-profit, membership-based consortium of software companies, developers and users committed to provide the ODA Technology Platform to its members, giving them the tools to create a wide range of technical graphics applications, including custom data access and editing utilities, visualization tools, and even full-scale CAD systems. The platform also supports the use of both DWG and DGN files, with import and export capabilities to other file formats."

I have been yelling myself hoarse on this blog and elsewhere, that reading and writing DWG files is just one of the many things that the ODA does. I even wrote a book to emphasize my point. It feels nice to know that the ODA has finally found itself. I have been privy to a few things going on at the ODA for some time. I would like to give a substantial amount of credit for this "makeover" to Arnold van der Weide, the president of the ODA. I know that there are other people involved as well, but let's give the devil his due. I am pretty sure that with the leadership and vision of Arnold, the ODA is a much stronger organization, which undoubtedly has a bright and strong future.

Today the ODA released DWGdirect.NET, the first ODA platform platform component built for use with the Microsoft .NET Framework. This opens the ODA's doors to a whole new class of programmers, the kind that do not need to mess with C++, but a more easier language like VB.NET. Full press release here.

Way to go, ODA!! Now go do what you do best. Crack that 2010 DWG format and piss all over Autodesk once again. I only hope that the ODA does not go ahead and do something stupid like the TrustedDWG thing they did the last time around. Otherwise Autodesk will be the one pissing all over the ODA in court.

PTC Joins the Direct Modeling Bandwagon

2009-06-08T20:47:00.004+05:30

I guess I can open my trap now. People at PTC/USER 09 have started reporting on PTC's modeling plans. I was shown some of it during my visit to the PTC Headquarters in Needham this April, but was asked not to talk about it till PTC/USER 09.

Direct modeling will not be in Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire 5.0. Rather it will be part of Wildfire 6.0. But since they are already working on it, I suspect that it will be in the software but the functionality will be hidden from the user. When I asked PTC top management why they were not shipping this technology in Wildfire 5.0, they told me that they were not completely satisfied with the technology and in their view it would be in shipping condition in time for Wildfire 6.0.

So does that mean that like Siemens, PTC is abandoning the history based feature modeling approach that they pioneered years ago? Hell No! PTC has managed to find a way to do quick localized rebuilds so that a complicated history based parametric model can be solved much faster that it previously could, thereby giving the user the feel and easy of direct modeling. At least, that's what they told me.

DEVELOP3D is covering PTC/USER 09 live and has a sneak peek of the direct modeling that will become part of Wildfire 6.0.

PTC's New Blogger and Tweeter

2009-06-07T11:49:00.006+05:30

Mark Lobo, PTC's Director of Windchill CAD Integrations, now has a blog. PTC/USER 09 starts tomorrow and Mark intends to blog and tweet live at the event.

Blog: http://marklobo.blogspot.com
Twitter: @marklobotweets

John McEleney's Comment on Parasolid

2009-05-28T19:31:00.003+05:30

I guess you can imagine how hard it is to get an official comment from SolidWorks on the issue of them continuing to using Parasolid, a modeling kernel owned by their rival Siemens PLM Software. I am still trying to get something out from them. However, I have been recently speaking to former CEO John McEleney and asked him for his views on the contentious issue. This what he had to say:

"I do not think it's appropriate for me to comment on behalf of SolidWorks - Jeff Ray or Austin O'Malley are probably the best people to speak with.

The one thing I can say that I know the past, current and any future team would agree with is: that we simply did not want people to be bothered with or worry about the technology foundation that was used. Our feeling was always that we wanted to remove the technology hassles/details from the user and provide them with what they wanted: powerful, affordable easy-to-use 3D."

Although John McEleney is no longer affiliated with SolidWorks, he is a big supporter. He stepped down from the board approximately one year ago and has recently joined a start-up called CloudSwitch as CEO, a company still in development mode and which is doing something related to cloud computing.

Direct Editing and Direct Modeling

2009-05-28T13:07:00.004+05:30

Paul Hamilton's comment made me wonder why there may be some confusion regarding what I have been calling "Direct Editing" on this blog. Alibre and its customers claim that they already have direct editing, and some think that it is the same as what SpaceClaim, Siemens and others are offerring. The problem has been the term "Direct Editing". I should have been using the term "Direct Modeling" instead and I will begin to do so from this post onwards.

This post will also serve as a comparison (as I see it) between the Direct Editing capabilities offerred by Alibre Design and SolidWorks.

Alibre Design has a sub-menu called Direct Edit in it's Feature menu that contains a bunch of commands to directly edit something. We will find out exactly what in a while.

Now lets see how direct editing works in Alibre Design. I sketched a 1" x 1" square and extruded it by 2" to get a box.

I then used the Push Pull Face or Sketch command from the Direct Edit sub-menu and used the mouse to push the dark colored face (in the figure above) into the solid by 1" to arrive at a cube.

I then used the same command to pull the same face outward by 1" to return to the original geometry.

Now let's see what happenned to the feature tree.

After the Extrusion feature we now have two Move Face features. So although the geometry is exactly the same as before I started direct editing, we now have two extra features. So if I were to sit all day and push/pull a million times I would have a feature tree a million features long and would still have modeled a 1" x 1" x 2" box. This is called Direct Editing in Alibre Design. But what is it directly editing? The Extrusion feature? No. If it were directly editing the Extrusion feature then the extrusion distance parameter would have been modified from 2" to 1" and then back to 2" and we would have just one Extrusion feature in the tree. Direct Editing in Alibre Design means adding features to the feature tree.

Now lets see how SolidWorks does the same thing. I created a similar 1" x 1" x 2" box in SolidWorks by extruding a square and turned on Instant3D, their direct editing feature. I picked the square face, pushed it into the solid and then pulled it back. When I looked at the feature tree I found that there is still the single Extrude feature and no other features. So it appears that SolidWorks is smarter then Alibre Design because it recognized that the face I was pushing and pulling was created by an extrusion and modified the extrusion distance instead of adding Move Face features to the tree. Direct Editing in SolidWorks means that you directly edit the parameters of a feature, whereas in Alibre Design you directly edit the entire model by adding features to the end of the feature tree.

So you might think that SolidWorks has a better Direct Editing solution than Alibre Design. Well, according to me, it is quite the opposite. I bet you will find this interesting. Lets go back to Alibre Design and push one of the rectanglular (not square) faces into the solid. As expected, the face is pushed in and a third Move Face feature is added to the feature tree. If you try and to the same thing in SolidWorks, the rectangular face does not get pushed into the solid. Rather the entire model is pushed in space. This is because SolidWorks cannot find an Extrusion feature corresponding to the rectangular face and hence cannot change its value to push the face into the solid. SolidWorks does have a separate Move Face command, which is not tied into the Instant3D feature, which can be used to move the rectangular face into the solid. But just like Alibre Design it adds a Move Face feature to the feature tree.

So if you compare the two in terms of directing editing a model using the mouse, I would prefer Alibre Design to SolidWorks, simply because they have managed to let the user use their Move Face command (they have one as well) with the mouse. SolidWorks has not yet managed to tie their Move Face command to Instant3D. However, it would be nice if Alibre Design would not add Move Face features if the user was moving a face linked to an extrusion. However, both end up messing up their feature trees. And this is Direct Editing when it comes to history based parametric modeling systems like Alibre Design and SolidWorks.

As you can see, it is quite a messy affair. I call it messy because in order to make a modification, a user has to study the history tree and figure out which sketch or parameter of which feature he needs to modify in order to effect his change. And now if users can arbitrarily move faces using Direct Editing commands, the feature tree is bound to get only more and more complicated and difficult to understand and work with. No model is perpetual. It undergoes several changes thoughout its lifetime with the changes being made by different people. As a programmer, I know how hard and frustrating it is to modify someone else's code, especially if the programmer has not left comments in the code. In SolidWorks you can add comments to a feature. In Alibre Design, I don't believe you can.

Direct Modeling is an entirely different ball game. Direct Modeling systems are not history based, although some like Solid Edge ST have features, parameters and constraints. In others like Spaceclaim, a model is simply a bunch of closed solids and open surfaces. These systems give the user the ability of directly modify the geometry of a model without being constrained by the limitations associated with history based systems. They differ in the way they offer this functionality and the outcome of a modeling operation, but essentially they are all about making the geometry creation and modification processes quick and easy.

The fundamental difference between Direct Modeling systems and history based systems is that Direct Modeling systems make or allow geometric changes by taking a bird's eye view of the entire model, whereas history based systems make or allow geometric changes by performing modeling operations in a sequential mannger. Hence they lack the flexibility of Direct Modeling systems. Its like deciding your trip by looking at a map as opposed to reaching a place and then deciding where to go next.

Alibre and SolidWorks seem to be of the opinion that their customers need Direct Editing and not Direct Modeling. I know for sure that Alibre feels that way. In a comment, Paul Grayson, the Founder and CEO of Alibre said, "Alibre already has direct editing and the non-history based editing is simply a feature, not the basis for a product." Clearly, Alibre and SolidWorks feel that Direct Editing, of the kind I showed above, coupled with the benefits and power of history based parametric modeling outweigh the value proposition offerred by Direct Modeling systems. I tend to think otherwise. As Direct Modeling technologies evolve to more closely integrate parametrics, features, constraints and all the things that make history based systems powerful and also difficult to use, I believe we are going to see the sense in what some consider to be a rush towards Pushmi-Pullyu CAD.

I hope this explains a few things. And I promise never to use the phrase "Direct Editing" when talking about non-history based systems.

Direct Editing and the Future

2009-05-27T09:37:00.004+05:30

Solid modelers like IronCAD, CoCreate, KeyCreator, etc. have been doing direct editing for quite a while. But somehow the entrance of SpaceClaim was the event that got every one's attention, mine as well. Paul Grayson, Founder and CEO of Alibre, left a comment asking me, "You have been over the top on Direct Editing since SpaceClaim hit the market. I recall your prediction that SpaceClaim would get snapped up by someone for Billions! What happened to that?"

I guess SpaceClaim did not (and probably will never) get bought because other CAD vendors decided to "make" instead of "buy". Maybe the "billions" were the problem. We know that today they certainly are. I may have been wrong about other CAD vendors buying SpaceClaim or their technology. But I was not wrong about the reason for doing so - to add a direct editing solution to their products. Siemens, Dassault and now Autodesk are ample proof of that. I have said on this blog earlier that as far as direct editing is concerned PTC is not sitting idle, which is pretty much all that they will let me say for now.

I believe that direct editing is going to be an integral part of our future. Not just because I believe that it is a good thing. We have discussed its benefits and drawbacks over and over again. But there is another reason that many of you may not have realized. The purpose of this post is to highlight that reason.

If you were an exisiting Solid Edge 20 user (the version just before Synchronous Technology) and you installed Solid Edge ST, you would be given an option of using old history style modeling or direct editing. But if you installed Solid Edge ST on a computer without a previous version of Solid Edge, you would be able to do only direct editing. At least I could not easily find a way of doing history based modeling on a new license. This means that Siemens has already decided for new users how their future will look like. I guess Siemens may have wanted existing users to adopt direct editing as well, but they must have realized that switching to direct editing is not something that can be done in a day.

My point here is to draw attention to the myth that customers decide what the future holds for them. Sure they give feedback, report bugs and submit enhancement requests, some of which are considered and implemented in future versions. But ground breaking changes are almost never decided by customers. The Microsoft "ribbon" is a perfect example. Microsoft simply decided that the menu should be the past and the ribbon should be the future and shoved it down the throats of its customers.

I can go on giving you many such examples, but I think you get my point. Direct editing is an excellent thing. But that is not the only reason why I believe it is going to be the future.

In another comment Matt Lombard said, "CAD manufacturers have shown that they are willing to make the leap, but the other half of the market (customers) are not showing that propensity in significant numbers yet." I believe that customers don't need to make a leap. They will simply be airlifted and dropped on the other side.

So when I say things like SolidWorks and Alibre are "stuck in the past", I do not mean to look down on the companies and their visions of the future. My opinions are based on my vision of what the future will look like, which seems to converge with the visions of the majority of CAD vendors.

Paul Grayson ended his comment by saying, "Why should Alibre, or SolidWorks for that matter, waste development resources on features that their customers are not asking for? Hopefully, we are not expected to write code solely based on what our competitors do and the opinions of industry pundits."

Maybe Paul has a point. It would be nice if Alibre and SolidWorks resisted the movement towards direct editing. At some point in the future, we would then be able to let customers determine which direction was the better one. Or maybe not. Because like I said above, the CAD vendors are taking decisions for the customers, and we already know which side of the fence most of them are on.

Kernel Conclusion

2009-05-26T22:05:00.003+05:30

It all started with me speculating about SolidWorks' use of Siemens' Parasolid kernel and not Dassault's V6 platform. Then to drive my point that this was a business issue and not a technical one, I used IronCAD as an example to show how a CAD system could easily switch between two modeling kernels, that too on the fly. Today, someone from IronCAD left a comment that confirmed my theory.

"[IRONCAD] Users can design their models using a specified modeling kernel. This provides them the ability to work in the most common kernel that they may end up exporting to downstream in the design (helping to eliminate translation issues). However, IRONCAD has technology to 'Kernel Collaborate' which is nearly invisible to the user. Kernel Collaboration means that IRONCAD can use both kernels to build the underlining solid model. For example: Say the user was working in ACIS to build their model. They add a blend to the model that ACIS cannot support for some reason. IRONCAD will automatically pass the operation to Parasolid to attempt the modeling operation. If successful, it will build the blend and maintain the model in ACIS. At this point, you might think I mistyped that. No I did not. The model is still in ACIS. However, the results of the body are made up of both Kernels. If the user exports to ACIS at this point, the result would still be the same since it is just the final b-rep body.

IRONCAD does not have many issues in translating back and forth between ACIS and Parasolid once the model is inside of IRONCAD. We maintain a common tolerance which reduces many issues found in direct translations. In most modeling cases, you can take an ACIS model and change its type to Parasolid and visa-versa without any issues. Of course there may be the rare exceptions to this but IRONCAD performs regular testing on this capability. Most cases where issues would occur would be in non-manifold conditions where ACIS can support and Parasolid does not, but this is not normally a common modeling case."

This pretty much proves what I said earlier:

"The job of a modeling kernel is to end up with a valid watertight solid model, basically trimmed NURBS surfaces stitched together. A modeling kernel has very little to do with the presence or absence of parameters or history that makes up the recipe which cooks up that solid body, if any at all."

I am not suggesting that the task of SolidWorks switching kernels is, in any way, an easy one. Just that it may not be entirely impossible to do so, as some might believe.

WTF is Digital Prototyping - Part 2

2009-05-26T14:34:00.002+05:30

A year ago I did a Part 1, in which I defined Digital Prototyping as "the difference between modeling and designing". At that time I was talking about Autodesk and its idea of Digital Prototyping, while keeping Inventor at the center of the concept.

Today I would like to talk about another company that is doing digital prototyping - a company called GEOMATE with its product CADCALCS 2.0. I don't believe I have seen anything like CADCALCS before. To put is crudely, it is a geometric calculator. But it is actually much more than that. I could spend an hour trying to explain what CADCALCS does in words here, but I think you will get a much better idea if you see this video. After you do that take a look at this PDF document to see a bunch of examples where and how the software may be used.

Even in the case of CADCALCS, my definition of Digital Prototyping still remains the same - "the difference between modeling and designing". Like I said in Part 1, geometry is a solved problem. Of course, we will constantly strive ways to find new ways of arriving at geometry, such as direct editing or the thing which comes after that, but the real problem is to find an easy and accurate method of arriving at the right geometry that will satisfy the design requirements. This is a very complex problem and is probably the reason why we still need a particular class of humans to design something, a class called Engineers. Technology can only make our work easier; and CADCALCS is one such technology.

CADCALCS 2.0 is priced at $499. They also have an educational price of $99, which I believe is fantastic. A software like CADCALCS is an excellent tool to get young minds interested in engineering. For that price you even get an extra license for home use and free technical support via the web.

GRANITE Cross-Release Interoperability

2009-05-25T09:55:00.006+05:30

During my recent visit to the PTC headquarters in Needham, Asa Trainer, Director - Product Management, explained to me PTC's solution to the legacy format interoperability problem, something which I accused many CAD vendors of deliberately ignoring in my last post. Their solution is called GRANITE Cross-Release Interoperability or GCRI. I believe that this solution is the only one of its kind in the CAD industry today. At least I am not aware of any other CAD vendor doing something like this. In this post I will try and explain GCRI and the issues surrounding it.

PTC uses an in-house developed modeling kernel called GRANITE, similar to ACIS from Spatial, Parasolid from Siemens, etc. GRANITE is also used for interoperability to read and write native Pro/E part and assembly files. GCRI is basically a plug-in to GRANITE interoperability kernel.

With the GCRI plug-in, a Pro/E Wildfire 2.0 user can read files created by later versions of Pro/E. I will not get into the technicalities of this, because then I would need to explain things like Associative Topology Bus (ATB) and Translated Image Model (TIM). However, if you are interested to dig to the roots then I suggest you read this document.

The GCRI plug-in gives Pro/E the ability to do the following wonderful things:
1) Open a later version Pro/E file and display the feature tree. However, the feature tree is read-only and cannot be edited.
2) Add new features to the feature tree and save the file.
3) Open the saved file in the new version of Pro/E and "graft" the new features added in the older version back into the new version.

All this happens without any loss of design data. So effectively with GCRI you can now have a single Pro/E file which has been edited by more than one version of Pro/E. Obviously, this is a far better way for users of different versions of Pro/E to work with each other, as opposed to exchanging data using neutral file formats like IGES and STEP.

So now to the all important question. What happens when PTC adds new features to Pro/E that never existed in a previous version? Well, its actually quite simple. The features simply don't show up in the feature tree, which is quite understandable. So if a user of a newer version of Pro/E does not use any new features, he can work seamlessly with the user of an older version of Pro/E. The fact that the user of the older version can actually add features to a newer version file is simply amazing.

Needless to say, I find GCRI to be simply awesome. What I do not find awesome is the fact that GCRI is available only to customers on maintenance, which ironically, defeats the very purpose of GCRI. If a PTC customer is on maintenance then he already has the latest version of Pro/E and does not need GCRI. Of course, he would need something like GCRI if he paid his subscription fees, received all the latest software, never opened the box and still continued to use his old version.

I sincerely hope that I have misunderstood something here, because try as I might, I cannot get myself to believe that this wonderful technology is going to waste.

Kernel Confusion and Legacy Models

2009-05-24T11:52:00.006+05:30

Evan Yares left a comment on my earlier post ("Inventor Fusion and SolidWorks Confusion"), attempting to explain why SolidWorks could not switch to the Dassault V6 modeling kernel. This is what he had to say:

"There are very good reasons. I don't think they're beyond your comprehension -- but they may be beyond your experience. Talk to someone who has done kernel-level interoperability work, and ask them how easy it is to replicate the weirdnessess of one kernel in another. The issues of surface parameterization and modeling tolerance alone are enough to make most developers run away screaming. Dassault owns both the ACIS and CATIA modeling kernels. Either one could be 'bolted in'. Neither one would provide support for legacy SolidWorks models."

When someone like Evan says something, I listen. He comes with a lot of experience in the CAD software industry. However, on this particular point, I would beg to differ.

IronCAD offers its users a choice between two modeling kernels - ACIS and Parasolid. Their software works perfectly with both kernels. IronCAD does not maintain two file formats, one for each modeling kernel. This is because the job of a modeling kernel is end up with a valid waterright solid model, basically trimmed NURBS surfaces stitched together. A modeling kernel has very little to do with the presence or absence of parameters or history that makes up the recipe which cooks up that solid body, if any at all. Tomorrow morning the developers at IronCAD could very well add a history tree to their software and still continue to use both modeling kernels.

IronCAD is a perfect example of how a solid model created by the ACIS modeling kernel can be converted into an exact same solid model as defined by the Parasolid modeling kernel, and vice versa. IronCAD users are even known to switch between modeling kernels, because one does blends better than the other. In fact, I believe that IronCAD is the best way of transfering data from modeling systems that use ACIS and Parasolid, as compared to using neutral file formats like IGES and STEP. Their programmers have figured out a way to map data perfectly between ACIS and Parasolid.

I may not have a lot of experience in modeling kernels, but I do happen to have some experience in file formats and the issues that surround them. But in this case, a little bit of common sense was more than enough to figure this out. I believe that the programmers at SolidWorks are at least as competent as those at IronCAD. This SolidWorks-Dassault kernel discussion is a business issue, not a technical one.

And talking about SolidWorks wanting to support legacy files is a joke. They don't even save to earlier versions of their own software. The excuse given is that they add new features in every new version that cannot be broken down into older features. Anyone with half a brain and a little knowledge of the SolidWorks feature tree will be able to see how much water that argument really holds.

For argument sake, lets accept the SolidWorks argument at face value. I have another question. Why cannot SolidWorks save to an older version as a dumb solid? There can certainly be no reason for not doing so. If a SolidWorks 2009 user wants to send a model to a SolidWorks 2008 user, he needs to export to a neutral format which can then be imported into the older version. This introduces huge problems of missing geometry, gaps and what not. Instead of putting their customers though this, doesn't it make sense for SolidWorks to spit out an older version file with the model as a dumb solid. At least the user of the older version will not have to worry about the integrity of the data that he has received from another SolidWorks user.

And this is true for all parametric modeling systems, not just SolidWorks. We all know why these CAD vendors do this. They actually shove their "valued" customers down a path of great risk in the hope that they will upgrade to the latest version or buy a subscription.

Trust me, you don't want to get me started on this.

AutoCAD Fusion

2009-05-23T11:43:00.003+05:30

In a post on this blog six months ago, I wrote:

"It is my prediction that a version of AutoCAD in the not so distant future will have 3D direct modeling capabilities equivalent to (or probably better than) what we see today in SpaceClaim and Solid Edge ST."

Today I would like to reiterate my prediction once again. I believe it will eventually happen. It seems to be the most logical thing to do.

AutoCAD has the largest base of CAD software users. Every other CAD software vendor is trying just about everything in its power to woo this huge base. Not always to make them dump AutoCAD and adopt their software, but sometimes to sell them stuff that works with AutoCAD. For example, an AutoCAD 2D user wanting to do some serious 3D work is more likely to use a direct modeling system like SpaceClaim rather than learn a parametric modeling system like Inventor.

In recent times Autodesk has been making the right noises in terms of adding 3D capabilities to AutoCAD. They even hired a Product Manager called Guillermo Melantoni for that exact purpose. Clearly the idea here is to prevent customers wanting to adopt 3D in their work flow from looking for technologies outside of the Autodesk stable.

Assuming that Autodesk does not piss off its AutoCAD customers too much with its pricing, subscription and product retirement policies, AutoCAD users would prefer to look for technologies that they need within the Autodesk stable itself, rather than risk jumping ship to another CAD vendor. So with Inventor Fusion, Autodesk is offering its AutoCAD customers a reason to stick with them. I don't believe the purpose of Inventor Fusion is to make people switch from SolidWorks or Solid Edge. Rather it will be more effective as a deterrent for preventing AutoCAD users from looking to other CAD vendors for solutions to adopt 3D in their work flow.

But lets move a step further and take a closer look at my prediction. AutoCAD is a platform that is used across several industries. Inventor Fusion will be an answer that will work only for the MCAD industry. What about the others? Doesn't it make sense for Autodesk to add direct editing capabilities right inside AutoCAD itself? In AutoCAD 2010 they already added 2D constraints and I am sure 3D constraints is on its way. So all that is left to do is link the constraint system to the underlying modeling kernel and you have an Inventor Fusion like technology right inside AutoCAD. I am sure there is a lot of work involved here, but my point is that the situation is ripe for Autodesk to do this. And so is the business case.

The underlying logic of my prediction is based on the simple assumption that if you give AutoCAD customers direct modeling capability right inside AutoCAD itself, a software that they have learned to trust and are quite familiar with, Autodesk actually ensures that their customers stay with them. Obviously some AutoCAD users may move to Inventor for the Digital Prototyping features, but the ones who simply want to model in 3D will not find the need to look elsewhere. Moreover, this way Autodesk can effectively market AutoCAD and Inventor with Digital Prototyping as an explosive combination that can make a huge mark in the MCAD space. Right now, AutoCAD and Inventor look and feel like two opposites sides of two different coins.

The beauty in all of this is that adding direct editing to AutoCAD does not break it or change it drastically. An AutoCAD user can still work in 2D just like how he did a decade ago. For those who do not need it, life will remain the same. But for those who do find the need for direct editing, life will be much easier and will gladly sign those subscription payment checks. In fact, I would be extremely surprised if Autodesk does not add direct editing capabilities to AutoCAD immediately after they have let the world test the technology in Inventor Fusion.

Like I said, it seems to be the most logical thing to do. If any of you can think of a reason why Autodesk should not go down this road, I would like to hear from you.

Inventor Fusion and SolidWorks Confusion

2009-05-22T20:17:00.008+05:30

The Lonely Engineer blog is dead. I have to admit, I never really understood what it was all about. The subtitle of the video blog read "One engineer's adventures with direct and parametric CAD", although I don't remember Roger ever mentioning anything about direct and parametric CAD. Too bad I cannot cross check because the all posts, except the last one, have been deleted. The last post, dated 19th May, is basically a suicide note (in terms of blogging) and a pointer to a new video of Inventor Fusion.

At COFES 2009, Buzz Kross, Senior Vice President of the Manufacturing Solutions Division at Autodesk, let me know that they would be releasing Inventor Fusion on Autodesk Labs in May ("Inventor Fusion is Coming"). Maybe the death of the Lonely Engineer blog is timed to match the release of Inventor Fusion. Lets see. But for now, I suggest that you see the video.

I wonder if Inventor Fusion will be the final straw for SolidWorks. Probably something that will finally make big brother Dassault let them use their V6 direct editing technology. It is an open secret that Dassault does not appreciate SolidWorks eating into it's market. That probably explains why direct editing technology, of the kind that we see in V6, has not yet found its way into SolidWorks, after all this time. Heck, Dassault still makes SolidWorks use the Parasolid modeling kernel by Siemens to do its basic modeling, thereby lining the pockets of competitor Siemens.

For its part, Siemens has made it quite clear that Synchronous Technology is for their use only and will not be licensed to competitors. So obviously, if SolidWorks is to move beyond Instant3D, it would have to either borrow/license direct editing technology from Dassault or someone else or develop its own.

So if I have understood this correctly, Dassault prefers that SolidWorks (a company that it owns) pays hefty royalties to Siemens (its competitor) for every license and subscription of SolidWorks that it sells, as opposed to earning royalties from SolidWorks (a company that it owns) for letting SolidWorks use its V6 technology. I am sure there is a very good reason for this kind of thinking, but it is certainly well beyond the limits of my comprehension.

Something else strikes me. Alibre has been constantly comparing itself with SolidWorks, more in terms of functionality and less in terms of price. I can now see the similarity between the two on another level. In the part of the mid range CAD market that I track, Alibre and SolidWorks seem to be the only couple that I consider to be still stuck in the past.

Back To Work

2009-05-11T13:10:00.003+05:30

I am back in office after almost a month and the place is still standing. Which means that my employees no longer need me to run my joint. And that is a good thing.

The picture below shows the stack of business cards that I accumulated during my meetings in this mammoth US-Europe trip. It also reminds me of the number of people I need to initiate or continue conversations with.

I think I should get started.

X Rated Code

2009-05-11T12:33:00.003+05:30

In my OpenCAD book, I explain how to write a DRX plug-in. I start with a simple "Hello World" plug-in using just 22 lines of code. I started a group called "DRX" at IntelliCAD.net and posted the 22 lines of code there. Daniel, a brilliant programmer and avid contributor to IntelliCAD.net, beat me by posting a minimal ARX/BRX plug-in on the "Bricscad" group of IntelliCAD.net that has just 17 lines of code.

I am beginning to like this X rated coding. I wonder if anyone can come up with something smaller.

$500 Discount on Inventor

2009-05-11T11:08:00.007+05:30

Looks like someone is very pissed with Autodesk. While that is not a new thing, this particular someone (who calls himself JohnJohn191138), has started a blog called "Autodesk does NOT want you to know this..." and his first (and probably last) post has the same title. John claims to be working for a "prominent Autodesk reseller" and goes on to disclose the dirt about the ACE (Autodesk Customer Engagement) program instituted by Autodesk.

Bottom line, if you are interested in purchasing Inventor and want to save $500, a simple mouse click will do the trick. If you haven't already, now would be a good time to read the post. In fact, it was written two weeks ago.

If any of you have recently bought Inventor from an Autodesk reseller I would be interested to know whether there is truth in any of this. If you do comment to this post to either confirm or deny John's claims, I would appreciate it you did not do so anonymously. Otherwise, please feel free to comment anonymously if you want to shed more light on this issue.

If John's claims are true, then personally, I do not believe that Autodesk is doing something extremely wrong here. There are far more greater things to talk about when it comes to ethics, morals and CAD software vendors.

I am more interested in knowing whether this John fellow really works for an Autodesk reseller or is the figment of the imagination of one of Autodesk's many rivals who have somehow got wind of what really goes on in the ACE program. If someone has decided to buy Inventor instead of their product, then why not let the cat out of the bag and make Autodesk take a hit of $500 per license.

Or maybe John is a figment of the imagination of someone in Autodesk marketing who is high on pot, although that seems a bit far fetched. I am pretty sure that Autodesk has better ways of telling the world that they are giving a $500 discount on Inventor.

Or maybe John actually works for an Autodesk reseller, which may pretty well find itself in a lot of trouble if Autodesk manages to find out who is really behind this.

Note: I understand that John has not been able to get his message across as effectively as he probably would have wanted to. That's probably why he is spamming CAD blogs with comments containing his post, mine including. So by blogging about John and his blog some may find me guilty of promoting this guy. So be it.

Something To Think About

2009-05-07T03:57:00.001+05:30

In 1977, when I was two years old, a man arrived in Goa, my home state, which was (and still is) a famous tourist destination for foreign tourists. This man had just finished his studies and decided to take off for a year with nothing but a back pack. He traveled across Sri Lanka, large parts of India and even landed in Nepal. Although this man roamed from city to city in India, he liked Goa the best and spent a lot of time on its beaches.

I remember my father referring to such people as "hippies". They were people who really didn't care about tomorrow. We have a few of them wandering about Goa even today, but not to the extent that they prevailed in Goa thirty years ago. They organized parties on our beaches and sang the mantra "Hare Rama Hare Krishna" as they smoked and drank all sorts of things till the sun rose in the morning.

I had the impression that such people either smoked themselves to death or ended up in the lowest strata of society and lived off welfare. That changed when I shook this man's hand at COFES 2009 last month. He is the CEO of a CAD software company.

The Bricsys Automated Testing System

2009-05-07T02:12:00.003+05:30

AutoCAD clones have been termed unstable and unreliable since they first appeared on the market. And this is not just Autodesk spreading FUD (Fear Uncertainty Doubt). I remember at the IntelliCAD World Meeting in Athens last year, Dave Lorenzo, the CTO of the ITC, painted a horrible picture of the old IntelliCAD 6 code. This was not in private, but in front of all the attendees and press. He mentioned that the old code had 1000 line functions, which any C/C++ developer will tell you is a pain to maintain, fix and debug.

For this very reason, Luc de Batseiler, the CTO of Bricsys, was quite keen to show me their automated testing system that they had developed in-houseas part of their rewrite of their CAD platform. Luc called the old ITC code a nightmare and the main reason for instability and poor performance, some of the adjectives that he does not want the rewritten Bricscad to be associated with.

The system is quite complicated but I will try and dumb it down a little for sake of clarity. The main highlight of their system is the way they write the tests. First let me explain how tests are normally written. A programmer writes code and builds it into an application. This application is used internally by the testing team or externally by beta testers, who report bugs and crashes to the development team. The concerned programmer then fixes his code and then proceeds to write a small test command (usually in a plug-in) which verifies that the bug has been fixed. This test is added to the list of existing tests which are run automatically or manually after every build is created. This is vital because it is quite possible that another programmer may modify something else in the code which brings back the bug that the first programmer was responsible for. This is called Regression Testing.

Bricsys does this a bit differently. They first write the tests and then write the code. Let me explain this with a simple example. Suppose I am writing code that computes the geometric propeties of a circle, say its area and circumference. After I write the code I go ahead and build the application. As part of testing my code, I run a command that I know uses the circle related code I just wrote. Lets assume that this particular command uses only the area calculating code and not the code to calculate the circumference. The command works fine and I release the build for the testers to do their work. The testers will run the same command but with more data. After testing is successful, I mark the build as a production build and it gets into the hands of the general public.

All this time the circumference code has not really been tested. I have used a very rudimentary example (area and circumference) to explain the concept, but you must understand that code is usually a vast set of logical instructions which behaves differently for different data sets. The Bricsys approach is to test all conceivable ways that code can be used in order to trap bugs and crashes before the software even lands in the hands of the testers. So continuing with the circle example, first Bricsys would write two tests - one to calculate the area and another to calculate the circumference of a set of circles and test the outputs with known calculated values. They would then proceed to write the code to do the actual calculations for the area and circumference.

So now hoping that I have not lost you, I will proceed to explain how the testing is carried out and to what extent it is automated. Bricsys has offices in Belgium, Russia and Romania. All their source code resides on a server. Before a programmer from any of their development centers works on the code he first checks out a local copy from the server and uses it. After he is done with his work, he pushes a button which automatically runs all the tests on his local build of the application. If all goes well, he checks his code back to the server. The moment he does that, a series of events are triggerred. The server rebuilds the code, builds an installer and initiates installations on the various testing servers. All this happens automatically without any human intervention. Once the testing servers have the latest build installed on them, they automatically fire the tests that they are programmed to carry out. After all the testing servers are done testing, the results of the tests are posted on the intranet for the concerned people to see and take necessary action. Either way, every night this entire operation happens anyways.

Luc showed me some of the testing code and the testing results of the past few days. He pointed me a jump in test failures on a particular day. "This is because on that day, we replaced the ITC geometry library with our own. We are now working towards eliminating the test failures", he said. "When the number of failures become zero, we will release the build as a beta to our beta testers. Although we try and be as exhaustive as we can in our tests, it is by no means a fool proof approach. Our beta testers report bugs and crashes, which we analyze, fix and add then create tests to see that they do not surface again."

I asked Luc how long the entire building and testing process took once a programmer checked in his code. He replied, "First we had one server for the code and another server that did the testing. As the number of tests grew, we added more servers and split the tests between them. To give you a sense, the DRX plug-in that contains the tests for Bricscad is 22MB, whereas the Bricscad executable file is just 6 MB. From the time a developer checks in his code, it will not take more than half an hour for the server to rebuild the software, rebuild the installer, reinstall the software on the testing servers and have the testing servers perform the tests and publish the results. If we see that the time exceeds half and hour, we add another testing server".

Every software company talks about how they go to lengths to make their software the best. This was the first time that a company actually showed me their stuff. Luc showed me a great deal more, but that was for my eyes only.

Bricscad for Linux

2009-05-07T01:28:00.002+05:30

Ever since word got out that Bricsys was developing a version of Bricscad for Linux, people have been bombarding Bricsys with questions regarding it. Luc de Batseiler, CTO of Bricsys, told me, "Every week we get at least 3 to 5 inquiries for a Linux version." CEO Erik de Keyser added, "People are even offering to pay in advance for it in order to help us fund the development. It's unbelievable. Money is the least of our problems. Time is."

Now that the rewrite of the Bricscad platform is almost over, Bricsys is free to concentrate on other things, and one of things on their plate is the Linux version of Bricscad. Luc tells me that they intend to release a beta this year. "This is new to us as well, and we do not want to come up with a half baked solution", he said.

Bricsys has also planned a version of Bricscad for the Mac - native support, not some solution using VMWare or Parallels. There has been some noise from Autodesk on this front as well. It will be interesting to see which company gets there first, Bricsys or Autodesk. Lets see who follows whom.

Chocolate

2009-05-06T00:06:00.002+05:30

I have been out of home for 23 days now and have left my wife alone to take care of our two boys - Reuben (5.5) and Russell (1.5). As it turns out, both boys have been driving her up the wall, day and night. I call home twice a day to get a sense of my wife's state of mind. Slowly but surely I have come to the conclusion that she is going to crucify me when I get home. Moreover the pictures that I have been posting on this blog showing me frolicking around the world have surely aggravated the already volatile situation. And this is a big problem for me.

Eric de Keyser, CEO of Bricsys, today tried to help me solve this problem. I have heard that chocolate does wonderful things to women and Belgium happens to have the best chocolate in the world. Today Erik took me to his favorite chocolate where they make and sell hand made chocolate. Apparently, the owner of the shop has written books on the subject. "Your problem will be solved. I guarantee it. In fact, she will send you back here", Erik told me as we left the shop. For my sake, I hope he is right.

I leave for home tomorrow morning. This has been a wild trip for me. I rode a Harley Davidson in Hawaii and a cycle in Belgium. I criss-crossed the US, flew to the middle of the Pacific ocean and crossed the Atlantic twice. I have been continuously bombarded with information throughout this trip - COFES, ODA World Conference, PTC and Bricsys.

Now I have only one fear that is gripping me. The fear that Russell will not recognize me when I get home. That will surely break my heart.

The Story of Bricsys

2009-05-05T22:39:00.003+05:30

Erik de Keyser, currently the CEO of Bricsys, is an architect by profession and got involved in 3D in the late 80's as part of his own practice. He started developing an architectural package with two developers, one of which is still with him and heads the Bricscad platform development effort. The software ran on something called AES (I am too young to know what that was) which ran on IBM machines. Erik's company was called Bricsnet and IBM eventually bought a stake in his company. At that time BRICS stood for Building Related Interactive Computer System. Today, the "Building" in BRICS has been replaced by "Business".

Anyways, in 1992 IBM eventually dumped AES which left Bricsnet in the lurch. Erik had to make a decision between continuing developing his architectural software for AutoCAD or Microstation. He went for Microstation because it ran on Windows, Unix as well as the Mac, and at that time nobody guessed that Windows would be what it is today. Erik's team developed their Architectural software for Microstation for two years and in 1994 they released their first version. It was called Bricswork. Bentley was pretty interested in Bricswork because it needed vertical applications to counter those of AutoCAD.

As it turned out, Bentley bought into Bricsnet and also bought the distribution rights for Bricswork. Bentley also ended up co-owning the Intellectual Property of Bricswork. They changed the name of the Bricswork to Triforma. Then something happenned which Erik does not want me to write about. To make a long story short, Erik sold everything to Bentley and restarted development of his architectural software on AutoCAD and IntelliCAD. He called the product Architecturals. During the dot com boom, Erik took his company to the stock market, got listed on the European Nasdaq and used the money from the IPO to make a few acquisitions. In March 2000 the stock market tanked and business rapidly started moving downward. Then 9/11 happened and some huge banks which relied on Bricsnet for their facilities management software stopped renewing their contracts. Things started to deteriorate quite rapidly.

As the Founder and CEO, Erik offered to resign. The board could not accept his resignation for three months since they could not find a replacement. Eventually in January 2002 Erik resigned from Bricsnet, but he never cashed out. He looked for investors and proposed to buy back the CAD software part of the business from Bricsnet, which by that time had diversified into other areas of software.

On his 50th Birthday, Erik started a company with six people and called it Bricsys. As time progressed, he hired back the CAD programmers from Bricsnet, which was fine the Bricsnet because they had stopped developing CAD software anyways. Bricsys stopped developing for AutoCAD since they did not want to be at the mercy of a single company - once bitten, twice shy. So they joined the ITC and started offering an IntelliCAD based solution called Bricscad along with their architectural vertical called Architecturals. For the first 3 years they operated at break even, but things started looking upwards from there on. Today Bricsys has substantial cash in the bank which Erik considers as a huge advantage in these troubled times. "We do not need to rely on the banks to survive and that is very relieving", he tells me.

Today, Bricsys has 50 employees some of which have a stake in the company. Erik himself holds 33% stake which could increase to 40% if he exercised his options. I asked Erik what was the long term goal of Bricsys. He said, "I believe that we are at a point where can take a substantial share in the DWG market. And we are ambitious to do exactly that. Thereafter we will add technologies to Bricscad that offer our customers much more than what AutoCAD offers. We will not blindly follow Autodesk. We will be compatible for sure, but we will decide our own destiny."

I asked him how he intended to take on the huge Autodesk Marketing giant. Erik replied, "We do not have 3 million to spend on marketing. We believe in power of e-marketing. We have not yet gone all guns blazing, because we believe that our product was not yet ready. But now we believe it is."

This needs some explanation. As many of you may have noticed, Bricscad has looked and worked pretty much the same for the past year or so. The reason for that is that Bricsys has been working hard to remove the old IntelliCAD 6 code that has been part of Bricscad all this time. So almost all the changes have been internal and quite invisible to the end user. I am now given to understand that the ITC code is very close to being completely gone.

"Now we can concentrate in adding some real features", Luc de Batseiler, the CTO of Bricsys, tell me, heaving a sigh of relief. "We have been so consumed with the rewrite of our platform that we neglected just about everything else", he continues.

"We are at a critical point", Erik tells me, the excitement clearly showing in his eyes. "There are interesting times ahead for Bricsys." Now that they are finally free (almost) from the ITC shackles, I tend to agree. Technically, Bricsys is still a member of the ITC, but I guess it is only a matter of time when they break free and take control of their own destiny.

Bricsys Visit

2009-05-05T02:07:00.003+05:30

Today I visited Bricsys. I thought I knew a lot about the company and its products. As it turned out, that was not quite the case. This evening Eric de Keyser, the CEO of Bricsys, took me out to dinner along with CTO Luc the Batselier, to an exquisite restaurant on the banks of the river Leie, which was once upon a time a warehouse.

Tomorrow I will be spending the day at Bricsys again and I leave for home the day after. I will be writing at length about Bricsys when I return back to my space and time.

Interesting Pictures in Gent

2009-05-04T01:09:00.002+05:30

Roaming around in Gent, I saw some interesting sights. And as usual my camera was at hand.

Cycle theft is common here. Reason? The guy from whom I rented a cycle yesterday put it this way, "There are a lot of students in Gent". Take a closer look at the picture above and appreciate why the owner of this cycle is going to have an extremely sore butt when he gets home.

I couldn't help taking a picture of this mop.

This sign is written in five languages. Almost all other signs in Gent (and even Holland) are in Dutch only. Even the menus in restaurants are mostly in Dutch. So I cannot understand a damn thing of what I am ordering. Eventually I play safe and ask the waiter to get me a pasta. The bright side is that I think I have now tasted almost every pasta that people on this part of the world offer.

Someone living in an apartment on the banks of the Leie, a river running through Gent, put this statue of a woman ready to leap into the river.

Bang on the opposite bank of the river someone else put this statue of a man ready to take a plunge as well. I don't know if there is a story to this. If any of you Belgians know, please do enlighten me.

And speaking of naked statues, this one is of a naked pregnant woman. The pedestal has a plaque that reads "Hores House for Art and Healing". I didn't bother to enter. I think I already know what's inside.

Gent by Boat

2009-05-04T00:45:00.002+05:30

Today I went for a boat cruise on the river Leie which flows though Gent. We got a glimpse of the beautiful suburbs of Gent on the way out of the city and then passed through two villages. It was an experience that I cannot explain in words. So I hope that the following pictures to justice.

I will only say that such breathtaking beauty cannot be enjoyed alone. You need to experience it with someone else. Of all the days that I have been out of home, I think today I missed my wife and kids the most. OK, may not be the kids, but surely the wife. So I did the next best thing. I turned on my iPod, selected my "Easy Listening" playlist and lost myself in the scenery that slowly glided past me.

Gent by Cycle

2009-05-02T21:00:00.002+05:30

This morning I checked out of the Holiday Inn in Leiden, Holland, and boarded a train for Gent in Belgium. Bricsys, which is headquartered in Gent, is hosting me for a few days. I am visiting Bricsys on Monday and intend to use the weekend to do some sightseeing around Gent.

Gent is a beautiful old town. I heard that the best way to see it is to rent a cycle, arm yourself with a street map and pedal around the streets. And so I did exactly that. After checking in into the hotel I walked up to the nearest cycle renting outlet and rented a cycle. I picked up a cycle tour map from the tourism office and went on a tour through the town. It was fun, much better than taking the bus. This way I could stop as and when I pleased for as long as I wanted, as opposed to being herded around by a tour guide. However, I didn't get to know the history behind the places I visited. The cycle tour map I got from the tourism office was in Dutch only and no other language. I found that odd because common sense tells me that someone wanting to take a cycle tour around Gent will most probably be an outsider and will not understand Dutch.

I learned something the hard way today. While riding a cycle on asphalt may be fun, riding on cobbled streets gives you a very sore butt.

Grand Holland Tour

2009-05-02T00:02:00.006+05:30

Looks like Amsterdam did have a party after all. Today when I came out of the Amsterdam Central Station, I was greeted by this...

Today I went for a bus tour called the "Grand Holland Tour" wherein I was taken to bunch of cities and towns in Holland in 8 hours. kind of useful when you do not have a lot of time to spend in Holland.

We started out by visiting a town called Aalsmeer where were taken to a see the place which conducts the largest flower auction in the world. For someone who did not see Keukenhof, this may have been interesting.

Next we were taken to Rotterdam, the city that has the third largest port in the world, after Singapore and Shangai. Rotterdam is completely different from any other city in Holland, in the sense that it is filled with skyscrapers and works of modern architecture, as opposed to the ancient buildings that you see in other parts of Holland. Along the bus ride, I saw only two ancient buildings, the town hall and the post office. This is because the Germans flattened Rotterdam during World War II. This building is better known as "The Pencil" for obvious reasons.

For lunch we were taken to Delft, a city which looks like this...

...and has a city center that looks like this...

After lunch we drove to The Hague (Den Haag in Dutch), the unofficial capital of Holland. Unofficial because the official capital is Amsterdam, but the government, monarchy, foreign embassies are all located in The Hague, along with the international courts and offices of other UN organizations. We passed by all these buildings. This is the Queen's residence...

Considering yesterday's incident, I was quite surprised to see the level of security outside the building. In fact I didn't see any security at all. I saw a man and a boy standing outside the main gate and a vendor selling ice cream to the public. My guess is that the Queen wasn't in because the flag pole didn't have a flag on it. In total contrast, the US embassy looked like a fortress, with armed guards all over the place.

Next we were taken to the fishing town of Scheveningen, situated on the North Sea. Nothing much to see there apart from a beautiful sandy beach.

To wrap up the tour we were taken to Madurodam, which was wonderful for an altogether different reason. If you have a full day in Holland, I suggest you take the Grand Holland Tour. If you have only a couple of hours, then I suggest you visit Madurodam. Here you get to see all of Holland scaled down 25 times - all major heritage monuments, skyscrapers, railway stations, airports and ports. There are also a few factories, a stadium and tons of neighborhoods. Maybe I should simply show you some pictures.

To give you an idea of the level of detail, take a look at the following closeup picture. The leaves are the only give away since all the vegetation is real.

This is a great place for kids because they can see how things work. All these models are mechanized. Trains speed on the rail tracks, a steam engine spits out water vapor, vehicles speed on highways, planes taxi around the airport and even bridges open so that ships can pass through them. Truly amazing.

But I guess my jaw dropped when I saw a fire, a real fire, on the deck of one of the oil tankers. It was quickly put out by a nearby rescue vessel by squirting water from its water cannons.

Queen's Day

2009-05-01T00:04:00.003+05:30

30th April is Queen's Day(or Koninginnedag) in Holland, the Queen's birthday. Actually, not the present Queen's birthday, rather her mother's. But anyways, every year on 30th April, Amsterdam goes bananas.

By bananas I mean the city and its people do certain things which I definitely consider bananas. The town is painted (or rather decorated) orange. People wear orange. Pets wear orange. Why? Because "orange" figures somewhere in the name of the royal family. The entire city erupts into a wild party and booze flows like water from morning itself. The city center gets converted into one big flea market. On 30th April some civic rules are ignored. You can park anywhere you want. You do not need a license to sell something on the street. So people get all their year's junk, sit with it on the streets of Amsterdam and try and sell it to other people. Whatever does not get sold usually is left on the street. The next day is a royal mess, pun intended. Huge speakers blaring techno music are assembled at every corner, and also between corners, and people dance on the street as if there is no tomorrow. In fact, for some, there will indeed not be a tomorrow since they will most probably wake up the day after.

However, this year, things have turned out to be quite different. On our way back from the Keukenhof spring garden, our tour guide informed us that there was an attack on the Royal family. A car tried to ram into the open bus carrying the royal family killing four and injuring many others before it rammed into a stone monument. See video here. The mood of the city changed instantly. Flags were flying half mast. Instead of people dancing on the streets, we could see them sitting down with the music turned off. Some started leaving for home. In fact the train that I took from Amsterdam back to Leiden was packed to the brim with people wearing orange.

There were some pockets of music and dancing, but I guess people were simply disillusioned by what had just happened. This is a sad day, completely different from what it was supposed to be. This morning, on my way to the tour pickup point, I saw a huge arena being constructed in one of the city's open spaces. One of the world's top DJ's was to perform there at night. I am not sure if that event is still on.

Initial reports suggest that this was not a terrorist attack, at least, the kind of terrorist attack that comes to mind the moment we hear something like this. My thoughts and prayers go to the families of those who have been traumatized by this event.

Tulips, tulips and more tulips

2009-04-30T23:16:00.002+05:30

They say that the Keukenhof spring garden is the most photographed place on earth and I decided to find out why. Today I took a bus tour to Keukenhof from Amsterdam and returned with 1 GB of JPG images.

I am not crazy over nature but I do appreciate her beauty from time to time. Today was more like an overdose. Frankly, in those two hours I have seen enough color to last me a lifetime. But jokes apart, the spring garden at Keukenhof is just to beautiful to explain in words. Even pictures do not do justice. You need to actually stand among the flowers and experience them. If you visit Holland, you simply have to experience this.

And this is how they grow them in fields.

If my tour guide has her facts right, centuries ago an ambassador from Turkey came to Holland and gifted the King a tulip bulb. Yes, just one bulb. The king gave it to some wise guy who also happened to be a horticulturist. He found a way to make 2 and 2 into 22 and now Holland exports tulips by the ship load.

Amsterdam - Canal Cruise

2009-04-30T22:16:00.002+05:30

Since I am visiting Holland for the first time, I decided to stay back for a couple of days more and do some sight-seeing. I am still at the Holiday Inn in Leiden which is about 30 minutes by train to Amsterdam, where all the tourist action starts.

Yesterday I took a boat cruise in the canals of Amsterdam.

I always wondered how people living in houses like in the picture above handle tides. As it turns out, the water level in these canals stays constant because the water is isolated from the Black Sea by means of gates and dykes. And what's more, about 27% of Holland is under sea level. They have a system of dykes, polders and gates that has managed to keep their feet dry since 1287, when the North Sea flooded the country and created the South Sea. It took them a few centuries to pump the water out using wind mills. Amazing.

The cruise lasted for an hour and a half and we passed though the the older parts of town. These canals were actually dug out as the city expanded and have names like streets and roads. In the olden days, traders used to get goods by ships which were docked out of town. They then transported their cargo to warehouses along these canals using small boats. Most of the old houses you see in the picture above still have hoists jutting out from their front walls which were used to lift the items to the top floors. I was quite surprised to see that some of the front walls were not built plumb. Instead they were built leaning outwards so that the cargo would not damage the walls when being hoisted up.

This is an amazing picture. This is a view of seven arched bridges in a straight line. You cannot see all seven because (1) my camera is not all that good, and (2) there is another boat blocking the view.

ODA World Conference - Quotes

2009-04-30T03:23:00.004+05:30

Here are some interesting lines I heard at the ODA World Conference, some of which have already appeared in earlier posts on this blog.

Mauritz Botha of IMSI/Design
"Our AutoCAD constraint plug-in served as a fantastic prototype for what Autodesk implemented themselves in 2010"

Erik de Keyser, CEO of Bricsys
"DRX is proof that ODA is not following Autodesk."
"Recession has been good for us. Revenue is increasing."
"While porting their ObjectARX plug-ins over to Bricscad, some developers are fixing memory leaks in their AutoCAD plug-ins because of a Bricscad command that traps memory errors."

Luc de Batseiler, CTO of Bricsys
"More than 300 AutoCAD plug-ins are being ported to Bricscad"

Neil Peterson, CTO of ODA
"Its nice to see members come up here and show some of their cool stuff. Normally I only hear from members when they complain to me that something is not working."
"The first IT infrastructure of the ODA was delivered to my house in a truck - 15 computers in my bed room which stayed there for 8 years."

Arnold van der Weide, President of ODA
"TrustedDWG was a big mistake and am glad it has been settled".
"Autodesk has been very successful in increasing our legal expenses. We have to be careful in what we do."

Sergey Slezkin, Dev Lead of ODA
"Last week I posted my 2000th message on the ODA forum"

Dmitry Ushako of LEDAS
"What the f**k is LEDAS to tell us about constraints?"

But this one takes the cake. Keynote Speaker of the ODA World Conference, Bjorn Stangeland of buildingSMART said: "The purpose of BIM is not to need organizations like the ODA".

ODA World Conference - ADTdirect and Facet Modeler

2009-04-30T03:19:00.002+05:30

Vadim Kosarev, Development Lead of the ODA, gave a presentation on their ADTdirect and their new Facet Modeler.

ADTdirect is the ODA architectural engineering package, based on the ODA flagship DWGdirect library. It is basically a set of DRX files (DLL’s actually) that need to be placed in the same folder as the calling application. It has full support for standard architectural objects such as walls, roofs, slabs, etc. It can create architectural objects from scratch with standard styles. It also provides the user will grips for major entities, which enables the editing of these objects.

Vadim used the ODA test application to create a set of walls and then used the grips to move the walls around. He then went on the draw a few doors and again used the grips to move one of them to an adjacent wall. The wall automatically adjusted itself to accommodate the door. He did the same thing for windows as well. Doors and windows can be standard rectangular and even have a custom style.

ADTdirect also has support for complex architectural objects such as stairs, railings, balusters, etc., which are all created parametrically. They come with grips which can be used to dynamically it using the mouse.

ADTdirect also comes with support for slabs and roofs using 2D profiles. All ADTdirect objects can be exploded. For example, when a door is exploded the wall automatically fills up the place where the door existed.

The Facet Modeler is another component that was originally developed for use in ADTdirect . It is a lightweight 3D modeler for creating boxes, pyramids, extrusions, revolutions and arbitrary surfaces. The Facet Modeler is used to perform the Boolean operations (union, difference and intersection) in ADTdirect, such as removing a door from a wall.

ODA World Conference - Tech Soft 3D and Redway3d

2009-04-30T02:45:00.002+05:30

Day 2 of the ODA World Conference had two presentations by 3D graphics engine developers each trying to sell their wares to ODA members, quite similar to how Siemens and LEDAS were trying to convince ODA members to use their constraint management systems.

Ken Royall of Tech Soft 3D (TS3D) gave a brief run down of his company. There are 200+ applications that use TS3D components which span industries line MCAD, AEC, BIM, etc. TS3D is best known for HOOPS, their rich and flexible scene graph, basically a high-performance graphics engine. Under HOOPS, TS3D provides high performance drivers for OpenGL as well as DirectX. Autodesk Design Review, which has 20 million downloads till date, has been completely built using HOOPS. So is SolidWorks eDrawings.

Performance is a big deal in the industry that TS3D operates in, especially since data sets are becoming increasingly larger. 50 million triangles or 1 billion points is not uncommon these days.
TS3D components usually need to be used in conjunction with components from other vendors and TS3D offers component bridges for that purpose. For example, they offer bridges to modeling kernels (ACIS, Parasolid and Granite), 3D InterOp translators for all major CAD vendors, Adobe 3D and even an integration to the ODA’s DWGdirect and DGNdirect. The DGN bridge was built by TS3D and donated to the ODA so that development could be continued by the ODA.

Later we were shown a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) of their HOOPS technology using a shader based renderer. The plant model used in the demo had 18 million triangles.

Later in the day, Fabien Chauviré of Redway3d gave us a demo of his Redsdk 2D/3D graphics engine. The demo was a more advanced version of the one I saw at the ITC World Meetings in Athens last year (report). The thing which was different was that Redway3d implemented a graphics device for the DWGdirect platform. To put it simply, Redway3d developed a set of DLLs which need to be placed in the same folder as the DWGdirect application and their engine will take over the rendering, object picking, editing, etc. in the drawing view. There is no need to write a single line of code to integrate the Redsdk with a DWGdirect application. This was confirmed by Neil Peterson, the CTO of the ODA in his presentation later.

I found one item in the presentation particularly interesting. Airbus has licensed their graphics engine and has signed a 15 year maintenance contract with Redway3d.

I want to bring something to attention here. I have been singing praises of the DWGdirect and DRX SDKs, so much so that I dedicated an entire book to it. Now consider this. Two companies, LEDAS and Redway3d are offering all 2000 ODA members their technologies in a unique way - by wrapping them up with the DWGdirect/DRX SDKs. This means that ODA members do not need to break their heads trying to build technologies to implement in their DWGdirect applications. Third party component developers can simply do what LEDAS and Redway3d did and offer their technologies to ODA members as a end to end solution in the form of DRX plug-ins, graphic devices, etc., basically a bunch of DLLs. This way code does not get messed up between the ODA members and the component developers and problems are easily located and fixed by either party.

I believe people will eventually understand the full implications of these wonderful technologies that have been put together by the ODA.

ODA World Conference - Constraints

2009-04-29T13:22:00.005+05:30

One of the enhancements of AutoCAD 2010 has been a 2D geometric and parametric constraint system. This implies that ODA members who develop AutoCAD clones (ITC Members, Bricsys, Graebert, etc.) would need to add a similar constraint system to their software as well.

Autodesk has licensed the 2D Dimensional Constraint Manager (DCM) from Siemens PLM for use in AutoCAD 2010. So it made perfect business sense for Siemens to sell to the other side as well. That’s why on Day 1 of the ODA World Conference, Siemens presented its 2D DCM to ODA members. Jim Thorpe from Siemens PLM Software gave a basic demo of 2D DCM and another demo showing how the system can automatically apply constraints to a “dumb” 2D drawing.

IMSI/Design has already licensed 2D DCM for use in their AutoCAD LT killer - DoubleCAD. In fact, in his presentation, Mauritz Botha from IMSI said, "Our AutoCAD constraint plug-in served as a fantastic prototype for what Autodesk implemented themselves in 2010".

On Day 2 of the conference, ODA members got to see a presentation by a Russian company called LEDAS Ltd. LEDAS has developed a geometric solver quite similar to the Siemens 2D DCM solution. Dmitry Ushako, Director of Product Management of LEDAS Ltd. showed us a demo of a DRX module (basically a plug-in for a DWGdirect application) that implements their constraint system. “We have already done it”, exclaimed Dmitry. The only shipping DWGdirect application I know on the market today is Bricscad and Dmitry showed us his company's technology working inside Bricscad as a plug-in. IntelliCAD 7, another DWGdirect application, is still in alpha and probably a long way from seeing the light of day. Dmitry mentioned that a Rhino plug-in was being developed as well.

Dmitry told the audience that LEDAS was ready to sell their DRX modules to end users of DWGdirect applications, but would prefer to license it to ODA members so that they could ship it along with their software. Whats more interesting is that LEDAS charges a flat annual fee and no per copy royalty. I am not sure what Siemens' licensing options are.

It will be interesting to see if Siemens can play catch up. As far as ODA is concerned, CTO Neil Peterson commented, "We are working closely with partners like Siemens and LEDAS to help them integrate their technologies with our platform so that our members can choose the solution that suits them and their business model".

ODA World Conference - DWG 2010

2009-04-28T19:36:00.002+05:30

Neil Peterson, CTO of ODA, updated us on the progress of reverse engineering the AutoCAD 2010 DWG file format. "We can read DWG 2010 files", Neil said, and he created a simple drawing of the ODA logo in AutoCAD 2010 and saved it to DWG 2010. He then opened the file in OdaMfcApp, the ODA's test application and it showed up just fine.

"We are in good shape with DWG 2010", Neil said. "We intend to release this in two stages. The first stage will allow read and write of DWG 2010 files. In the next release we will add features that take care of the new stuff on DWG 2010. We intend to release a 2010 version of DWGdirect in late 2009".

ODA World Conference - Book Signing

2009-04-28T17:45:00.003+05:30

Today I attended my first ever book signing event. And incidentally I found myself on the other side of the desk, the side on which the author sits.

All attendees received a copy of my book "OpenCAD - A Step by Step Guide to Developing a Professional CAD Application".

I hope my book helps the ODA in re-branding itself into a organization that develops and supplies a CAD platform as opposed to just DWG read/write libraries. The book and the associated OpenCAD software are good enough proof of that.

ODA World Conference - Day 1 - Development Status

2009-04-28T04:44:00.002+05:30

Neil Peterson, the CTO of the ODA, spoke about some of the past work done by the ODA and updated us with the current development status of the ODA platform.

Neil was the first employee of the ODA and was hired 10 years ago. He gave a brief roundup of the OpenDWG Toolkit and Viewkit, the ODA components in 1999, and what their limitations were.

In 2000 the ODA expanded their two man development team and developed an early C++ platform to fix the problems of the C based Toolkit and Viewkit. They basically rewrote the components from ground up. They added a rendering framework and import/export modules, the first one being DWF and then added other interfaces like SVG and PDF. They then added ActiveX support and more recently added support for .NET which has brought it a whole new set of members. Subsequently, members requested rendering support for ACIS solid models since they didn’t want to license the full blown ACIS modeling kernel just to display 3D solid models in DWG files. The ODA wrote an in-house ACIS Rendering and Conversion module for that purpose.

"Support for Custom Objects has been the reason for the success of our DWGdirect SDK", Neil said. He rubbished Autodesk’s claim that their "Trusted" DWG files were better than the ones coming out from DWGdirect. "I have been in this business long enough to know better", he said. "I haven’t seen anything that proves a word they say. This is mature technology and is in use by members for a number of years."

As part of the image change, the ODA is looking for new names for DWGdirect, DGNdirect and other technologies, all of which will go to constitute the ODA platform. Neil also mentioned that the ODA has developed in-house ACIS support for rendering, read/write/convert. Members that need full solid modeling support, can license the ACIS modeling kernel from Spatial and use ODA's Spatial ACIS Integration feature. The ODA has also developed in-house Parasolid rendering support to render solid data in DGN files as well.

Neil spent some time explaining the DRX SDK, a subset of the DWGdirect SDK. He mentioned that custom objects can also be created using the free DRX SDK.

Neil admitted that documentation has been weak and that they were changing that. The ODA now has a dedicated team for documentation. He urged the members to download the new DWGDirectX Developer’s Guide document and give feedback.

The ODA is in the process of putting up my OpenCAD book on its web site as a Wiki, so that users can contribute to it. I think this is a wonderful idea. For example, if a user sees a bug they can go ahead and fix it. If they have a better way of doing something they can go ahead and edit it. I believe that the Wiki will serve as an excellent resource for new as well as existing users.

Neil mentioned that the ODA’s customer base has been changing since 1999, where most customers wanted to write DWG utility, rendering or import/export applications. Today people are using the ODA libraries to build vertical applications, full CAD systems and even web based applications.

ODA World Conference - Day 1 - Opening Remarks

2009-04-28T03:52:00.003+05:30

Arnold van der Weide, the President of the ODA, gave the opening remarks on the first day of the ODA World Conference, which saw a total of 92 attendees.

He started by calling the members of the ODA staff, all 25 of them, and introduced them one by one. I finally got to put a face to the names of the programmers that I have been corresponding for all these years.

These are the guys that work tirelessly in the background and make all the wonderful things happen.

Arnold also felicitated Ralph Grabowski on his 600th issue of upFront.eZine by giving him a plaque. He went on the give a presentation on the ODA, its beginnings, what happenned in the past and what lies for it in the future. The ODA now has a new goal: "To develop a platform for Technical Graphic Applications". I am glad the word "DWG" didn't feature anywhere. He laid out what the ODA does and does not do.

The ODA does:
1) Interface to the DWG and DGN file formats.
2) Support multiple operating systems
3) Create API’s for useful third party components like ACIS 3D Modeling, Redway’s Red engine, etc. so that ODA members can simply license and implement the components.

The ODA does not:
1) Develop a CAD system
2) Deliver to end users
3) Deliver libraries
4) Spend $ on administration

Arnold spent some time on what he referred to as the "painful history" involving the embezzlement of $600,000. After the fiasco, an investigating committee was constituted to get to the bottom of the matter. In Nov 2006 the committee submitted its report to the ODA board and a decision was taken to fire the President at that time, Evan Yares, although he was not directly responsible for the fiasco. Evan was fired because it happened on his watch.

The findings of the investigating committee indicated a lack of financial control. The ODA has now put in place a system to ensure that such an embezzlement does not occur again, which includes a new procedure for paying invoices, monthly financial statements and a yearly audit, among other things.

At one point in time the ODA had 5000 Associate members. The ODA had one person full time handling these people, managing their agreements and keeping track of the software that they were building. Last year alone they closed down 4 web sites for wrongful use of the libraries.
To put a lid on the situation the board decided to put a handling fee for Associate members and also created a special Educational Membership class.

Arnold explained how the ODA technical team had two development streams, one for DWGdirect and the other for DGNDirect. This has now been streamlined to use the DWGdirect platform. Source code was spread across all over the world and there was no test system. It has now been moved to a single location on 13 servers. A bi-weekly status report goes out to every member to let them know what has been done, what is being done and what will be done in the future. Personally, I find this report very helpful.

According to Arnold, the ODA is a stable organization and income is growing. In 2007, the ODA raised its membership fees, the first time in 10 years. That led to an increase in 23.7 % jump in income. Moreover the erosion of existing members has stopped. Contrary to expectations, there was a 11% increase revenue for in Q1 2009, in spite of the economic downturn.

Arnold admitted that the legal battle with Autodesk on the TrustedDWG issue was a big mistake and was glad it had been settled. He thinks that it is unwise to give Autodesk an opportunity because they would use it. "Autodesk has been very successful in increasing our legal expenses. We have to be careful in what we do", he reminded the ODA members in the audience.

Arnold explained why every member will need to re-sign their membership agreements. The old membership agreements were written in 1998 at a time when web applications were not an issue. Now members are making use of their outdated agreements and developing web applications using the ODA libraries, thereby selling more licenses that they are entitled to. There will also be new membership class called “Corporate Membership”.

As for the future, Arnold mentioned that the ODA was looking to support PDF as another file format. Support for more third party components is also on the cards as is more testing systems and procedures. The next ODA World conference will be in Florida.

In the question and answer session that followed I asked Arnold whether ODA had a long term plan, say 5 or 10 years from now. He didn’t directly answer my question but did mention that he expected the ODA to continue to grow at 10% every year. He also saw a future where Autodesk would believe that the ODA is not a threat and is an organization that it can work together with.

ODA World Conference - The Platform

2009-04-27T03:17:00.002+05:30

The ODA World Conference starts tomorrow. The tag line on the conference web page gives you an idea of what this conference is all about.

The platform — Meet, discuss, discover and network

I have been screaming myself hoarse on this blog for quite some time now about how the ODA has been viewing itself solely as an organization dedicated to providing the world with libraries to read and write DWG files. In reality they offer much more. I even wrote a book about it and all attendees of the conference are going to get a free copy of it. In my opinion, this conference is part of an exercise of the ODA to rebrand itself into an organization that develops and supplies a platform on which its members can develop full blown CAD applications among many other things.

The conference goes on for three days, the first two being dedicated for presentations and discussions by third-party component developers, ODA members and ODA technical staff. The third day includes a couple of sessions hosted by the ODA development staff for those interested in learning more about the technologies that the ODA has to offer.

Leiden

2009-04-26T18:29:00.002+05:30

I just checked into the Holiday Inn Leiden in Holland. I flew into Brussels this morning and then took the train to Leiden. While on the train it occurred to me that it was the first time that I was crossing a country border by train. Normally I fly over them.

The ODA World Conference begins tomorrow. Among the CAD press I know, Ralph Grabowski and Randall Newton will be attending. I will be staying back after the conference to tour Holland and Belgium over the weekend. Next week I am spending a couple of days at Bricsys after which I return home.

My two boys are missing me and I am missing them as well. It's been two weeks since I left home. Another week and a half to go. I have been telling Reuben, my 5 year old, that I would be bringing him toys when I come back. That kept him quiet for a while. But now he is getting impatient and is probably smelling a rat in all of this. My wife is doing her best to hold fort. But it seems like she's fighting a losing battle.

Boston Red Sox

2009-04-25T23:31:00.002+05:30

Mark christened me a Red Sox fan when he made me put an official Red Sox cap on my head. I guess if you enter Fenway Park wearing a Yankees cap, you may be asking for trouble and may end up getting it. Mark explained the rules of the game and I caught on pretty quickly. I find baseball far more interesting than cricket, mainly because something needs to happen every time the pitcher pitches the ball, unlike cricket where the batsman can bore the hell out of everyone by sitting around and leaving the ball or simply touching it. But I seriously think they need to re-engineer the bats a little. They kept breaking in half and I am told that it is a common occurrence.

Another good thing about baseball is, unlike cricket, there is no third umpire. A third umpire in cricket is someone who sits in a closed room in the stadium and closely watches the game on TV and analyzes TV replays in slow motion. So if the two umpires on the ground are not sure which way to award a decision, they consult the third umpire by means of walkie-talkie. While this may be “fair” to the game and the players, I believe this has killed something. People no longer relive the game by discussing and debating decisions over drinks after the game or during play. You end up simply sitting and watching things as they happen and then maybe comment later. Sometimes sport gets far more interesting and enjoyable when people make on the spot decisions based on their assessment of the situation. I hope baseball does not follow that route. Don’t get me wrong. Technology is a good thing. Just that it makes us less human at times.

Fenway Park was almost sold out. The street leading up to the gate we entered was like one big carnival party with beer flowing everywhere. And that was probably the reason that the line to the men’s bathroom was way longer than that to the ladies, a first for me.

I even got to meet Wally, the Red Sox mascot.

And so did Mark.

The Red Sox won the game 5-4 after being down 2 runs in their last innings. It sure was fun. I had a ball at the ball game last night. I will be keeping the ticket. This one’s special.

Right now I am languishing at the JFK airport in New York. I just flew in from Boston this morning and my flight to Brussels is this evening at 6:10 pm. I guess that’s the price you pay when you tell your travel agent to get you the cheapest fares and then don’t bother to check connection times.

This wraps up the US leg of my tour. I now begin the European leg which includes attending the ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland, and a visit to Bricsys in Gent, Belgium.

PTC Visit - Revisited

2009-04-24T18:27:00.002+05:30

Rick Stavanja left a comment on my post titled "PTC Visit" letting me know that he missed the "meaty unfettered opinions" that he is accustomed to hearing from me. He found it odd that the PTC executives had not discussed the role I would be taking as a visitor before I arrived there.

I know all this sounds quite odd. In fact it is. But I think I need to clarify a few things here. PTC did not pay for my travel or stay. I am paying for all my flight tickets for this entire 25 day US-Europe trip. Marc insisted that I stayed with him while in Boston, but that is more of a personal thing and has nothing to do with PTC. I guess the only thing PTC is paying for is the tickets to the ball game ;-)

I think yesterday's meetings/presentations at PTC were originally designed for a blogger/press. But they as well as I knew that it would be quite a challenge considering the kind of mix I am. As I see it, PTC's aim was to change my perception of the company and its products and that objective would never have been met if they treated me as press. I know far too much to be fooled by the crap that CAD vendors feed the press these days. That is why I believe they ended up showing me stuff that they would never show the press at this stage of development.

This situation in not uncommon for me. CAD vendors are faced with this problem all the time. They really don't who they are dealing with - a blogger, an analyst, a developer, a partner. I wear all the hats at the same time. I cannot take one off and wear another. That makes me kind of a moving target.

So although I may not be allowed to blog some (or rather most) of the stuff, I believe this visit was a good thing for me personally. But I do intend to write at length about some of the stuff after I get back to India. I asked the PTC executives some real tough questions and I was quite surprised to get back some real frank answers. Nevertheless I have asked them to supply me with the "official" positions so that I can mention them in my writings for whatever they are worth.

PTC Visit

2009-04-24T04:24:00.002+05:30

I spent the entire day at PTC headquarters in Needham, Boston.

My meetings with top PTC executives went off well. In fact, I think they went off too well. So much so that they gagged me from just about everything they told and showed me.

Before we even started, John Buchowski, Director of Product Management summed up the general feeling in the conference room. He looked me straight in the eye and said, "I am finding it hard to figure out something here. Am I talking to a blogger or am I talking to a PTC partner?" I wasn't sure myself and I told him so. So we decided to go with the flow and take things off the record as and when required.

What followed for the next eight hours were conversations and presentations that started on the record but quickly went off record. Now as I look at my notes I am so utterly confused that I am not sure what is on and off the record. So before I go ahead and write something that lands me or someone in PTC in trouble, I had better cross check.

But there is an irony to all of this. I embarked on this PTC due diligence excercise with the intention of figuring out the company and it products for myself before forming an opinion. As it turns out most of the opinions that I have been expressing on this blog are pretty close to the fact. However, after seeing the stuff that I have seen today, there are some opinions and conclusions that I need to change, but PTC is not allowing me to do so, although deep down they really want me to. Its complicated.

But I am going to say something here and hope that it does not get me into too much trouble. So here goes. Contrary to what PTC executives told me at PTC World in Mumbai, as far as direct editing is concerned, PTC is not sitting idle. I would like to leave it that and let you draw your own conclusions.

The day started out with Hiren Kumbhojkar, Senior Project Manager, giving me a demo on the PTC Product Development System. Andy Barlow, Senior Director of Business Development, was my host and took care of me the entire day. After the PDS demo I sat with Andy Barlow, John Buchowski, Tom Shoemaker (Vice President of Product Marketing) and Asa Trainer (Director of Product Management) and gave them a brief introduction of SYCODE and Print3D Corporation. But they were more interested in my perspective of PTC and I let them have it. Needless to say, what followed was quite an interesting discussion.

I asked them what PTC thought about blogs and bloggers. Asa was of the opinion that blogs were influential and PTC needed to pay more attention to them. All four executives admitted that PTC was not the most press friendly CAD vendor and needed to be more agressive in its marketing in order to keep up with its competitors. Just about everything was taken off the record in this one hour session. But all said and done, I really appreciate them for patiently listening to my views and also sharing with me information about PTC, its products and its future plans, some of which were quite sensitive.

Next was a one on one session with Tom Shoemaker, who explained PTC's vision of Social Product Development. This was followed by a working lunch with Andy Barlow who explained to me the recently revamped PTC Partner Program. After lunch, John Buchowski gave me a brief run down of the upcoming Pro/ENGINEER WildFire 5.0 and explained its roadmap. He literrally breezed though his presentation and I kept wondering why he was in such a hurry. After the presentation I came to know why. He wanted to show me the "new stuff" that the PTC R&D team in Needham was working on, stuff that amazed me but unfortunately was meant strictly for my eyes only.

Asa Trainer spent more than an hour explaining the PTC interoperability roadmap. At SYCODE we have been working on our first plug-in for Pro/ENGINEER, a STL file import plug-in and I gave him a brief run down of what it does and how it will help Pro/ENGINEER users. Asa discussed various issues related to data exchange. I made a few suggestions to improve the usability of Pro/TOOLKIT, the API used to build plug-ins for Pro/ENGINEER.

After I get back to India I hope to gather my thoughts and write some more about the things that were discussed today. Tommorow Mark is going to take me around Boston and then later we will be going to see the baseball game between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees, tickets courtesy of PTC. I have been advised to wear a Red Sox cap before I enter the stadium.

Boston

2009-04-23T08:00:00.002+05:30

Today I find myself in the cozy home of Mark Lobo, PTC's Director of Windchill CAD Integrations. Mark lives in a beautiful town called Ashland on the suburbs of Boston. This is my first time in a suburban town of an American city and it feels wonderful. To give you an idea, Mark's house is on the edge of the woods and I am told that deer come to graze outside his window.

I arrived into Phoenix from Hawaii this morning and eventually landed in Boston this evening. I lost a few hours along the way and that is probably the reason my mind and body are all messed up right now.

Tomorrow I spend the entire day at PTC, where I believe, I will be put in front of a firing squad, the members of the squad being:
1) Andy Barlow – Senior Director of Business Development
2) John Buchowski - Director of Product Management
3) Tom Shoemaker – Vice President of Product Marketing
4) Asa Trainer - Director of Product Management

The agenda has been pretty much firmed up. It got tweaked a little after I met Brian Shepherd, Executive Vice President (Product Development) during my PTC Vendor Appointment at COFES 2009. I guess the most interesting item on the agenda will be between 9 to 10 am, where I am the speaker and I am supposed to speak on "Overview of SYCODE and Deelip's perspective of PTC". If I live to tell the story, I will do so on this blog.

On Friday PTC and Mark are doing something special for me. They are taking me to a baseball game - Boston Rex Sox vs New York Yankees. I don't know much about baseball, but I do know that this is a big deal. After all, Wikipedia has a page dedicated to the Yankees-Red Sox Rivalry.

This is going to be my first baseball game and Mark will need to fill me in on the rules. Back in India, we have something similar called "cricket" in which, like baseball, you basically hit and run. I am curious to see how the Americans do it differently.

Booze for Breakfast

2009-04-21T23:16:00.006+05:30

The Bloody Mary you see in my hand is a special one because that is the very first one I have ever had for breakfast. Yesterday we had breakfast at the Wailea Golf Club and I decided to follow the saying "When in Rome do what Romans do". As far as alcohol is concerned, I thought I had done it all. Apparently not.

Bloody Mary

I still cannot believe people here have booze for breakfast. Back in India, we have a word for such people. It's called "drunk".

And here is something that some of you may not know. Back in India, and maybe other parts of the world, we have something called "mocktail", which is essentially a cocktail minus the alcohol. They taste deceptively similar to the cocktails and have names that match. For example, the mocktail version of "Bloody Mary" is called "Virgin Mary". I believe this was designed for women, since it is rather uncommon for women to drink alcohol in India.

Last night we had dinner at a lovely waterfront restaurant in Maalaea. The food was simply out of this world. And so was the ambiance.

With Ron and his lovely wife Rhonda

We eventually did get some business done with some more slated for today. It's really difficult to talk business in an environment like this.

I leave Hawaii this evening for Boston. PTC is hosting me for a couple of days at their headquarters at Needham. I will be staying with Mark Lobo, PTC's Director of WindChill CAD Integrations. Mark is originally from Goa and we got to know each other through this blog.

I am getting myself mentally prepared for the long flight to Boston via Phoenix. Usually I refrain from having a drink while flying. But when coming into the US, the Goa-Mumbai-Brussels-Newark-Chicago-Phoenix route really got to me. To put myself out of misery, I decided to have have one. I soon realized that a Bloody Mary at 33,000 feet does far more damage than one at sea level, especially if you have been languishing at airports and changing planes for more than 24 hours before that. I guess I learnt my lesson the hard way.

Hawaii on a Harley

2009-04-21T12:20:00.003+05:30

In my opinion the best way to enjoy Hawaii is by riding around in a Harley Davidson. Ron gave me his 1700 CC mean machine and I went riding the winding roads of Maui. That piece of work is so loud that my ears were ringing long after I parked it back in the garage. I hear that you get Harley's on hire as well on Maui. We Indians drive on the left side of the road. So getting used to the American way of driving on the right side of the road took some time.

You can choose to ride around the beautiful mountains or along the breathtaking coast line. I took the coast line.

This is Clint Eastwood's house in the background. I thought of dropping in to say Hi to him, but was in a hurry to get back home. Maybe some other time. Maybe I will have some time for his neighbor Jack Nicholson as well.

Hawaii is a lot like Goa, where I come from. The climate, vegetation, beaches feels just like Goa. Just that the people living here are a lot more richer and drive much better cars.

Hawaii

2009-04-20T23:52:00.003+05:30

Just to give you a sense of my current state of mind, I am sitting on an easy chair in the garden of a beautiful house overlooking the Pacific Ocean on the beautiful island on Maui in Hawaii, one of the most spell binding places on earth. The fact that I am in the middle of the Pacific Ocean simple adds to the sense of seclusion and calmness that I feel, quite contrast of the high level of activity at COFES 2009. Its 8:30 in the morning and all kinds of birds have come out to greet me. All that is left to do is take in the marvelous air and listen to the waves in the distance.

I arrived last evening after a six hour flight from Phoenix. I am actually here on business, but I don't think I am going to much of it in this environment. My business partner in Print3D, Ron Barranco, lives on Maui. He was supposed to attend COFES 2009 with me, but something came up and he could not make it. So I decided to fly here instead.

Ron's taking good care of me. I hear that he has arranged for a young lady to come over and give me a massage this afternoon. My wife is reading this blog back in India. So I am not going to get into the other plans for today. Last night, Rhonda, Ron's wife and a wonderful hostess, barbecued some Salmon and concocted a lemon drop Martini for us. She let me know this morning that she has made better plans to dinner tonight.

Talking business with Ron in on the agenda, but looks like its got the lowest priority now. I am going to go offline for a while now.

The Bob McNeel Story

2009-04-20T14:58:00.003+05:30

I have always considered Bob McNeel to be one of the few people in the CAD software industry who stands out from the crowd. His decision to not go down the path of most CAD vendors of locking customers using proprietary file formats is just one of reasons I admire the man.

On the second day of COFES 2009, in the middle of the Arizona dessert, I got the chance to sit with him and talk business over beer. I learnt a lot of stuff about him, his company and the way he views the CAD software industry. Bob is an accountant by profession. So I asked him how an accountant ended up where he is. What followed was one of the most interesting conversations that I ever had in a long time. A small disclaimer here. This was not an interview and I was not taking down notes. So it is perfectly possible that some of what I am going to say is factually incorrect. Moreover please remember that we were having beer and my brain does not do a very good job remembering things when alcohol is in close proximity.

Anyways, as it turns out, once upon a time, Bob McNeel was a practicing accountant. Along the way he started writing accounting software for himself and other people. Things started working out on the software front and he ended up with quite a few customers. A few years down the line, one of his customers asked him for some help which involved purchasing and installing a license of AutoCAD. So Bob picked up the phone and called Autodesk. They told him that if he signed up as a reseller and ordered a reseller kit (2 licenses of AutoCAD) he would get a 50% reseller discount. So Bob figured that he could break even since he could sell one of the licenses to his customer and would still be left with another license which he could sell to someone else. So Bob signed up as a reseller and purchased a reseller kit.

The thing with Autodesk is that they do not sell directly to end users. If they get a direct inquiry, Autodesk routes it through the reseller for that area. So through no effort of his, Bob started getting inquiries for AutoCAD and began selling it. Soon enough, reselling AutoCAD started becoming quite a profitable business and Bob expanded his operations to include HP plotters and all kinds of stuff that CAD users need.

The reseller business started taking up so much of his time and resources that he slowly let the accounting software business disappear. Bob started adding value added services to his AutoCAD customers which included writing plug-ins and scripts for AutoCAD. One thing led to another and he ended up developing plug-ins that he sold commercially. At one point McNeel became one of the largest AutoCAD reseller in the entire North America.

Somewhere along the way Bob McNeel hired Michael Gibson, the genius who now develops and sells Moment Of Inspiration (MoI). One of Michael’s first project was a toolbar plug-in for AutoCAD, the same kind of toolbars that Rhino has till date - the ones where something different happens when you left-click and right-click the mouse.

After a few requests from customers for more free-form modeling tools Bob decided to develop a NURBS modelling plug-in for AutoCAD. At that point, the architecture of AutoCAD offered poor support for integration of a Windows NURBS modeller and his programmers eventually realized that they were going to run into trouble. So Michael was entrusted with the job of developing a standalone NURBS modeller. The idea was to have the NURBS modelling happen in an external application and then transfer the model back and forth to AutoCAD.

Bob licensed the AGLib NURBS modelling kernel from Applied Geometry to do the actual NURBS modelling. Bob soon realized that the AutoCAD plug-in was not going anywhere and decided to stop going down that road. The codename for the standalone modeller that Michael was working on was “Rhinoceros”. When the product was ready, the name that Bob chose for the product ran into some trademark issued and he decided to stick to Rhinoceros. Bob released Rhinoceros 1.0 as an open beta, something which he still continues to do to this day. The response was phenomenal. He got flooded with bug reports and enhancement requests from people all over the world. McNeel programmers found it difficult to keep up with the users. Eventually after about three years, Rhinoceros was officially released and became an instant smash hit.

At this time McNeel was still using the AGLib modeling library. Alias bought Applied Geometry and there arose a conflict of interest. So Bob started developing his own NURBS modeling kernel.

All this time Bob remained a reseller of AutoCAD. He admits that profits from their AutoCAD plug-in products paid for the Rhinoceros development effort. The AutoCAD reseller relationship came to an end shortly after Autodesk bought Alias, which had a product that was in direct competition with Rhinoceros. McNeel still develops plug-ins for AutoCAD and Revit including AccuRender and DOSLib.

To this day, Bob feels that Alias Studio is one of Rhino’s main competitors, which does not seem apparent when you take the cost of both products into consideration. He tells me, “Actually they are competing with my product and not the other way around, if you know what I mean".

So this is the story of how a practicing accountant became one of the most respectable and admired people in the CAD software industry.

COFES 2009 - Day 3 Pictures

2009-04-19T20:04:00.003+05:30

Due to connectivity problems I could not upload pictures last night. Here are some.

With Jon Hirschtick

I had the pleasure of meeting SolidWorks co-founder and now Group Executive and Board Member, Jon Hirschtick in the Scottsdale Plaza lobby. We spoke for quite a while and a exchanged notes on business among other things. Jon is a fantastic guy.

Roundtable

This was the "Leveraging Gaming and Social Networking in Business" roundtable. As you can see the table is indeed round. In this picture Lynn Allen was explaining what she used Twitter for. Her point was while most people were looking to exchange information with other people, she was simply trying to put out information using Twitter. And it was working for her.

Congress

This was a highly charged and open debate where the best minds and most influential people in the CAD industry sparred with each other, sharing their experiences and views on the economy and the ways that they were handling the problem.

After the final awards ceremony the bar was open late into the night and COFES attendees made sure that they made the best use of it.

Buzz Kross and Lynn Allen from Autodesk

Shyamal Roy and Evan Yares jamming up

Rachael Dalton-Taggart, Al Dean and Martyn day communicating with the rest of the world

Here is the COFES edition of "American Pie".

COFES 2009 - Day 3

2009-04-19T10:59:00.002+05:30

Keynote: Joel Orr

Joel Orr, Vice President and Chief Visionary of Cyon Research delivered a keynote speech with an interesting title: “Remembering the Future”. The idea here was to remember the future that we had envisioned in the past. Confused? I don't blame you. That's Joel Orr for you. I bet he could give therapy to a shrink. This is the 10th COFES and Joel spent some time remembering what it was and what they wanted it to be when they first started it. He reminded us that as engineers we are designing the future every moment of our lives. A couple of quotes to take away:

"Pyramids are things where great people are buried. The same is true for companies with pyramidal structures".

"Stop focussing for looking for what is not working on your company. Rather focus on what is working and improve it."

Keynote: Peter Marks

Peter Marks from Design Insight delivered a keynote speech on Blind spotting. Some pretty heavy stuff, but the gist is that the human brain processes only 1% of information consciously. The remain 99% is processed by the unconscious mind. We make most decisions on people and situations using this unconscious mind and is the reason for our unjust bias towards them. These are the blind spots in our mind. This is how I understood it. For all you know it may be something completely different. I am not very good at understanding this heavy stuff.

Discussions and Roundtables – Round 1

Meeting rooms are set up in suites around the pool where people with common interests sit down and discuss an issue that interests them. The topics of discussion were:

Channel Evolution: A discussion on the changing relationship between vendors, their go-to-market partners (the Channel) and their customers.

Collaboration 2020: A discussion on the kind of form collaboration will assume 10 years from now.

Innovating Everywhere - Helping Customers Secure Their Future: A discussion on how the engineering software world can or should help its customers struggling in this current financial crisis by means of innovation.

Is Direct Modeling the Interoperability “Holy Grail”?: A discussion on the role direct modeling will play in solving the interoperability problem. More than a year ago I published a white paper titled “CAD 2.0 - Finally a Solution to the CAD Interoperability Problem” in which I explained how direct modeling was a solution to the vexed problem of CAD interoperability.

Is SharePoint a Game Changer? – A discussion on Microsoft SharePoint and why everyone has a SharePoint Strategy or is working on one. For those who don’t know, SharePoint is a collection of products and software elements that include browser-based collaboration functions, process management modules and a document management platform. There is a view that SharePoint could be a real threat to existing PLM systems.

Jumping the Gap – A discussion on the widening gap between technology leaders (software vendors) and followers (their customers). Why do customers take time to implement new technologies invented by the vendors?

Turning BIM Towards a Handoff-Focused Data Model – A discussion on the interoperability issues plaguing the BIM world.

User Group Leadership Roundtable – A meeting of representatives of major user groups like AUGI, COE, PLM World, PTC/USER and SWUGN to discuss common issues.

During the time of these Discussions and Roundtables there were Vendor Appointments that COFES organizers arranged for attendees. I could not attend any of the roundtables as four vendors had set up meetings with me, one after another. These meetings are one on one, just you and the vendor. In my case, the vendors were PTC, Autodesk, Nemetschek and Microsoft.

Vendor Appointment - PTC

Brian Shepherd, Executive Vice President (Product Development) of PTC along with three other PTC executives briefed me about Pro/ENGINEER, CoCreate and the PTC strategy for them. Although Brian appreciates my attempts at doing my due diligence with regard to Pro/ENGINEER, he does not completely agree with my findings, some of which I have been writing on this blog. I will be writing on these issues at length after my visit to PTC Headquarters in Needham this coming Thursday, but all I will say now is that we are going to see more of parametrics in CoCreate and more of direct editing in Pro/ENGINEER. This is in complete contrast to what PTC executives told me at PTC World in Mumbai. I get the feeling that this PTC visit is going to be very interesting.

Vendor Appointment - Autodesk

Brenda Discher, VP, Industry Marketing (Manufacturing Industry Group), Hilde Sevens, Senior Product Line Manager (Manufacturing Solutions Division) of Autodesk and I sat outside their hotel suite where they presented to me the Autodesk vision of Digital Prototyping. I have written about Digital Prototyping on this blog in the past. But I would like to let you know about something that was considered classified a while back when I attended the Autodesk DevDays in Bangalore a few months ago. It's called AIRMax and it stands for AutoCAD, Inventor, Revit and 3ds Max. The idea here is to have a unified system wherein a user is able to use Autodesk software throughout the design chain. I hope to write about AIRMax at length. I do not have enough information on it yet and do not with to speculate. Watch this space.

Vendor Appointment - Nemetschek

I had lunch with Sean Flaherty (CEO) and Jeremy Powell (Product Marketing Manager) of Nemetschek where they introduced me to the company and its products. I must admit that I do not know much about Nemetschek and its flagship product VectorWorks, but I have promised myself to change that in due course of time. Nemetschek is very excited about its adoption of the Parasolid Geometry kernel from Siemens PLM. This means that entities (walls, windows, etc.) in Vector Works are pure solids, just like any other MCAD solid modeling system and can be modified as such. Parametric modeling is being introduced as well, which should make the product extremely powerful. I intend to take VectorWorks for a test drive and at the same time, get more familiar with the AEC industry and its products.

Vendor Appointment - Microsoft

This appointment kept me guessing till the last minute. I kept wondering why on earth would Microsoft want to meet me. As it turns out at the hotel suite, Peter Schroer, President of Aras Corporation, was waiting to introduce me to something I knew absolutely nothing about. Aras is a PLM software provider that turned its business model upside down in January 2007. As Peter put it, "I fired my sales staff and made my software open source". I thought to myself, "Wow! I sure hope I don't have to do that one day". Here is why Aras did it. They found that the cost of selling their PLM solution to companies was way too large. So one fine day Aras went open source and began charging for implementation and support. They changed the business model "to grow faster" and in the first year their revenue increased 62%. The reason Peter was sitting in the Microsoft Suite was because his PLM solution is built around Windows Server, SQL Server and SharePoint.

I really like these Vendor appointments where vendors request COFES organizers to arrange one on one meetings with people they find interesting. Now I have been fed with just the right amount of information to start investigating these companies and their products. The CAD, PLM, AEC, MCAD and whatever acronym you may find out there is just so large that it is almost impossible to know and understand everything. I am sure as hell going to try.

Discussions and Roundtables – Round 2

The Discussions and Roundtables in round 2 were:

Abstract Modeling and Optimization: The Next Wunderkinds of CAE: A discussion on abstract modelling, basically a modelling technique where you play around with meshes and fiddle width polygons. This is a good example of Abstract Modeling in Cinema 4D.

Blurring Corporate Boundaries: A discussion on “coopetition”, a cross between “cooperation” and “competition”, basically how vendors license and use each others technologies in competing products and the implications of doing so.

Dealing with the Harsh Realities of our Customers: A discussion on whether vendors are listening to their customers. Are vendors actually solving their customers’ specific problems?

Leveraging Gaming and Social Networking in Business: A discussion on how Gaming and Social Networking can be used in business.

Putting a Stake in the Ground: Visions of Future Interfaces: A discussion on how today’s futuristic thinking play a role in providing a vision for stuff that we will actually end up doing in the future.

The Next Big Thing – Making Current Building Inventory Less Inefficient: A discussion on how the operation of buildings, as opposed to automobiles, is a major sustainability concern, especially since they were built at a time when energy conservation was not considered a serious issue.

Where AEC and MFG Meet – A discussion on the increasing blurring of the line dividing the AEC and Manufacturing segments as both sides begin to use each others software tools to get their job done.

I attended the roundtable on "Leveraging Gaming and Social Networking in Business". Sparks flew all around the room. All throughout COFES 2009, I heard just about everyone use the word "Twitter". I believe there are three kinds of people (1) people who think they get it (2) people who don't know whether they get it, and (3) people who don' t get it. I belong to the second. The room was filled with people from all three categories. So you can imagine what it must have been. We also discussed other forms of social networking such as Second Life. Finally a wise man who sat silently in the corner for the entire discussion got up and suggested that we start using fax machines.

Congress - The Business of Design and Engineering: It's the Economy, Stupid!

This was basically an open forum with the aim of discussing current issues and explore future opportunities. I missed a major part of this because Chris Williams was giving me a demo of Vuuch in the lobby. More information here. The congress discussion was about the economy. As expected the discussion was very lively. At one point someone stood up and said that nobody in the room knew a damn thing about the economy and when it would get fixed. But I guess the telling moment was when one very wise old man stood up and very calmly said that the people who were going to end up actually solving the problem were all seated in that room. There was a momentary silence as this simple yet profound statement sank into everyone seated there. Incidentally this person was Jack Ring of Kennen Technologies LLC, the same guy who yesterday gave the presentation titled "Transforms and Transformations", the one that went right over my head. But I am pretty sure that what he articulated today was absorbed by everyone in that room and they understood exactly what he meant.

Dinner & Awards

After dinner, there was an award ceremony for the CADwire.net and CAD Society awards. The CAD Society is a not-for-profit industry association with the goal of fostering a community and encouraging open communication among those who make their living within the CAD industry including AEC, mechanical, manufacturing, and GIS. Every year they felicitate people for their outstanding achievements. This year Richard Doyle of SolidWorks received the 2009 CAD Society Community Award for his role in building a vibrant and open community for SolidWorks users worldwide. Bill McClure and Dan Staples of Siemens PLM Software were joint winners of the 2009 CAD Society Leadership Award for their vital role in developing Solid Edge. Richard Sowar, co-founder of Spatial, was the winner of the 2009 CAD Society Lifetime Achievement Award for his role in development of the ACIS 3D geometric kernel, which forms the backbone of a large CAD system today, 20 years after it was first introduced in 1989. The CADwire.net award for Innovation went to Chris Williams for Vuuch.

In his acceptance speech, Richard Doyle said something that I am not going to forget in a hurry: "You cannot have a meaningful conversation with someone using 140 characters or shake the hand of an avatar".

COFES 2009 - A Conversation with Evan Yares

2009-04-18T20:45:00.003+05:30

On the sidelines of COFES 2009, I sat down with Evan Yares to get his perspective on the ODA and the reasons why he intends to give the organization he once ran a hard time by threatening them with a class action law suit.

Deelip: So Evan, tell me what is all this about?
Evan: First I’ll tell you what it is not about. It’s not about me. Everyone knows that there is a lot of history between the ODA, the people running it and me. So I perfectly understand if people think that this is some kind of a revenge thing. But it is not. This is about the ODA members and more of a fight about a principle, something that I believe is worth fighting for.

Deelip: So what is this principle that you are talking about?
Evan: It’s actually very simple. The ODA is trying to force its Associate member into signing an agreement which requires them to pay for the libraries, when the existing agreement clearly states that there will be no fees whatsoever.

Deelip: So are you saying that the ODA does not have the right to charge its members as and when it thinks fit?
Evan: No, they can. But telling someone that they have to tear up their existing agreement and sign a new one is flat wrong. Furthermore, terminating a member for not doing so is even more wrong. There is a right way of doing this. This is the wrong way.

Deelip: What is the right way?
Evan: I would like to reserve that for the day when I appear in court.

Deelip: Do you really think the ODA is really interested in suing you. That’s the impression I got after reading your blog post.
Evan: I don’t know, but I am sure as hell not suing them.

Deelip: I don’t understand. Then what is this class action suit about?
Evan: I am not suing them personally as President of Purecor and an Associate member. I am going to simply lay out the facts to the class (the Associate members interested in taking this further). I will write a document describing everything and appear as an fact witness if required, at no charge.

Deelip: Help me understand something here. I get the “principle” argument, but to me it all boils down to inconveniencing the Associate members to pay $100 as handling fee. So if you do find Associate members who cannot afford to pay $100 a year, how on earth are they going to pay for this class action suit. I must admit I am new to all of this. Enlighten me.
Evan: That’s a good question. The Associate members joining this class will not have to pay anything. The lawyer taking up this case will figure out whether the case is strong and gauge the amount of compensation/damages that could be won. He will take a percentage of that. And as regards money, I will not spend a single cent on this and neither will I earn a single cent. I have already said that I will donate my share of any settlement to EFF.

Deelip: So what will it take for you to stop this?
Evan: Like I said I am going to write a document and lay down the facts as I see them. If the ODA refunds the fees collected from the Associate members, reinstates the members that they wrongfully terminates, I will then add more information to the document describing what they did and publish the document. If nobody finds a reason to take things forward after that, then nobody will. All I am requesting the ODA is they follow the rules and none of this needs to happen.

Deelip: I am going to ask you a straight question and would appreciate a straight answer. Knowing you I think I am going to get one. Why did you wait 30 days to begin acting? Why didn’t you ask for the bylaws and minutes of the meetings that led up to the decision to charge Associate members on the day you received the first email from the ODA clerk.
Evan: That’s an excellent question. I wanted to see what the ODA would do.

Deelip: Looks like you have some major issues with the ODA.
Evan: I have no problem with the ODA. I care about the organization but I care more about its members. After all, it is a member driven organization.

Deelip: There is a view that you are trying to get back at the ODA management for the manner in which you were made to resign as President.
Evan: Let’s be clear on something. I do not want my job back. In fact, I don’t believe that I am the right person to run the ODA. Neither do I want to be on the Board of Directors. Sure, the organization can benefit from my experience. But I seriously believe that the ODA deserves better.

Deelip: You mentioned not wanting to be on the board. If I understand this correctly, only Founding members can be on the board and Purecor is (or was) only an Associate member.
Evan: You are forgetting that any Founding member could make me their representative on the board. But I am not interested in that.

Deelip: Personally, I believe that neither the ODA, its members or you, need this. I hope you guys can find a way to sort this out amicably.
Evan: I could not agree more with you.

COFES 2009 - Day 2

2009-04-18T11:04:00.007+05:30

Introductions and Breakfast

Day 2 started out with breakfast at 7:30 am. Later representatives of the Technology Suite sponsors (Autodesk, Microsoft, Nemetschek, PTC, ShareVis, Siemens PLM and VX) introduced themselves and let us know what they were going to present in their technology suites sessions later in the day.

Breakfast

Keynote: Innovative Engineering for a Disruptive Time

Chuck House of Media X delivered a keynote speech on Innovative Engineering for a Disruptive Time. He is the executive director of Media X, Stanford University's Industry Affiliate research program on media and technology. The speech was very informative and humorous, in fact, bordering hilarious. Consider this quote: "Carver Mead invented Moore's law and told Moore about it who told the world." His first slide asked us to "check conventional wisdom at the door".

Chuck House

He dwelt on the reasons why innovation lags in most companies giving examples from the waves of innovation in Silicon Valley. In his opinion, innovative engineering in a desruptive time needs mavericks, people who don't break the rules, but rather, who change them.

Technology Suite Briefings - Round 1

A technology suite briefing is held in a hotel room where people from the sponsor company meet one on one with a handful of attendees. The ides is not to sell a product. After all nobody comes to COFES to buy a CAD system. Rather the briefing is to discuss issues related to the company and its products.

The technology suite briefings for the first round were:

Autodesk - Hilde Sevens, Senior Product Line Manager, Manufacturing Solutions
Topic: Extending Digital Prototyping

Autodesk - Brenda Discher, Vice-President, Manufacturing Solutions
Topic: Digital Prototyping and BIM

Microsoft - Diego Tamburini, Senior Evangelism Manager
Topic: New Technologies for Software Developers

Nemetschek North America- Sean Flaherty, CEO
Topic: Nemetschek's Vision for BIM and Design

PTC - Brian Shepherd, Senior Vice-President, Product Management
Topic: Social Product Development

ShareVis - Nail Sudin, CEO
Topic: PLM with Model-Based Workflows

Siemens PLM Software - Bill Carrelli, Vice-President Business Development
Topic: Differences between PLM for medium-to-large enterprises and PLM for small-to-medium businesses.

SpaceClaim - Chris Randles, President & CEO
Topic: Direct Modeling

VX Corporation - Mark Vorwaller, President
Topic: Capturing and Sharing Knowledge

I attended the SpaceClaim briefing where CEO Chris Randles and co-founder Blake Courter explained SpaceClaim's product strategy and a need for its technology in a multi-CAD environment.

Chris Randles

DaS Symposium

While the Technology Suite Briefings were going on there was something called as the Design and Sustainability (DaS) Symposium. The founding members of the DaS Symposium include Autodesk, Building Smart Alliance, CIFE, Cyon Research, Gensler, Siemens, SolidWorks, Sustainable Minds, et al. The purpose of this symposium was to focus on how design software can facilitate the visibility of sustainability issues at the design stage.

Analyst Briefings – Round 1

An analyst briefing is quite similar to a technology suite briefing, just that the person discussing the topic is an industry renowned analyst who first gives a brief overview of one or more pressing issues surrounding his industry and then answers questions posed by attendees. These replies more then often spark off a debate with different points of view being expressed. This increased level of interaction is what makes it far more interesting.

The first round of analyst briefings for the day were:

Chuck House, Media X
Topic: Issues raised in his Keynote Speech

Deke Smith, Cyon Research
Topic: BIM Changes Everything

Don Brown, CPDA
Topic: Scorecard on Mechatronics

Joe Barkai, Manufacturing Insights
Topic: Will PLM Shake Off Its CAD Roots?

Jim Brown, Tech-Clarity
Topic: Design, Engineering, and Social Networking

Jon Peddie, Jon Peddie Research
Topic: Why Virtual Worlds Fail

Tom Pennino, TP Technologies
Topic: Interdependency of EDA and MCAD

I went in to attend Jim Brown's briefing on "Design, Engineering and Social Networking", but was pulled away for a private meeting. Before I left I caught Randall Newton hiding behind the door twittering away to glory.

Randall Newton

Analyst Briefings – Round 2

The second round of analyst briefings for the day were:

Phares Noel, Cyon Research
Topic: Factory-Floor Time-Bomb

David Prawel, LongView Advisors
Topic: Extending the Reach of Product Data

Ken Versprille, CPDA
Topic: Trends in Design Data Quality

Jay Vleeschhouwer, Financial Analyst
Topic: Wall Street Perspective on the CAD/PLM industry

Bruce Jenkins, Ora Research
Topic: Strengthening Simulation’s Impact

Dave Jordani, Jordani Consulting Group
Topic: BIM – Innovation Under Construction

I attended Jay Vleeschhouver briefing on "Wall Street Perspective on the CAD/PLM Industry". First Jay painted a horrifying picture of the mess that CAD vendors are finding themselves in, complete with numbers and their implications for the future. He noted that the more pressing current situation is that new license revenues are declining rapidly, and that there would be – or already are in some cases – resultant adverse effect on maintenance. He also noted that there were high chances that product development spending could be severely curtailed. He threw some light on the cost cutting measures of adopted by the CAD vendors and stated that customers were showing clear signs of deferring new purchases. Jay was of the opinion that a steep decline did not mean that there would be a steep ascent. In fact, he believes that the upturn, when it comes, will be slower than expected. He felt that Autodesk and SolidWorks may recover faster because their customers have shorter software procurement cycles.

Jay Vleeschhouver

When he eventually got down to talking about the Wall Street perspective on the CAD/PLM industry, he said that investors very rarely look at the software and technologies of the CAD vendors before investing their stock. At present, they are simply interested in cost management. He mentioned that a couple of private equity firms had in the recent past asked him to debrief them about the CAD/PLM industry. He feels that such kind of interest reveals that investors see some potential in the CAD/PLM industry.

Technology Suite Briefings - Round 2

After lunch, there were a repeat of the morning briefings which gave attendees the opportunity to attend a second briefing. I attended the briefing by Siemens PLM. Bill McClure, Vice President of the Velocity Portfolio, discussed Synchronous Technology and what had changed since it was introduced a year ago.

Bill Carelli and Bill McClure

Bill McClure let us know that they were getting ready to ship the next version of Synchronous Technology next month. Incidentally, Inventor Fusion also comes out next month. A major enhancement was the addition of a sheet metal system.

Technology Suite Briefings - Round 3

The third and final round of analyst briefings for the day were:

Steve Wolfe, Cyon Research
Topic: Affordable PLM

Chad Jackson, Aberdeen
Topic: The Innovation Transition

Marc Halpern, Gartner
Topic: Designing Green: Practical or Pipe Dream?

Monica Schnitger, Schnitger Corporation
Topic: Shifting Channel Models

Terry Wohlers, Wohlers Associates
Topic: Additive Fabrication for Mass Customization

Martin Fischer, CIFE
Topic: The Promise of VDC

I attended Terry Wohlers' briefing on "Additive Fabrication for Mass Customization". I have been conversing with Terry over email for a few years now. It was nice to meet him face to face for the first time.

Terry Wohlers

Terry spent some time explaining new methods of additive fabrication (or more commonly known as rapid prototyping) and new materials. He passed around physical models among the attendees, some of which could never have been created using normal machining. He answered question from his small audience and they had a lot of them.

Maieutic Parataxis

This is something that was started last year and became a hit. So they decided to do it again. Maieutic means “the midwifery of knowledge” and Parataxis means “the juxtaposition of ideas, without connection or conjunction”. Putting them together, according the COFES organizers, you get “a series of five-minute vignettes drawn from topics and ideas that, while perhaps not yet fully formed, are likely to impact your thinking about how we design, build, and interact with software in the future”.

A couple of these five minute presentations were fascinating, not always in the right sense. Among the presenters were Bill Barnes from Lattice Technology showing off his XVL file format and player. He showed how a 1.3 GB assembly could be reduced to 6.5 MB without any geometric difference at all. Gary Vanderplats, CEO of Vanderplaats Research & Development Inc. gave a presentation on "Optimization". Jack Ring of Kennen Technologies LLC gave a presentation of "Transforms and Transformers", of which I understood absolutely nothing. Here is one slide.

WTF

I am pretty sure his presentation made sense to a lot of people in the audience. Just that my level of IQ didn't fit the requirement. Stephen Prusha of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab gave a presentation on "Next Generation Conceptual Design at JPL". Simon Floyd of Microsoft gave a mind blowing presentation on "Work Styles & Interactivity in 2020" which included this video. Torben Sko, a PhD student came all the way from Australia and showed how by using a normal web cam and face tracking software he could navigate a first person shooter game in a real life manner. Truly amazing. Link.

Evening Under the Stars at La Puesta del Sol

To wrap up the day, all attendees were herded into busses and taken to La Puesta del Sol, a great western cookout in the middle of the desert. Last year I froze. This time I made sure I took my jacket with me. Far away from the city lights, you get a much clearer view of the stars in the Arizona sky. They even have a huge telescope.

COFES 2009 - Inventor Fusion is Coming

2009-04-17T20:38:00.007+05:30

This morning I had an interesting conversation with Buzz Kross in the Scottsdale Plaza lobby. Buzz is the Senior Vice President of the Manufacturing Solutions Division at Autodesk, basically the man in charge of Inventor. I asked him about Inventor Fusion. "We are letting customers try it out in May", he said. "We just released Inventor 2010. So this will be offered as as a separate application on Autodesk Labs, which will be later integrated into Inventor".

"So has Autodesk finally cracked the case? Is Inventor Fusion really able to do direct editing while maintaining the feature tree?", I asked. "Yes", he replied. "Frankly, I don't find the approaches taken by other CAD vendors feasible. Users will always feel the need for parametrics in a solid modeling system".

I asked Buzz whether this technology was developed in-house or was licensed/bought from some one else. "This is all our stuff", he replied.

So this is how I understand it. We have Inventor 2010 and there will be Inventor Fusion on Autodesk Labs, two separate applications. Say an Inventor 2010 user creates a parametric model and saves it as a part file (.ipt). Inventor Fusion will be able to open the part file and let the user push/pull and mess around. When he saves his changes to the same .ipt file and opens it back in Inventor 2010, the feature tree will stay intact, as will the modifications made to the model when it was in Inventor Fusion. In time, this functionality will be integrated into Inventor.

If what Buzz told me is true or if I have understood this correctly, then this is AWESOME!! Now I cannot wait to get my hands on Inventor Fusion to see for myself.

Someone from Autodesk once told me. "We may not be very good market leaders, but we are damn good followers".

COFES 2009 - Day 1

2009-04-17T11:44:00.006+05:30

COFES 2009 starts full swing tomorrow morning. But today afternoon were three special sessions and the Business reception followed by dinner.

Special Session: CAD/PLM Market Survey Results

Brad Holtz, President and CEO of Cyon Research, put forth the results of his CAD/PLM market survey I mentioned earlier on this blog. Preliminary because the survey is still on. So far there have been 447 respondents and he expects the number to rise to 600 to 800. One of the questions asked in the survey related to the decision to buy new software or continue with maintenance in these trouble times. The results were pretty alarming. 25% of people said that they were holding all new software purchases. 19% were delaying purchase and 14% had canceled plans to purchase software. As far as software maintenance is concerned, 33% discontinued unused seats, 45% discontinued selectively and 32% had discontinued across the board. No wonder CAD vendors are posting dismal quarterly numbers.

Brad Holtz

Special Session: What’s Going to Stick

Kathleen Maher from John Peddie Research (JPR) gave a presentation titled “What Sticks to the Wall”, basically an update to her presentation on the Practicality Gap of last year.

JPR is a technically oriented computer graphics marketing and management-consulting firm based in Tiburon, CA, which provides specialized services to senior and middle management in computer companies and companies that are major computer users. Kathleen Maher has worked as an analyst and journalist in technical fields for more than ten years. She is presently the Vice President of JPR and Editor-in-Chief of Tech Watch, JPR’s bi-weekly newsletter on the PC graphics industry.

Special Session: International Business Update

Allan Brehrens from Cambashi presented his International Business Update. Cambashi is a management and marketing consultancy company. Allan's is a director at Cambashi.

I missed this session because I was chatting with Bob Mayer (COO of IMSI/Design) and Bob McNeel (President of Robert McNeel & Associates) in the lobby.

Business Reception and Technology Suite Open House

This was the first opportunity for COFES newbies to meet their hosts. Every freshman at COFES is assigned a leading industry consultant who introduces him to other attendees. Last year, my host was Shyamal Roy, founder of GEOMATE. He helped me tremendously by putting me through to the people I wanted to meet, especially top executives like Jeff Ray (CEO of SolidWorks), Mike Payne (CEO of SpaceClaim at that time) and a bunch of other people. This time I didn’t need anyone and found my way around easily. That’s the beauty of COFES. The environment is extremely informal and friendly. Basically you stick your hand out to the person sitting or standing beside you and start talking. At the end of it you will find yourselves exchanging business cards, which more than often, turns out to the start of a mutually benefiting business relationship.

The Technology Suite Open House is a place where vendors discuss corporate direction, business development, and potential partnerships. This is a time where you sign up for appointment time slots for the Technology Suite briefings to be held over the next couple of days.

In the middle of the Business Reception, Blake Courter, co-founder of SpaceClaim and avid Twitter user took me to his room to give me a demo of the new features of SpaceClaim.

Blake Courter

Spouse & Guest-only Mixer

While COFES Attendees were at their business reception, their spouses and guests were treated to a wine tasting mixer/reception before they joined the attendees in the welcome reception.

Welcome Reception

COFES attendees brought along their spouses for an evening social by the pool. My spouse was on the other side of the planet busy taking care of our two boys. Speaking of which, my wife called me yesterday to let me know that Reuben (my 5 year old) had lost the first of his milk teeth and was pretty excited about it. I feel sad that I missed it. Looking at the bright side, he has many more teeth to go.

At the welcome reception I met Mike Riddle, the man who wrote AutoCAD. I first met Mike last year at COFES itself, where he showed me the latest stuff that we was working on. Yes, this 60 year old man still codes and thoroughly enjoys doing so. We got talking and found myself at a loss of words when he told me that he had purchased my book - "OpenCAD - A Step By Step Guide to Developing a Professional CAD Application". This 60 year old man who wrote AutoCAD 25 years ago (I was 8 years old then) actually bought my book, read it and liked it so much that he is now encouraging me to take OpenCAD forward and make it a complete CAD system. I don't know what to say.

I had a couple of copies of my book with me. I signed and gave him one. I asked him to sign the other for me. He wrote, "Great Idea! Best Wishes. I hope many people pick up on this - Mike Riddle"

With Mike Riddle

This has definitely been an excellent first day. I look forward to tomorrow.

COFES 2009 - Dinner For Early Birds

2009-04-16T11:18:00.002+05:30

Brad Holtz was kind enough to host a dinner for a few of us who arrived early. COFES 2009 starts tomorrow. Here is a picture. Obviously my camera does not do a good job in dim light.

Twitter vs Facebook: The Question

2009-04-16T05:41:00.003+05:30

At the outset, I would like to say that I don’t think I get Twitter. On the other hand, I think I get Facebook. The source of my confusion with regard to Twitter is the question that I am expected to answer. Twitter asks you the question: “What are you doing?” Whereas Facebook’s question is “What’s on your mind?”

Twitter’s About page states, “The result of using Twitter to stay connected with friends, relatives, and coworkers is that you have a sense of what folks are up to.” And that’s why they ask the question, “What are you doing?” But I see that people are hardly answering that question anymore. At least the people I follow (me including) seem to be answering Facebook’s question, “What’s on your mind?”

Something similar happened with blogging. The word “blog” is short for “web log” and a “log” is supposed to be a listing of what someone did on a particular day. But people soon started using blogs to express their opinion, which is basically answering Facebook’s question, “What’s on your mind?”

Over the past couple of days, I tried something. I used Twitter to tell the people following me exactly what I was doing. I told them that I was getting ready to board a plane in Goa. I told them which book I was reading. I told them I was changing planes in Brussels. I told them that I checked into the Scottsdale Plaza. Basically I answered the question, “What are you doing?” And every time I answered that question, I asked myself, “Why would anyone want to know?” and “Why should they even care?” Frankly, I believe it makes sense to tell someone what you are doing if it is going to add some value (however small it may be) to that person in some way or the other. After all, the people following me on Twitter are actually taking their time out to read what I am writing.

I highly doubt people following me on Twitter will be interested in knowing which book I am reading. But I guess they may be interested in knowing what I think about the book or its author. I doubt they will be interested in knowing what I am eating in a restaurant. But they may be interested in knowing whether I think the food is good or not. I think you get the point.

I am pretty sure people will be more interested to know what’s on my mind as opposed to what I am doing. And I believe this is probably the reason that most people, knowingly or unknowingly, more than often, end up answering Facebook’s question on Twitter.

ODA vs Evan Yares

2009-04-15T14:04:00.001+05:30

Just when I thought Evan Yares’ blog was dead, he comes up with this post, explaining why and how he intends to sue the organization he once led. In gist, Evan is pissed off with the ODA for charging Associate Members an initial fee of $250 and an annual recurring fee of $100. One thing led to another and as things now stand, the ODA has kicked Evan’s company out of the ODA and Evan is preparing to file a class action suit.

Evan has listed a few clauses from the ODA Associate Membership agreement. I will list one more to add another twist. The clause is 1.1, which states:

“Subject to the terms and conditions of this Agreement, Member will be entitled to exercise, all rights of an associate member of the Alliance, as such rights are specified from time to time in the bylaws of the Alliance. Member will furnish to the Alliance such documents and other assurances as the Alliance may reasonably request from time to time to ensure that Member has and continues to meet the qualifications for membership in the associate member class as specified in the articles of incorporation and bylaws of the Alliance.”

If I understand Clause 1.1 correctly, by signing the agreement, the Associate members agreed to abide by whatever the ODA board decides. Evan claims that the original agreement gave him a perpetual license. But Clause 1.1 of the same agreement also bound him to agree to whatever the ODA board decided, which in this case, was abolishing the perpetual license and having an annual subscription instead. Evan wants to stick to the old agreement. But by agreeing to this clause he has agreed to “funish documents and assurances”, which in this case, means that he has to execute the new agreement, or get kicked out of the ODA. Associate members do not get to decide whether they want to agree to the bylaws or not. They simply have to. And they agree to do exactly that.

Clause 1.1 may give you the impression that the ODA Associate Agreement is completely one sided. Just that when Evan amended and restated the agreement as ODA President on October 28 2003, he never expected to be on the other side.

Autodesk's New Upgrade Policy

2009-04-10T21:11:00.002+05:30

Randall Newton of CADCAMNet has written an excellent article on Autodesk's new upgrade policy titled "Autodesk Rejiggers Upgrade Prices as New Encouragement to Get On Subscription". Here is the summary:

"Autodesk recently announced a revised pricing plan for software upgrades; the engineering blogosphere immediately erupted with derision, anger, and hand-wringing. We took the time to talk to the right people inside Autodesk to get the straight story. There’s less here than the meets the nattering class eye."

Randall does the math and arrives at interesting results. He ends the article with "we see that strategy as not only shooting oneself in the foot, but aiming carefully first." But he is not referring to the Autodesk strategy here. I strongly suggest you read the article.

CADCAMNet is available at a monthly subscription of $24.95. However, they also offer a one month free trial.

COFES 2009 - The Odd Man Out

2009-04-08T23:26:00.002+05:30

Of all the 178 people attending COFES 2009, I guess I am going to be the odd man out. I seem to be the only one who has "Blogger" for a title. Everyone else has titles like President, Founder, CEO, Director and similar. There are a bunch of journalists and analysts as well, some of whom are also bloggers. But the title on my badge is definitely going to stand out. Whether it stands out positively or negatively remains to be seen.

I leave for the Arizona dessert coming Monday on what I believe will be an epic journey: Goa > Mumbai > Brussels > Newark > Chicago > Phoenix. My travel agent gave me a good reason for making me pass though six airports. On my way back I am going to break journey at Brussels to attend the ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland. Apparently, if you book a round trip via the same route, it costs much lesser. So maybe this wild goose chase will be worth it.

The last time around, I landed in Phoenix in the evening, felt it was morning, while my stomach kept complaining that it needed lunch. This time will not be any different. I am going to arrive the Scottsdale Plaza late evening on 14th April. COFES starts on 16th.

I hear that Brad Holtz, the "organizer-in-chief" of COFES, has organized something for people like me who will be arriving the day earlier. Not sure what it is, but I hope painkillers are on the menu. On second thoughts, booze (plenty of it) would be just as good.

This is going to be my second COFES. And something tells me that it is going to be just as fruitful as my first, if not a whole lot more.

Pro/ENGINEER and Direct Editing

2009-04-06T15:41:00.002+05:30

Michael Campbell, SVP Product Management, Desktop Products of PTC left an interesting comment on an article on this blog (“Pro/ENGINEER: Old Is Gold”). He drew a distinction between PTC’s strategy and that of its competitors, Dassault and Siemens. According to Michael, “an important part of PTC’s strategy is to develop a single, scalable parametric CAD tool that can compete with SolidWorks and Solid Edge at the low end of the market, and CATIA and UG NX at the high end. No other CAD system can do that.” I guess he left out Inventor since Autodesk does not have a presence in the high end MCAD market.

But I want to discuss a larger issue here. The issue of direct editing and the relevance of Pro/ENGINEER in a world that is increasingly moving towards the “quick and easy” way of solid modeling. Well, I am not sure about the world, but most CAD vendors are definitely moving in that direction. Siemens is pushing Synchronous Technology in its low end (Solid Edge) and high end (NX) products. Dassault may be still trying to figure out what to do with its low end (SolidWorks) but has already crossed the bridge with its high end (CATIA V6). Autodesk is crossing the bridge with its Inventor Fusion, and coupled with its Digital Prototyping marketing strategy, it is getting ready to take a slice of the high end CAD market pie from Dassault, Siemens and PTC. SpaceClaim is sniffing around trying to make its presence felt. And then we already have existing CAD vendors like IronCAD, Kubotek and similar who were already on the other side to begin with.

I find it hard to believe that with all these CAD vendors betting their R&D and marketing dollars on direct editing systems, end users are going to resist and stand by their strict parametric modeling systems, especially since direct editing systems make solid modeling faster and easier. As it stands, the only large CAD software vendor who appears to be holding out is PTC. Sure they went ahead and bought CoCreate to add a direct modeling workhorse to their stable, but I seriously cannot see CoCreate standing up to CATIA V6 and NX. The fact that PTC bought CoCreate goes to reinforce my belief that PTC is not going to morph Pro/ENGINEER into a direct editing system, something that their top executives quite clearly told me at PTC World in Mumbai.

So where do you think PTC is headed with this strategy? Do they think that their customers really enjoy getting tangled in a history tree? Do they believe that Pro/ENGINEER users who want direct editing will move to CoCreate? Or is it that PTC wants to, but cannot cross the bridge, probably because of Pro/ENGINEER’s antiquated architecture and programming language?

Don’t get me wrong. The old lady is quite capable and may even get a makeover. But can she do the split?

Pro/ENGINEER: Old Is Gold

2009-04-03T00:52:00.003+05:30

I prefer to think that I know a few things about the innards of today’s CAD systems. Over the past decade I have written plug-ins for a bunch of them – AutoCAD, Inventor, 3ds Max, Maya, SolidWorks, Solid Edge, SpaceClaim, Rhinoceros, Alibre Design, IRONCAD, INOVATE, SketchUp, Acrobat and over a dozen variants of IntelliCAD. Yes, I have done all these ladies. As programmers we get to feel them up and touch them in places that end users cannot. This is because CAD vendors need to expose certain parts of them by means of API’s (Application Programming Interface) so that we can plug our stuff into them. I must admit, checking them out has always been the most pleasurable part.

Today I began checking out Pro/ENGINEER. SYCODE recently became a PTC Partner and I am spending some time alone with Pro/E to figure her out. Actually this part of my plan of doing my due diligence with regard to PTC and it products and stop relying on what informed, or otherwise, people have to say.

If you ask me to describe Pro/E in one word, I would say she is old. But let me take two words. She is very old. Let me explain. You need to write Pro/E plug-ins using the C programming language. Not C++, but C. To give you an idea, C is a language that became outdated a decade ago. I started programming in C in my third year engineering, quickly moved to C++ and never looked back, till this morning. I eventually used Visual C++ 2005 to write my first Pro/E plug-in, but internally I had to create C functions, something I thought I would never have to do again in my life.

The API provided by PTC to third party developers is not an organized set of object-oriented C++ classes, like all the other API’s I have worked with in the past. Rather, it is one giant set of C functions that I spent a better part my day sifting through. To make it worse, the example code that comes with the API is next to useless for beginners because whoever wrote it has safely assumed that the reader has been developing Pro/E plug-ins for years. I finally had to make a tech support call to PTC India, the first programming related support call in my entire life, to help me get started.

Quite obviously, the reason for Pro/E still using antiquated code is due the fact that the company, and hence the product, is indeed old. But Autodesk is also an old company and AutoCAD 2010 has been written using the most recent version of Visual C++. In fact AutoCAD 2010 is the only CAD software I know that has been written in Visual C++ 2008. AutoCAD was rewritten in C++ more than a decade ago. So why didn’t PTC do the same? Well, because Pro/E still runs on Unix (the Sun and HP versions) and AutoCAD doesn’t. I am not sure what percentage of Pro/E users are running Unix. But I suspect it has to be a large number in order to justify PTC’s decision of holding Pro/E back.

As the saying goes, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Pro/E may be old, but she certainly ain’t broken. Having said that, judging by their API, I get the feeling that the code that goes to make up Pro/E is going to be a nightmare to maintain, let alone rewrite. I may be wrong, but my guess is that if PTC buys a company, like it did CoCreate, or if someone buys PTC, I highly doubt that Pro/E will integrate or get integrated with another product. At least I would not like to be the one in charge of making such an integration happen. I would prefer to shoot myself instead.

When I was at PTC World in Mumbai, I asked a couple of top PTC technical people about direct modelling and whether we would see some in Pro/E. The reply was a straight “No”. “Our customers are not asking for it. And if they do, then we have CoCreate for them”, one of them told me. I think I now know the reason why. I don’t think she will be able to take it.

I am a programmer, not much of a user. So I am looking at this purely from a programming point of view. But looking from a user’s perspective, this old lady still has the moves. She is extremely capable and can even put some of these newer damsels to shame. I can’t say for sure but I think her aged anatomy is probably what makes her powerful. Pretty much like how good old DOS was lightening compared to today’s sexy and sluggish Vista. In the past couple of years I have noticed a sudden craze towards making software “look” good. CAD vendors actually count these pretty features as enhancements, and I am not sure why. And some of these so called “enhancements” actually end up slowing things down.

People have used Pro/E to design airplanes and cars years ago and as I see it, they will continue to do so for a long time to come. If you ask me I prefer her the way she is. She is like old wine. Putting her in a new bottle is not going to make much of a difference and I am sure PTC knows it.

After attending COFES 2009 this April, I will be heading to the PTC HQ in Needham, where I hope to meet a few people who know her far more than I do. I have only taken off her coat. There is still a lot more to uncover. If you want to enjoy the show with me, watch this space.

SpaceClaim Gets Some More Dough

2009-03-31T19:10:00.004+05:30

These days it's nice to hear that a company has received additional funding from its investors as opposed to receiving bailouts from the government. Today SpaceClaim announced that it has secured another round of funding from its investors in order to "fuel ongoing investments in R&D and drive market demand for SpaceClaim’s 3D Direct Modeling solutions". A cool 7 million.

From an earlier article on this blog:

"Ever since SpaceClaim appeared on the scene, people (me including) have been talking about when they will be bought and by whom. I wanted to hear it directly from the horse's mouth. So I asked Chris [Randles, the SpaceClaim CEO]. "I have not heard anything to that effect", he quipped. "SpaceClaim is on solid footing. In these bad times when money is not easily available, we are getting ready for another round of funding. This goes to show that our investors are strong and believe in what we are doing."

BRX - Under The Hood

2009-03-31T17:54:00.003+05:30

Luc De Batselier, the CTO of Bricsys, was kind enough to let me in on a few details about the BRX SDK, that I attempted to explain yesterday. Apparently, before Bricsys embarked on the exercise of developing the BRX SDK, they made an attempt to count the number of functions that existed in the ObjectARX SDK. They arrived at a number of about 22,000. With that number I am actually surprised that they decided to proceed.

Today the BRX SDK has about 4,000 functions. Yes, that's only about 18%. But like I explained yesterday, these 4,000 functions are part of the most commonly used functions used by ARX developers. Luc estimates that these functions will cover about 50 to 70% of all existing ARX applications.

Bricsys engineers add about 30 new functions every week. The number does not seem large, but that's because each function added to the BRX SDK is fully backed by automated tests. Every function is checked for normal operation and error return values. This ensures that they maximize:
1) the correct functioning across different Bricscad versions.
2) compatibility with the AutoCAD platform, including the correct flow of error handling routines.
3) backward compatibility of the plug-in across different Bricscad versions.

It looks like quality is high on their priority list, which is a good thing. You don't get a second chance to make your first impression.

Luc disclosed what Bricsys has been working on and laid out their plans for the future, "Recently, we have started some extra development projects to support utility libraries like AModeler, HLR API and Boundary Representation in a code compatible way. This will open the door for the larger 3D client applications. We have finished adding support for 'deep cloning' and 'long transactions'. Currently we are adding support for 'custom object snap'. By the end of this year, we want to be able to support more than 90% of existing modules".

Years ago, when Bricsys announced that they were leaving the ITC to carry on with their own development, people thought that they were crazy. The ITC has still not been able to cough up the new IntelliCAD 7 based on ODA's DWGdirect SDK. Bricsys did that long ago with V8. They are now at Bricscad V9. This should be a bit embarrassing, to say the least, for the ITC.

If you are a programmer you may find the online Bricscad Developer Reference interesting. You can customize Bricscad V9 using a bunch of technologies:
LISP (LISt Processing)
DCL (Dialog Control Language)
COM (Component Object Model)
VBA (Visual Basic for Applications)
BRX (Bricscad Runtime eXtension)
DRX (DWGdirect Runtime eXtension)
SDS (decprecated)

To give you an idea, at SYCODE, we still use the antiquated SDS library to develop plug-ins for the current version of IntelliCAD.

You can get free access to the BRX SDK, simply by registering yourself as an application developer on the Bricsys website.

BRX Explained

2009-03-30T16:38:00.003+05:30

Bricsys released an ARX source-compatible SDK called BRX a while ago. Judging by the number of applications listed at their Applications page, I would say that quite a few third party developers have been using it. However, I have been receiving many questions regarding the BRX SDK from users, especially AutoCAD users, and a few developers as well. From the questions I get the feeling that people have not quite completely understood what “ARX source-compatible” means and how it can affect them. This article is written for end users, but I guess, some developers may find it helpful as well.

Let’s start from the beginning. When Autodesk developed AutoCAD they also created a SDK (Software Development Kit) called ObjectARX, which enabled third party developers to write plug-in applications that work inside AutoCAD. This SDK is basically a set of C++ classes and functions. For sake of simplicity, let’s assume that the ObjectARX SDK has a function called DrawLine. As a third party developer, I can use this function in the C++ code of my plug-in to draw a line in AutoCAD. I simply need to call this function in my plug-in code and supply it with input, in this case, a start point and an end point. But unlike LISP, I don’t give the source code to my customer. I need to build it into an .ARX file (basically a DLL) using the ObjectARX SDK and ship it to my customer, who then loads it into AutoCAD and runs a command which draws the line.

So as you can imagine, AutoCAD users who rely on such ARX plug-ins are virtually tied down to AutoCAD and cannot move to another CAD system unless the developers of the ARX plug-ins they use offer similar plug-ins for the other CAD system as well. Bricsys has decided to solve this problem in a unique way, by means of their ARX source-compatible BRX SDK, the “source-compatible” part of which I am now going to explain.

Say you are an AutoCAD customer and are using an ARX plug-in developed by me. You want to dump AutoCAD and are looking for an alternative. It looks like Autodesk has just given you another reason to do so. You look around and try Bricscad. It seems to fit your bill, both in terms of functionality and cost. But there is a problem. I don’t offer a version of my ARX plug-in for Bricscad. So it appears that you are stuck with AutoCAD. But as a third party developer I see this as an opportunity to make some money and at the same time, widen my product line. I take the existing C++ code of my ARX plug-in and rebuild it using the BRX SDK supplied to me by Bricsys. And behold, I get a BRX plug-in that works with Bricscad. You dump AutoCAD, purchase a license of Bricscad and a license of my BRX plug-in and we both live happily ever after.

But is it as simple and straightforward as that? And here is where all the skepticism and confusion starts. Does the BRX SDK contain each and every function of the ObjectARX SDK? The answer is no. But it does contain almost all the functions that are most commonly used. ObjectARX contains thousands of functions, most of which are rarely used. And frankly, I do not see the point in Bricsys spending their time and resources adding all of them to BRX.

Which begs the question: What happens if BRX does not have a function that my ARX plug-in uses? Take the DrawLine function I mentioned above. Suppose Bricsys has not yet implemented it in their BRX SDK, my BRX plug-in will not be able to draw a line in Bricscad.

Bricsys has a solution for that as well. When I build my C++ code containing unsupported functions I will get compilation errors, which will tell me exactly which functions are missing. I simply need to send the build log file containing these compilation errors to Bricsys. Their engineers will put these functions in the top of their priority list and start working on them immediately. Bricsys regularly releases updates of their BRX SDK, along with the corresponding version of Bricscad. Bricsys will do whatever it takes to add the missing functions as soon as possible. It is in their best interest to do so.

Another thing, Bricsys maintains binary compatibility across the same version of Bricscad. This means that they always add functions to the BRX SDK, never remove them. So I need not worry that a future build of Bricscad V9 will not load my BRX plug-in. Bricscad users are free to download and install updates of Bricscad V9 without having to bother about plug-in compatibility. This also means that I do not need to rebuild my BRX plug-in for each and every update of the BRX SDK. Once I successfully build my plug-in and it loads and runs properly in Bricscad V9, I can forget about it.

So if you are an AutoCAD user and no longer want to be one, Bricsys has a bailout plan specially designed for you. Contact your ARX plug-in developer and let him know about BRX. And if you are a third party developer, BRX may very well turn out to be an opportunity for you. And what’s more, Bricsys is doing all the heavy lifting so that you can sit back and count the money.

I hope this article has helped clear a few doubts about the BRX SDK. By no means do I consider myself an authority on BRX, but if you have any questions, please feel free to ask. If I know the answers I will reply. If I don’t, I will bluff. ;-)

Don't Buy My Book

2009-03-30T15:10:00.002+05:30

Don't buy my book if you are attending the ODA World Conference. The ODA is going to give a complimentary copy of my book to all attendees.

From ODA's press release:

Deelip Menezes, author of the book, remarked, “The Open Design Alliance is probably one of the most important organizations in the CAD world. Unfortunately, it probably also is one of the most misunderstood. The technologies offered by the ODA go far beyond just reading and writing DWG files. Through this book I hope to increase awareness about the ODA and its technologies.”

Earlier today I wrote about the agenda for the conference. If you are a CAD software developer, I am pretty sure that this conference will be well worth it.

Registration fee for the conference is $350, which includes entry to the conference and meals. I am told that there are limited seats. To register click here.

ODA World Conference - The Agenda

2009-03-30T14:00:00.002+05:30

The main purpose of the ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland, this April, is to highlight the ODA Software Platform and the technologies of its partner organizations. Take a look at the Conference agenda. One of the presentations caught my attention - the one by Jim Thorpe from Siemens PLM Software about their “D-Cubed 2D Dimensional Constraint Manager” or DCM.

One of the major enhancements in AutoCAD 2010 has been the geometric and parametric constraints, which I believe is not Autodesk’s invention. It appears that they licensed the D-Cubed 2D DCM from Siemens. No, I do not have inside information about this. I simply observed the copyright notices on the AutoCAD 2009 and 2010 about boxes and noticed that the following copyright notice has been added in 2010:

“D-Cubed 2D DCM © Copyright 2008 Siemens Product Lifecycle Management Software III (GB) Ltd.”

And now Siemens is presenting at the ODA World Conference. So putting two and two together, I guess the updated DWGdirect SDK for AutoCAD 2010, when it does come out, may have the D-Cubed 2D DCM tied to it. This also means that the new IntelliCAD 7 (or maybe a later version) may have the same geometric and parametric constraint system as AutoCAD.

This seems to be quite similar to how Autodesk initially uses the 3D solid modeling kernel from ACIS and the same found its way into the present day DWGdirect SDK. In fact, a presentation titled “ACIS 3D modeling engine” by Thomas Tillman from Spatial Corporation is right after the D-Cubed 2D DCM presentation by Siemens.

Another interesting presentation that I am looking forward to is by Fabien Chauvire of Redway3D about their Redsdk, an industrial grade 2D/3D graphics toolkit. I first saw Fabien presenting the Redsdk at the IntelliCAD World Meeting in Athens last year. Here is part of what I wrote about it at that time:

“He (Fabien) opened a 2D drawing of map of South Carolina in his test application containing 1.5 million curves and 72,000 text objects. He then zoomed and panned across the drawing and you could not see any time lag. He mentioned that he was using a medium performance laptop. Next he opened a model of a car designed in CATIA V5 containing 40 million triangles. He zoomed, panned and rotated and the performance was simply mind blowing.”

Fabien will demonstrate a successful DWG integration of his Redsdk. I am not quite sure what that means, although I have a good idea. In Athens an ITC programmer showed me a build of the new IntelliCAD 7 running the Redsdk, effortlessly navigating around a 3D model of a car having 100,000 triangles. I expect to see something more fascinating in Leiden.

Interestingly, earlier the same day, there is a presentation by Ron Fritz and Ken Royall from Tech Soft 3D on HOOPS, their development platform for high-performance applications. Here is something I wrote in the same post I mentioned earlier:

“A year ago, the ODA and Tech Soft 3D announced an integration between ODA's DGNdirect libraries with the HOOPS graphics components from Tech Soft 3D. The ITC watched and waited for the ODA to extend the integration to the DWGdirect libraries, the foundation of the IntelliCAD. Since this has not yet happened the ITC is now looking at other options. One option is Redway3D.”

So this is going to be interesting. With the ODA consisting of over 2000 members, I am not surprised that these 3D graphic technology companies are interested in its members.

There are a bunch of other presentations that I also look forward to. One called "Mobile DWG" by Wilfried Graebert from Graebert Gmbh, the company that has some fantastic CAD software for the handheld devices. The keynote will be delivered by buildingSMART co-CEO Bjørn Stangeland, where he will explain what his organization does and how it can work more closely with the ODA. There will be a presentation by Mauritz Botha of IMSI/Design on using the DWGdirect database as a common platform for file import and export filters, something that I know only too well about. I first met Mauritz at COFES 2008 last year and had an interesting conversation with him over lunch.

There will also be presentation by the ODA staff, people that I have been conversing with for many years now and look forward to meeting in person.

The third day is reserved for the annual ODA board meeting. There will also be a couple of courses on building a DRX application and an introduction to DWGdirect.NET. If you want to learn how to build a DRX application but cannot make it to the conference, buy my book "OpenCAD - A Step by Step Guide to Developing a Professional CAD Application". There is an entire chapter dedicated to developing DRX applications.

When time and technology permits I will be reporting the happenings of the ODA World Conference on this blog.

Time and Attention

2009-03-26T22:46:00.003+05:30

Every morning, before my driver drops me to office, we stop by the school of my 5 year old son, Reuben, and drop him as well. I sit in the co-driver's seat and Reuben sits at the back. He looks out of the window most of the time and minds his own business, while I am deep in thought planning the day that lies ahead of me.

A couple of weeks ago, Reuben asked me if he could sit on my lap on the front seat. I usually don't allow it for safety reasons. But since we do not encounter a highway on the way to his school there is not much traffic. So I let him sit on my lap with my seat belt on and my arms locked around him, just in case.

With Reuben in my arms I really could not continue planning my day and we ended up have a conversation as we were drove. He enjoyed the drive that day and I did too. It was a much better way to start my day. And I guess he felt the same.

The next day we did the same thing, and pretty soon it became a routine. He would run out to the car with his school bag and water bottle and start prancing about the co-driver's door till I opened it and let myself in. He would then jump in and onto my lap, as if it was the most existing thing to do in the world. In reality, to him, it was. And slowly I began to realize it.

Work takes up most of my time. And when I am home, I am mostly helping my wife with our other son, Russell, a one year old who is perpetually in a bad mood, thanks to his teething. I do keep time for Reuben on weekends. I take him fishing, sometimes go for a bike ride or take him to the movies. But this daily morning drive to his school has made me think.

Reuben's need for my time and attention is not a tap that can be turned off on weekdays and let open on weekends. He needs my time and attention every single day of the week. And I really don't have to do something elaborate like go fishing with him. Just conversing with him while he sits on my lap for a five minute drive to his school gives him unimaginable joy.

This has nothing to do with CAD software. But I don't know. I just felt like sharing this with you.

What's Inside? AutoCAD 2010

2009-03-24T21:11:00.002+05:30

Ralph Grabowski had been burning the midnight oil to figure out what's new and what's changed in AutoCAD 2010. He has just completed writing 26,000 words, 200+ illustrations, 130 pages, and 5 chapters making up the latest edition of his "What's Inside? AutoCAD 2010" ebook.

According to Ralph, "This ebook delves into every detail of using the new release of Autodesk's flagship software, including new and changed commands and system variables, undocumented commands, and system requirements." But wait. Shouldn't the AutoCAD 2010 documentation already contain most of this?

The ebook is priced at $19.50. But if you are an existing customer, you get a 30% discount.

Link

SYCODE Plug-ins Ready for AutoCAD 2010

2009-03-24T13:09:00.003+05:30

With AutoCAD 2010 shipping from today, I am pleased to announce that SYCODE's AutoCAD plug-ins, all 22 of them, have been updated to work with AutoCAD 2010 (32 bit and 64 bit). This means that we now support an entire decade of AutoCAD. To emphasize my point I will list all the versions of AutoCAD that our plug-ins work with:

AutoCAD 2000
AutoCAD 2000i
AutoCAD 2002
AutoCAD 2004
AutoCAD 2005
AutoCAD 2006
AutoCAD 2007
AutoCAD 2008 (32 Bit and 64 Bit)
AutoCAD 2009 (32 Bit and 64 Bit)
AutoCAD 2010 (32 Bit and 64 Bit)

So now we get to use this pretty logo.

At SYCODE we are committed to developing and providing support for our plug-ins for versions as early as is technically possible and feasible. I know this sounds like a line from a press release, but we actually are committed. In fact, once every while we regretfully turn away prospective customers who ask us to add support for AutoCAD 14. AutoCAD is such a fantastic piece of software, that versions more than a decade old are still in use today, something which Autodesk, in a way, may not be too happy about. But this really goes to show the kind of software that has been coming out from that company.

AutoCAD 2010 has been built using a new compiler and hence all plug-ins needed to be recompiled using the same compiler. While the porting was mostly uneventful, the process of testing each and every command in each and every version of AutoCAD was quite a long one. Apart from a few minor issues, I would say that the update happened quite to my satisfaction.

However, I must admit that this "forward thinking" way of naming software has wreaked havoc with my already convoluted mind. Just the other day, someone returned one of my checks because I dated it with the year 2010. You stare at a window called "AutoCAD 2010" long enough and 2009 begins to look like last year.

Books Don't Crash

2009-03-24T11:21:00.003+05:30

I am beginning to like this authoring stuff. I released my first book just yesterday and orders have already started flowing in. But that's not the only reason why I am in such a good mood this morning.

Up until now, I wrote software for a living. After someone purchases a license for one of my software products, certain things happen.

(1) The customer needs to install the software. He can face problems right then and there, since most of my products are plug-ins and need to be properly loaded into the host CAD application. I need to provide support to the customer.

(2) I need to give the customer a key to register the product on his computer. Since I live on the wrong side of the planet (at least in terms of CAD software), my customers sometimes need to wait for me to wake up, brush my teeth, walk my dog, have my breakfast and turn up in office before they get a key. But by that time, they are making plans to go to bed themselves. To solve this problem I am trying to get make this system instant and online. Anyways, this entire story repeats itself when the customer needs to transfer his license to a new computer.

(3) The product needs to work! This means the software needs to give the customer useful output without crashing. If it does not then I need to provide support and fix a problem that I sometimes do not experience myself. I once asked a customer to send me a screenshot when the error occurred. He stood three feet from his monitor, fished out his camera, took a snap and sent it to me. Luckily he sent the picture by email as an attachment and not by post.

(4) I need to constantly update my software so that it works with new versions of operating systems, CAD applications, their service packs, browsers, etc.

So basically, when someone purchases one of my software products, it is actually the beginning of a long term relationship, with me constantly striving to keep that relationship a good one. And for that I get paid. But when someone purchases one of my books (err... there's actually just one), I simply get paid. There are no licensing or support issues at all. I may need to revise my book probably once a year, but I highly doubt that my readers will not be able to continue working if I don't.

But, as a programmer there is one thing I simply love about authoring - Books Don't Crash. So if something cannot break, there is no need for me to fix it. And here is the best part. Let alone being pestered by customers for support, I don't even know who my customers are. My publisher has such a fantastic privacy policy that he will not tell me who purchased my book. I simply get to count the money, which is precisely how I would like to spend my time.

OK, the money in books may not be as much as software, but for the effort that goes into writing a book, it certainly appears to have an extremely high return on investment.

But try as I might, I still cannot get over my realization that Books Don't Crash. You have to be a programmer to really understand how good that feels.

OpenCAD - My First Book

2009-03-23T16:37:00.001+05:30

I have been making noise about the Open Design Alliance on this blog for some time now. Most of the noise has been about the misconceptions surrounding the ODA and its technologies. And now to justify the noise that I have been making, I have gone ahead and written a book about it. The 92 page book is titled "OpenCAD - A Step by Step Guide to Developing a Professional CAD Application". I think the best way to explain what the book is all about is to simply list its Introduction here.

Introduction

Ever since the Open Design Alliance (formerly the OpenDWG Alliance) was founded, it has been busy reverse engineering the DWG file format as and when Autodesk changed it. Due to this the ODA came to be known as the "hackers group" who give nothing but pain to Autodesk by offering their members libraries to read and write DWG files. Autodesk already has a library called RealDWG which reads and writes DWG files, but they are known not to license it to their business rivals. Hence the need for an organization such the ODA grew and the ODA delivered every time Autodesk changed the DWG file format.

My company, SYCODE (www.sycode.com), is a member of the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) as well as a member of the ODA. I have been keeping a close eye on the cat and mouse game between Autodesk and ODA for quite some time now. In all the confusion, law suits and out-of-court settlements, there is one important aspect of the ODA that has gone completely unnoticed. And the purpose and motivation for me to write this book is to shed some light on that particular and very interesting aspect.

Every time the ODA reverse engineered the DWG file format, they improved their technology, not surprisingly, by cloning that of Autodesk. One thing led to another and they finally ended up cloning Autodesk's ObjectARX SDK, the very foundation on which AutoCAD has been built. The ODA called their clone DWGdirect and needless to say, ODA members started using DWGdirect to read and write DWG files. And that is the problem which I hope to address by means of this book. DWGdirect is not just a SDK to read and write DWG files. It actually offers a full blown framework that can be used to develop a professional CAD application, complete with plug-in architecture and all. Applications built using the DWGdirect SDK are called DWGdirect hosted applications. The not yet released IntelliCAD 7 is one of them. Bricsys rewrote Bricscad as a DWGdirect hosted application in V8 itself.

This book is my attempt to show that the ODA offers far more than libraries to read and write DWG files. We will create the framework of a professional CAD application (which I have called OpenCAD) using nothing but Visual C++ 2005 and a bunch of ODA libraries. You will also learn how to create plug-ins that extend OpenCAD using the ODA's free DRX SDK. And of course, OpenCAD will be able to read and write DWG files as well.

This book is divided into two sections. Section I deals with creating the basic OpenCAD application, wiring it up with required ODA libraries and adding features to make it a full blown professional DWG viewer. Section II deals with adding plug-in architecture to OpenCAD and developing a plug-in that converts it into a DWG editor. We will also see how the plug-in developed for OpenCAD loads and runs in Bricscad V9 as well.

If you are an ODA member then you already have access to the DWGdirect SDK and you can start building OpenCAD or your own DWGdirect hosted application by following the instructions in Section I of this book. If you are not an ODA member you can download the OpenCAD source code and binaries from www.open-cad.com and start developing plug-ins for it or any other DWGdirect hosted application by following the instructions in Section II of this book.

The point of the OpenCAD software and this book is not to develop a full blown free CAD application. Rather my intention is to showcase the various technologies offered by the ODA, apart from reading and writing DWG files. We will first create OpenCAD as a DWG viewer and then add features as we proceed.

OpenCAD is not open source for the simple reason that the DWGdirect SDK is not open source. However, all the C++ source code used to build OpenCAD and its plug-ins are available free of cost at www.open-cad.com. I have also organized the source code by chapter. So if you want to skip a chapter or two you can do so.

I have used Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 and DWGdirect version 2.06 to develop OpenCAD and its plug-in. The ODA offers libraries for other compilers as well and you can very well use another compiler.

I write software for a living, not books. So I am not quite sure how this book is going to turn out. I am going to need all the criticism that I can get - good, bad and ugly. Please do give it to me.

If this book ends up helping you in any way or gives you a better understanding of the technologies offered by the ODA, do let me know. It will make me happy ;-)

So let's get right to it.

The book is available as a perfectly bound paperback book ($99) as well as a PDF eBook ($49). It comes with complete C++ source code which you can use to make a professional CAD application that makes you a whole lot more money than you spent on purchasing the book. The book also serves as a good primer on developing DRX plug-ins that work with DWGdirect hosted applications like Bricscad V9, which will also help you earn money. So you see, its all about spending some money to make a whole lot more money ;-)

For more details on this book visit www.open-cad.com.

And now, thanks to this book, you can henceforth respectfully refer to me as Author.

Front Cover

Back Cover

Will Autodesk Activate a Retired Product?

2009-03-22T17:27:00.002+05:30

I was trying to help an AutoCAD user at IntelliCAD.net who is unable to get a simple answer to what I believe is a simple question: "Will Autodesk activate a retired product?". The answer to this question would determine whether he would stick to AutoCAD or dump it for IntelliCAD.

This Autodesk customer has a license of AutoCAD 2006 and does not wish to upgrade for the simple reason that it does his job just fine. He has previously posed this question at Autodesk Discussion Groups in the hope that someone from Autodesk would reply. But that didn't happen. Surprisingly, his reseller tells him that Autodesk "may not" give him an activation code for AutoCAD 2006.

Autodesk has an entire section at its web site dedicated to activation - http://www.autodesk.com/activation. Here is part of one of the FAQ documents:

1.10 What if the company shuts down? I paid for the product and should be able to use it in perpetuity.
The Software End User License Agreement grants the user of an Autodesk product the right to use it in perpetuity. In the unlikely event of the company's shutting down, we will enable automatic approval of all activation requests or provide other technical means allowing users to continue using our products.

So it seems like the reseller is either ignorant or a liar. I will put my money on the latter.

Bricsys Developer Meeting

2009-03-21T13:29:00.003+05:30

Bricsys is taking the fight up Autodesk’s alley. They are organizing a Bricsys Developers Meeting this May. Basically a two day seminar for application developers to help them port their existing AutoCAD plug-ins over to the Bricscad platform. Bricsys could not be more clear in their message.

“Most DWG application developers have their roots in AutoCAD and have built business on it. With the recession hitting hard globally, many AutoCAD users and clients want to cut costs. Bricsys is your partner to minimize expenses on the CAD platform side so that you can maximize revenue on your applications. The only thing you have to do is recompiling your code for Bricscad.”

The seminar will be held at the Bricsys European headquarters in Ghent, Belgium on May 26 and 27, 2009. You can have one-on-one business and technical meetings with Bricsys management and developers on the days before and after the meeting. If you want to attend the meeting, click here.

You may not find me at the meeting as I will already be spending the first few days of May at the Bricsys headquarters in Ghent on my return from the ODA World Conference in neighboring Holland.

A Couple of Surveys

2009-03-19T23:05:00.002+05:30

Your email address could now be worth close to $4,000. Cyon Research is conducting a follow up survey to the one they did with Merrill Lynch last summer. That was a survey on CAD/PLM users, the report of which was published this January and could be purchased from Cyon Research for $1,995.

This survey is titled “Cyon Research Survey of Users of Software Tools for Design and Engineering” and I am told that its report will also be priced at $1,995. However, if you take part in this survey and submit your email address, you will be entitled to get its report for free. And what’s more, you will also get the report of the CAD/PLM survey for free as well. So that adds up to a cool $3,990 worth of reports.

Click here to participate.

Brad Holtz of Cyon Research is also conducting another survey with Peter Marks and Jim Brown for a presentation at COFES 2009 (which I will be attending). This survey is titled “Engineering Software Market Outlook Survey” and is aimed at determining the impact of the tattered world economy on engineering software. This one has just nine quick questions. You can keep an eye for the results of the survey on this blog.

Click here to participate.

The first survey is meant for end users of engineering software and will be open for two months. Whereas, the second survey is meant for end users as well as software developers, VAR's, vendors, etc. and will be open for only two weeks.

AutoCAD LT and Plug-ins

2009-03-09T22:41:00.004+05:30

I have kept this to myself for quite some time now, but I think I need to let it out. As far as possible I prefer to play by the rules. My company, SYCODE, is a member of the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN). Every ADN member, or for that matter, anyone who uses the ObjectARX SDK to develop plug-ins for AutoCAD, has to first agree to the terms of the ObjectARX License Agreement, which clearly prohibits the use of the SDK to develop plug-ins for AutoCAD LT.

"You may not use the Software to develop applications for AutoCAD LT®, DWG TrueConvert™, and DWG TrueView™, as the aforementioned products are nonextensible applications and the use of the Software to develop applications for these products is expressly prohibited by this Agreement."

Now this post is not about whether Autodesk is right or wrong in putting this restriction. After all, it's their software and they are free to restrict or allow access to it as they please. I am writing this post in light of the recent demise of LT-Extender, a LT enabler by Torsten Moses. Or maybe suicide would be a more deserving term in this case. This post is about how one ingenious ADN member has been able to extend its middle finger towards Autodesk and its ObjectARX License Agreement.

The ADN member I am referring to is ASVIC, a developer of software related to Mechanical, Piping, HVAC and Structural Steel Detailing. They simply bundle a LT enabler along with their software, in this case drcauto's LT Toolkit. Their usage instructions lay it out:

"Mech-Q for AutoCAD LT2000-9 requires a Lisp Enabler to work. The Mech-Q installation will also install the Lisp Enabler.

(snip)

The LT Toolkit serial number and authorization code will be sent to you either by email or with the software CD when you download a Mech-Q demo or when you purchase."

And if you want to purchase LT Toolkit only you can do that as well. ASVIC resells LT Toolkit and I guess that is how they bundle it with their products.

Out of curiosity, I asked the ADN Program Manager what Autodesk had to say about this, especially since ASVIC is listed as an Autodesk Partner and its products are listed as Autodesk Partner Products at the Autodesk web site. I was told that Autodesk would investigate and take appropriate action if necessary. That was two years ago!! ASVIC is still listed as an Autodesk Partner and its products are still listed as Autodesk Partner Products at the Autodesk web site.

So I am now trying to figure out the point of all this. If Autodesk does not mind it's partners bundling LT enablers in their products and even recommends them to its customers by listing them as partner products on its web site, then why not just let AutoCAD LT load plug-ins?

Am I missing something here?

DoubleCAD XT Pro

2009-03-04T21:22:00.003+05:30

With AutoCAD and AutoCAD LT sales dropping by a third IMSI has put its plan into action today by releasing DoubleCAD XT Pro, their AutoCAD LT killer.

Priced at $695, which includes one year of premium technical support, IMSI claims that DoubleCAD XT Pro is "an AutoCAD work-alike, but better, for half the price". I have written about DoubleCAD in the past and intend to take it for a spin when I manage to find the time. But judging by number of virtual post it notes on my desktop, it does not look like it will be anytime soon.

According to their web site, IMSI wants to "shake up the CAD world". Looks like Autodesk is shaking already. So can IMSI rattle them with their daring DoubleCAD XT Pro and the free DoubleCAD XT combo?

Way Off Topic

2009-03-03T10:08:00.001+05:30

Some of you may find this interesting.

Autodesk Responds to the PolyFace Mesh Issue

2009-02-24T12:15:00.004+05:30

Kean Walmsley, Senior Manager - Developer Technical Services or Autodesk responded to my post about the PolyFace Mesh issue. This is what he said:

Deelip,

A little on how this works from Autodesk's side of things. I'll let you decide whether you "lost on votes" or not.

My team (Developer Technical Services - the staff providing the various technical services via ADN) receives bug reports and enhancement requests from ADN members, which we then validate and submit to our various engineering teams.

Once we've logged a Change Request (CR) in our CRM system, we report back to the person submitting the issue with an ID that can be used in future to refer to that CR. We also make sure we ask the person submitting the issue to justify the priority of the issue, so that we can help prioritise dealing with it.

That's our standard procedure... now for how timing can affect things.

You submitted this particular limitation in early December 2006. Now of course you're going to say "but that's given you two years to deal with this!", but let me explain why this unfortunately isn't quite how it works from our side. You submitted the issue at what was unfortunately a very late stage of our development cycle for AutoCAD 2008, and without some justification of external urgency/priority, we didn't have much choice but to defer the handling of the issue for that release. Early on in the development cycle we are much more open to such requests, but as the cycle proceeds we get very conservative - which I know can feel frustrating, but is also a pragmatic approach for maintaining the quality of the AutoCAD product/platform.

OK, your next question is probably "so why wasn't this carried over automatically for handling in the next release?" Once the CR is in the system and gets deferred for a particular release, we wait for one of two events to occur: either the developer submitting the issue gets back to us with a "business case" so that we can help engineering decide where to prioritise, or we have other developers submit the same issue, which then get linked into the same CR and cause us to ask engineering to take another look into it. In this case we unfortunately received neither a further justification from your side for making the change nor any subsequent report from a developer complaining about the issue.

When I say a business case, here's what we actually asked for in our email to you:

"If you would like to provide a business case towards implementing this Change Request, please append it to this current case and we will forward it to our development team. Your providing a business case can increase the urgency of your request with our engineering team. Please provide as much information as possible, including the impact of this issue on your application, the number of users affected, and the expected revenue impact for both you and Autodesk. "

To be clear about this... we don't necessarily need a lengthy, detailed or even a financially impressive justification for us to prioritise handling an issue, but we do need to hear from someone (whether you or someone else) that this issue is worthy of resource investment. If we had received some kind of justification, even something like "as models gets bigger, it's going to be increasingly important for customers to deal with huge meshes", then that would probably have been enough to at least have someone from engineering evaluate the amount of work required to address this.

So, a couple of suggestions for getting changes made to Autodesk software: firstly, always let us know when an issue is important to you. I know that might sound silly, but when you have software that is used by millions of end-users with a development community numbering in the thousands of companies, squeaky wheels get more attention. So be vocal.

Also, keep track of your pending CR IDs and don't be shy about sending them into my team to get status updates (and to give us a prod). We can tell you whether issues are basically in a holding pattern (i.e. a black hole) or whether something is likely to happen. As a matter of course my team now sends status updates to developers when the status of their issues changes, but that's only a process we've had in place for a year or two (and issues submitted prior to that won't be covered).

I hope this helps explain some of what went on behind the handling of this issue.

Kean Walmsley

Senior Manager
Developer Technical Services
Autodesk

I appreciate Kean's reply, which has given me (and probably you as well) a deeper insight as to how things happen in a company as large as Autodesk.

The Autodesk approach seems to be reasonable, but I find a fundamental flaw in the logic they employ. Before I delve deeper, I would like to say that the approach being discussed here pertains to the manner in which Autodesk handles Change Requests from its developer partners, which may be very different from how they handle requests from end users.

As I see it there are two kinds of Change Requests - those that help the developer and those that help Autodesk. Lets keep customers out of this for the moment. I think this whole idea of a developer being asked to submit a business case make sense only when the requested change is going to primarily help the developer. For example, suppose a developer wants Autodesk to add mesh boolean functionality to AutoCAD because a plug-in that he is developing needs it. In such a case, Autodesk is perfectly justified in requesting the developer to submit a business case for Engineering to review and decide whether it is worth making the change. But if a developer calls attention to a fundamental flaw and limitation of AutoCAD, in this case, something as serious as invisible and unselectable geometry and something which even AutoCAD's own Audit command cannot fix, I do not see the sense in asking the developer to provide a business case. Its like Obama asking the CIA to convince him that Osama with a nuke is a bad idea.

Recently, when it came to my notice that Autodesk had still not fixed the PolyFace Mesh, I brought it up with them and rightly enough, according to the system they have in place, they asked me to provide a business case. I am a software developer and whenever someone finds a bug with my software I thank him from the bottom of my heart, go ahead and fix the problem, let him know when it is fixed and thank him once again for helping me improve my software. So when Autodesk asked me for a business case to convince them why AutoCAD should be able to handle large meshes or why it should not have invisible and unseletable geometry, it ticked me off. This is part of an email I sent them:

"You have to be kidding me. As a well meaning and concerned partner I have done my part in pointing out the problem. I have done my part in suggesting a solution and now I have done my part in reminding you to solve the problem. I do not have the time nor the patience to create a business case that explains common sense."

Subsequently, after being told that, as a rule, Engineering would not consider any Change Request unless there is a business case attached to it or unless it was a stop ship issue (crash), I did supply a business case. Armed with my business case, my contact at Autodesk tried his best to convince Engineering, but it was too late. The new DWG format was already locked by then and changing it would mean conducting extensive regressing testing which would throw everything off track.

I still think I lost on votes. If more people had made a noise about this issue, it would have been noticed and I would not have been writing this. But after reading Kean's reply, I have also come to realize that I made the mistake of assuming that someone at Autodesk would see the sense in my request and fix the problem. But their system is not designed that way and I sincerely hope that they do something about it.

I have learned my lesson. The next time I submit a change request to Autodesk I know exactly what to do.

SpaceClaim Listens

2009-02-23T14:35:00.003+05:30

In my last post I mentioned how my PolyFace Mesh related service request was ignored by Autodesk. In a stark contract, this post is about a company called SpaceClaim that does listen to what people are saying about their software. My only hope is that they continue to listen even after they have a large and probably unmanageable customer base like Autodesk does.

On 14th October 2008, I wrote a piece for upFront.eZine regarding OpenRP and how it solves problems related to the STL file format. In it I wrote:

"To store the geometric data of an assembly (many parts), the STL file would need many 'solid'/'endsolid' blocks -- which is not allowed by the STL format. Some CAD vendors, notably SpaceClaim, threw the STL standard to the wind by generating ASCII STL files with many 'solid'/'endsolid' blocks, one for each solid part in an assembly. You may think this is a good change, but I find it careless."

And I went ahead to explain why. That same day, Kevin Leblanc, Manager of Technical Services at SpaceClaim, contacted me to clarify things. I explained to him why I wrote what I wrote and he promised to fix the problem in the next release or service pack. And that is precisely what he did. I am extremely pleased to report that SpaceClaim 2009 now outputs STL files correctly. In fact, they have gone ahead and given the user the flexibility to output STL files per design, component or body, which I believe is excellent.

My world happens to revolve around CAD data exchange. 155 out of our 174 products are file import or export plug-ins for CAD systems. CAD users all over the world contact us every day with problems related to some file format or another. What pisses me off the most is when I see irresponsible software developers output CAD files with blatant disregard to the file format specification.

A typical example is the IGES file format, which is supposed to be a standard neutral file format, specially designed to ease the transfer of data from one CAD system to another. Over the years CAD vendors have abused the IGES file format by making variants of it to suit their specific needs, thereby defeating the very purpose of a neutral file standard. One look at the Rhinoceros IGES export options dialog box gives you an idea of the magnitude of the problem.

There are 60 types of "standard" IGES files. I don't think I need to say more.

The PolyFace Mesh

2009-02-20T18:12:00.005+05:30

Two years ago I posted an article on this blog ("The long and short of AutoCAD's PolyFace Mesh") reporting a problem in the way AutoCAD stores a PolyFace Mesh object in a DWG file. I ended the article with:

"The irony of all this is that over the years Autodesk has revised the DWG file format a number of times, more recently to make it more difficult for people like ODA to reverse engineer it. I only wish they had changed the short to a long and added real value to it. There are supposedly billions of DWG files out there. Too bad not a single one can store a mesh with more than 32,767 vertices."

Two years ago I registered a formal service request with Autodesk regarding this issue and at that time I was told that this situation would be remedied only when they next change the DWG format, which was in AutoCAD 2010.

Today, with great disappointment, I have to report that AutoCAD 2010 will not be able to store a PolyFace Mesh containing more than 32,767 vertices. Why? Because they still did not change the blessed short to a long. Why? There were not enough votes for my service request.

I am trying to understand how these big companies work. From this experience I have to assume that they receive so many service requests and bug reports that they simply cannot fix all of them. I can understand that. So things get prioritized based on how many "votes" each request gets. This line of thought leads me to believe that there is nobody in Autodesk who is entrusted with the job of using a little common sense to figure out for himself whether a service request is worth attending to, without looking at the number of votes it has received.

All other CAD systems I know can deal with large meshes. All mesh formats I know use long's instead of short's when storing mesh data. Any high resolution terrain mesh will exceed this limit. Almost all dental scans with exceed the limit a few times over. And considering that Autodesk is laying special focus on 3D in AutoCAD 2010, a little common sense should have been enough to conclude that AutoCAD 2010 should support large meshes as well.

Now lets consider how AutoCAD behaves with large meshes. I open a DWG file containing a single large PolyFace Mesh in AutoCAD 2010. The drawing window comes up empty, but if I run the "list" command type "all" at the "Select objects" prompt, AutoCAD reports that it found one object and proceeds to list it as a PolyFace Mesh. So I know that the mesh is there somewhere. Now let's try and view its properties. Since I cannot select an object that I cannot see, I run the "properties" command and do an "Edit->Select All". This is what I get.

As you can see the PolyFace Mesh has -1218 vertices (yes, that's a negative number) and no faces. Let me explain. In programming parlance when a variable goes out of range, it loops around and goes negative. So you can imagine that this is no small problem. Firstly the mesh is not visible and secondly it has an invalid definition. OK, now lets try and fix it. I run the "audit" command and choose to fix errors. Audit did mention a problem with the mesh (vertex count less than zero) but then reported no errors and fixed nothing. It could not fix it because the PolyFace Mesh data structure is not capable of holding that kind of data. I guess it could have exploded the mesh into individual 3D Face objects, but with the mesh definition in the DWG file corrupted, that does not seem like a possibility either.

And so I still have a DWG file that does not show the PolyFace Mesh and which still has invalid geometry. Why? Because someone at Autodesk didn't find my service request had enough votes. So why didn't customers complain about this? I guess because they probably don't know that the problem exists. You cannot find fault in something that you cannot see or don't know about. The sad thing is that this very serious problem has a very simple no-brainer solution which I provided two years ago to Autodesk. But since they use this weird fire fighting approach of putting out only the largest fires and ignoring the small ones, without employing common sense to think for themselves, the problem still remains.

So for all these years AutoCAD users have been unknowingly working with invisible and invalid PolyFace Meshes, and if Autodesk keeps up with their three year cycle, this problem may be solved only in AutoCAD 2013, that too only if enough customers make a noise about it.

I find it very hard to believe that someone at Autodesk analysed my service request and decided not to fix the problem. I get the feeling that my service request lost on votes and just did not come up for hearing.

Neil Peterson

2009-02-20T10:44:00.002+05:30

Continuing my series of interviews of programmers who I have worked with over the years, here is one with Neil Peterson, CTO of the Open Design Alliance. I have met Neil on two occasions - on the sidelines of COFES 2008 and at the IntelliCAD World Meeting in Athens last year.

How did you get into CAD software development? What was life like before the ODA?

Before ODA I worked for a small company called ImageMark Software Labs, who provided conversion support for a large number of graphics and engineering file formats, including DWG, IGES, PDF, PowerPoint, and most common graphics file formats. At ImageMark I had my first experience with CAD development working on an importer for R13 DWG. Prior to that I had worked with a number of presentation applications such as Corel Draw, PowerPoint, etc. The CAD work was more interesting and more challenging. Working on R13 was the most difficult task I had faced up to that point in my career, and it was that work that allowed me to step in and handle development work for the ODA.

You were the first employee of the ODA and today you are the CTO? How much has changed, apart from salary?

For me everything has changed. I was the first developer hired in 1999, and in the early years I did everything—development, bug fixing, testing, porting, client support, documentation. When I was first hired, AutoCAD 2000 had just been released and there were several hundred ODA members depending on the ODA to support it ASAP. Although I had worked extensively with DWG at my previous job, I had never worked with the ODA source code—needless to say, my first few months were interesting and intense. We got the 2000 support finished, and I had the opportunity to work closely with a number of ODA member companies. Our early success allowed us to start expanding our development team, and as the team has expanded over the years I have handed off most of my original day-to-day responsibilities. I now work as a coordinator and enabler for our various teams. I’ve had the opportunity to watch a number of talented and hard-working engineers grow into senior members of our development team, and it has been a pleasure for me to continue working with our developers as CTO.

Do you still code? Why?

I still enjoy coding, but it’s not my role any more. My current focus is on managing the growth of our organization, improving communication with existing and potential ODA members, and making sure our developers have everything they need to be successful.

What do you feel when people call the ODA a “bunch of hackers”?

I don’t take it personally. Anyone making such claims hasn’t taken a serious look at our software. Most people in our industry are aware that we perform a critical service by providing open access to the DWG file format. But our software has evolved over the past 10 years, and we now have a full-featured CAD development platform and not just a DWG I/O library. This evolution is clearly demonstrated by the fact that we now have several member companies building full CAD systems using our platform as the kernel. One of our goals this year is to get this message out to our membership and to the general public. For anyone who is interested in learning more about our software, the ODA World Conference will be held in Leiden, The Netherlands on April 27-29 this year. The conference will showcase our latest software, provide an opportunity to meet our development staff, and serve as a forum for discussions. Registration for the World Conference is now open on the ODA web site.

How much has changed at the ODA after Arnold took over as president?

Things have changed dramatically at the ODA since Arnold took over. Our infrastructure has been significantly upgraded. We’ve hired several key people to manage various parts of the organization. Our development and QA teams have grown. Communication with members has improved. Arnold has also been instrumental in initiating relationships with companies like Spatial and TechSoft3D, allowing us to provide integration solutions for third-party components such as ACIS and HOOPS. Overall the ODA is a much stronger organization today than it was a few years ago.

Autodesk is changing the DWG format for AutoCAD 2010. More than a thousand ODA members (including myself) are relying on you to deliver. Do you manage to get sound sleep at night?

I’m sleeping OK. This is the 5th DWG format change that I’ve been involved with as a developer and manager. All of our engineers understand how critical this work is, and we are ready to face this challenge.

The file size of all the ODA libraries add up to more than 12 GB. How long does it take to build all of them?

It of course depends on the platform, compiler and actual hardware, but average build time for a full set of our libraries is around 30 minutes on a reasonably fast machine.

As the CTO of the ODA do you wish to see different variants of the DRX SDK floating around? If not, can you do anything to stop it?

We want to see a single DRX standard. We take this issue seriously, and we are working with members to ensure that anyone using our DRX technology is maintaining compatibility. Member companies can build extensions on top of DRX, but they are contractually required to maintain compatibility with our core SDK.

What is stopping the ODA from developing a product for CAD end users?

Our member companies develop a wide range of end-user applications. If we were to start developing end user products, we would be in direct competition with our membership. We are a member-driven organization, and currently end-user products are not in our charter.

Will the DWGdirect SDK ever be made source compatible with ObjectARX? Don’t tell me ITC members are not asking for it.

Source compatibility with ObjectARX has never been our goal. We have a better API than ARX in many respects—for example, client code using our libraries is generally cleaner and more compact than ARX code due to our smart pointer usage, exception handling, and other features. We also run on every major UNIX platform, while ARX is Windows-only. Out of 1000+ member companies, we of course have individuals who would prefer to see us move in a slightly different direction on specific issues—but overall we do a good job of finding solutions which provide maximum benefit for the majority of our membership.

I look forward to meeting Neil once again at the first ODA World Conference in Leiden, Holland this April.