Top 10 Enhancements as read at SolidWorks World 2011:

10. Pressing ESC return to interface
9. File version compatibility
8. Ideas seclum in from aviabe all the time
7. Convert solid body to surface
6. Enhanced Equations
5. Feature Freeze
4. SolidWorks should cleanly uninstall itself
3. Dangle children instead of delete
2. Better utilize processor cores
1. Angle mates that don’t flip around

Before I comment, apologies for #8. I have no idea what I wrote. I remember giggling with glee as they posted #9, thus #8 in my notes is quite illegible.

If you look at the past, there are some classics on here that have been on the list since I was just a little Engineering Data Specialist Man (#9, #3)…there are some that I have no idea how they became a top ten vote getter (#7, #4) and others were actually mentioned as likely to be completed in SolidWorks 2012 (#6, #4).

So unless you are that guy who keeps voting for #7, keep voting and submitting your enhancement requests through the customer portal. It is your best way to drive the future of SolidWorks.

It is widely known that the third day of SolidWorks World is even more exciting than a Celine Deion concert. This is because they give us our fist sneak peek of what may be in the next version of SolidWorks. I took several pages of notes of new feature happiness. If you are good I’ll go through them with you.

Since I am an “always eat the dessert first” kinda guy, I am going to start with my favorite new feature of my favorite topic on my favorite day.

Large Design Review: The presenters displayed a new option in the SolidWorks “2012″ Open dialog named, “Large Design Review”. Very quickly a very large assembly appeared on the screen. Much faster than what a lightweight or perhaps even a speed pack assembly would open. They were able to zoom in and out and rotate the file with great performance. Measure, section views and even the ability to select on parts and see them highlighted in the tree structure were available. It felt like you were looking at an assembly through eDrawings Pro….but here was the real cool thing. They selected a part, chose to open it, made a change to the part. Then when they went back to the assembly the part was updated. Cool. Way Cool.

Think how this is going to be used. First thing in the morning you are going to open the top level assembly in this new review mode, and you are going to use the assembly to choose what parts you want to work on. No more navigating through any directory structure or even using a PDM search trying to find the files you need. The files you need are all right in front of you – a graphical file browser!

I wonder if it might also finally make lightweight nearly obsolete.

I’ll give you some hints on the location:

1. This place has 70 miles of beaches surrounding it.
2. The GPS coordinates are: 32°42′54″N 117°09′45″W
3. The average high and low temperatures in February are 66°F/51.5°F.
4. There is an average of 6.6 rainy days and 228.8 hours of sunshine.

Tired of guessing? Well the location for SolidWorks World 2012 is….
San Diego, California!!!

I look forward to seeing everyone there.

(source for data: Wikipedia)

1. Freeze
2. Grab a pen and a pad
3. Write your thoughts down, so you don’t forget them
4. Log into the customer portal and submit an Enhancement Request (located under ‘My Support’).

But for the next month or so, you’ll also be able to post your ideas with a chance to have them voted into the top 10 of the year!  Just click on this link (you’ll need to be logged into the forum, so if you don’t have an account create one)…

…and start submitting/voting for your favorite enhancements by clicking the ‘Create an idea’ link on the right.  The top 10 ideas will be presented in San Antonio during SolidWorks World and be at the top of the development team’s to-do list!  SolidWorks’ ability to listen to their enormous user base (1.4 million) is what keeps them ahead of the pack.

So get busy, or BE QUIET!  : )

By the way, I just littered the submission board with 15 ideas of my own.  Here are my favorites (again, make sure you’re logged in for links to work): Weldment Profiles to use Configurations, Auto Zoom ‘Normal To’ for Sketches Option

Monday the 24th:

• Jeff Sweeney presents “How to Create a Best Practice Document” @ 1:30pm
• Robert Warren & Josh Spencer present “SolidWorks Utilities and The Kitchen Sink” @ 1:30pm
• Bill Reuss presents “CAD is not flat – 2D to 3D with Sheet Metal [Hands-on]” @ 2:45pm
• Jordan Tadic presents “Rendering Like a Pro (in less than 30 minutes) [Hands-on]” @ 2:45pm
• Jeff Sweeney presents “A Story of Implementing SolidWorks Enterprise in a Global Corporation” @ 2:45pm
• Randy Simmons presents “Introduction to SolidWorks Routing (Tubing/Conduit/Piping ONLY) [Hands-on]” @ 2:45pm

Tuesday the 25th:

• Josh Spencer presents “Staying on Track with the Design Checker [Hands-on]” @ 1:30pm
• Keith Rice presents “Debugging the Most Brutal Install and Startup Issues” @ 4:30pm
• Randy Simmons presents “Introduction to SolidWorks Routing (Tubing/Conduit/Piping ONLY) [Hands-on]” @ 4:30pm

Wednesday the 26th:

• Keith Rice presents “Taking Macros to the People: Hands on for Beginners” @ 10:30pm
• Jordan Tadic presents “Surfacing Tricks for Solid Modeling” @ 2:45pm

If you haven’t registered yet, JUST DO IT at the link below (notice the link for a justification letter on the front page)!

Basically, if you’ve ever taken a 4-day essentials class and thought that was a lot to absorb, imagine four days of non-stop learning, networking, and excitement while being able to choose the topic for each and every hour of the day.  Additionally, there will be all kinds of fun events like the exclusive CSWE/CSWP event.  Hope to see you there!

I decided to do something different, I followed the Data Management track for all of the sessions I attended. I am glad I did, there were some great sessions given by top notch presenters: Jerry Winters, Dan Burmenko, Joy Garon, Randy Simmons, Jeff Sweeney, … [though my name got left off of the program...what's up with that?! That's the real question we should be asking Kerri Dunne.]

Here is what I thought was interesting. The session Randy and I gave had 40 attendees – which was the most attended session I saw. One session had six attendees, the average was twenty. Where was everyone? Attendance was announced at 5,000, there were 20 sessions per time slot, taking into account people playing hookie or spending time in the Partner Pavilion, you’d still expect a hundred or so in these sessions wouldn’t you?

I learned several sessions had over 200 attendees, so people were going to the sessions, the presenters and topics were good, why is interest so low for this track?

Does this mean the average attendee takes data management for granted? Perhaps they are not in a position within their company to make decisions at this level? Did I screw up and all of the other tracks were that much better? Does the average attendee work for companies that have data management all figured out?

All questions no answers, just giving you something to ponder.

San Antonio seems like a nice second choice though. We’ll get ‘em next year Columbus!

Here is a list of the “big hitters” as they presented them:

• Defeature
  • This is a new assembly feature that will make it very easy for you to dumb down your models before giving them to a customer. This will be very helpful so you don’t have to give away all intellectual property if you want to share space claiming information with your customers. In the demo they just picked a few mounting holes and important faces and SolidWorks did the rest of the work of simplifying the model!
• Revolve up to surface
  • New end condition in the revolve command. No more cleanup after the revolve command or calculating the total number of degrees you want to revolve! Finally!
• Photoview Preview
  • As you add textures and materials to your design, you can have a little preview window open to see how your changes will look rendered real time.
• Better Memory Usage
  • Here they showed a graph comparing memory usage doing typical operations for SolidWorks 2010 and 2011 -some operations seemed to improve memory usage by about 20%
• Plainer Simulation
  • Imagine being able do FEA on a cross section view of your file. Easy to setup and very fast to run right? Then (make sure you are sitting down for this) once you are happy with the results having the ability to extrapolate the cross section results to your full model! The example they used was a symmetrically loaded disk shape…I am hopeful that nearly any symmetrical condition would work. ??
• Dimension Layouts
  • This will be a nice drawing productivity enhancement. Automatically stagger or space your dimensions in a drawing view.
• Design Checker in tasks
  • The only SolidWorks Enterprise PDM enhancement they announced. This is a new task that can check your files against the rules you have defined in the design checker. Maybe the design checker will get the respect it deserves now?
• Lightweight welds
  • Not sure I fully understood this one. It reminded me of cosmetic threads for weld beads…but we’ve had this…I did notice a killer new interface for creating these lightweight welds and some new assembly features (i.e. chamfers and weld gaps) these will make creating weldments from regular parts much easier. (Could this be a key to removing the weldment feature in the future??)
• Piping enhancements
  • I’m not a piping guy, so I couldn’t tell what was new vs what we already have. Looked pretty easy though
• Walk through
  • We’ve had the ability to do a walk through with motion, this seemed a little easier to setup and run. They picked the floor face, an upward direction and we able to drive through their model.
• Feature Lock
  • Imagine making a change to a rather large part. One of the things that makes this process slow is that if SolidWorks decides it wants to rebuild your part, not much you can do but twiddle your thumbs. This option will allow you to select features to not rebuild -makes for a significant performance improvement.

No Lenard Nimoy, but Mark Snider’s acting skills almost made up for it.

Top 10 Enhancements read at SolidWorks World 2010:

While I can appreciate all of these enhancements, and would love to have them in the product today…how did #1 become #1? #1 would only affect users a few times a year, how could users pick something that would be used so seldom compared something that could help them perform their everyday tasks? Of these ten, here is how I would have ordered them:

10. SolidWorks should cleanly uninstall itself. (..and many others before this one!)
9. Graphical map of references
8. On the fly equations & Dialog boxes
7. Option to dangle children and not have to delete them
6. Exploded views for weldments
5. Better utilization of CPU/cores
4. Allow more types of assembly features
3. Increase stability
2. Simplify video card requirements (almost the same thing as #3)
1. File compatibility between versions