As most of you are aware SolidWorks 2010 is only a few months away from release (currently in Beta 2).  A few weeks ago a group of us bloggers had the awesome opportunity to go to the headquarters of SolidWorks Corporation and see first hand just what to expect in the upcoming release.

Similar to last year’s release SolidWorks 2010 was built around a focus of 3 different things.  These things were:

• improved work experience
• trusted reliability
• depth of function

The end goal for the developers was to make the end user be able to work smarter & faster during their day to day design process.  Over 30% of the development time was spent on the areas of performance, reliability, and predictability.  One example of this that was demonstrated to us while we were there was with the delete face feature.  In SolidWorks 2009 and previous versions the feature was a resource hog and took around 16 seconds to rebuild.  In SolidWorks 2010 when this was demonstrated in took right around 3.5 seconds.  Now that is an improvement if you ask me!

The developers also wanted to make sure that SolidWorks 2010 offered a better work experience for the end user.  Some of the areas they focused on in order to accomplish this was a completely revamped installation process using the SolidWorks Installation Manager (SWIM).  I will touch on this more in an upcoming post but let me say here that it is a big improvement in my eyes and is a lot more streamlined than the previous SWIM’s.

Another area that was improved in regards to the user experience is a whole new support system (help files).  By SolidWorks 2010 SP0 you will be able point your help files to an online database that is always being updated.  In other releases SolidWorks would have to wait for the next service pack in order to update the help files but not anymore.  Now there was some concern from the bloggers about SolidWorks having to always go out on the network in order to get these files and how it would affect the performance and also about IT departments that have blocked out various internet sites.  SolidWorks representatives said that the performance should not be affected by this and that you will also have help files locally on your machine in case you can not get them online.  If this is the case you just would not be able to benefit from the constantly updated support files.

The other area in regards to user experience that was mentioned was a more consistent and intuitive user interface.  Automatic FeatureWorks turn on when you edit an imported part and different functionality like quick access to move face are examples of this improvement.

All in all I think that SolidWorks 2010 is going to be a great release, even better than 2009 which in my eyes was a welcome release compared to SolidWorks 2008.  I appreciate that SolidWorks Corporation seems to be listening to the end users and are focusing on things like reliability and performance as opposed to all of the “flashy, cool” new products.

In the upcoming weeks I will be posting reviews of some of the SolidWorks 2010 highlights here.  Many of the other bloggers will also be doing reviews on SolidWorks 2010 that may overlap with what you see here.  The nice thing about reading some of these reviews from the bloggers is that many of us have different perspectives on new functionality because of how we use it so I encourage you to check out all of the “SolidWorks Blog Squad” blogs in the upcoming couple of months to see exactly what you can expect in this new release.  You can find links to these other blogs in the side bar on the right side of the screen.