Last week the official production release of SolidWorks 2010 SP3.0 went live in the SolidWorks Customer Portal. With this update there is a major enhancement that was made to the dimension palette which received some serious attention here during a previous post on that tool. I will do an upcoming post on this soon. Another big change to the SP3.0 release was a name change to one of the SolidWorks products.
The product formerly known as DWGeditor is now called SolidWorks 2D Editor. This name change stems from a lengthy court battle between Dassault Systemes SolidWorks and Autodesk over the use of the DWG. You can see more about what that was about here if you are interested. Anyways, there are some things that you need to know when making the jump to SP3.0 as far as the SolidWorks 2D offering is concerned.
When you do the standard update process using the SolidWorks Installation Manager you usually can start it, walk away, and be all set when you return. However, with the name change to the product there are a few additional things that you will need to do in order to make sure that all of your programs are up to date. Here is what you will need to know in order to stay up to date.
1. DWGeditor is now named SolidWorks 2D Editor (pretty similar icons, huh?)
is now 
2. You will notice in the picture below that there is no mention of DWGeditor or SolidWorks 2D Editor during the update process. Proceed with the standard update process as normal.
3. Once the update has finished you will see at least 2 different SolidWorks programs listed in your control panel. Click any of them and select uninstall.
4. Once you have launched the uninstall process, you will get a screen similar to the one shown below. UNCHECK all of the components OTHER than the DWGeditor 2010 item. Click “Remove Items” in the lower right hand corner to proceed with uninstalling DWGeditor.
5. Once you have completed uninstalling DWGeditor, log into the SolidWorks Customer Portal and on the Downloads page download and install SolidWorks 2D Editor which is listed beneath the SolidWorks main releases.
6. You should be all set once the installation process has been completed. You can find SolidWorks 2D Editor in the exact same location that you would have found DWGeditor.
There you have it, hopefully all you need to know for this name change. There is nothing in the program that was visibly obvious to me that changed other than the name.
I am not sure how this product will be handled in the future either. I would hope that beginning with SolidWorks 2011 you will find this product in the standard SWIM install program so that you do not need to keep looking in the SolidWorks Customer Portal for possible updates.
Happy 2D editing everyone!
