Over the past couple of days SolidWorks Corporation has made quite a bit of noise that I wanted to make all of you aware of.  So here it is.

SolidWorks 2010 SP3.1 Available

Today SolidWorks released SolidWorks 2010 SP3.1 to all of the active subscription customers.  According to the technical bulletin released the difference between SP3.0 and SP3.1 is administrative and if you already have SP3.0 installed there is no need to update to SP3.1.  I have SolidWorks 2010 SP3.0 installed already but I decided to update to SP3.1 anyways and it looks as if it is about a 66MB install.

To read the technical bulletin follow this link: SolidWorks Technical Alerts & News

SolidWorks Portal Login Changes

On Sunday, May 16, 2010, SolidWorks will be making some changes that will affect how you login to the various SolidWorks sites (Customer Portal, Forums, etc.).  One email address and password will get you into anything that you are entitled to.  You no longer will have to manage multiple logins in order to get on the different SolidWorks sites.

To read the technical bulletin, which includes some key benefits of this new system, follow this link: SolidWorks Technical Alerts & News

7 Tips for Windows 7

After the very popular Microsoft Excel tips for SolidWorks Users screencast that Darren Henry did late year came out, I heard a ton of positive feedback.  Well SolidWorks has released a 2nd screencast for you that is just as good.  This time, Jeremy Regnerus walks us through some tips for all of you users who have made the move to Window 7 already.  There is a ton of great information in this screencast and they even included a Windows 7 hotkey cheat sheet in PDF format for you to download and hang up in your office.

To see this awesome screencast follow this link:  7 Tips for Windows 7

So there you have it, a quick hit roundup of what has happened in the world of SolidWorks since yesterday morning.

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!

Over the past 1 month or so I have been extremely busy switching over our CAD / CAM department to Windows 7 64bit.  I have personally been running Windows 7 64bit on my work laptop since late last year and absolutely love it.  I wanted to hold off switching over our engineering department for a little while but after sitting through Greg Jankowski’s CAD Administrators Boot Camp at SWW10 I decided to push the switch to management.

Why?

When I returned from my trip to Anaheim in February I had the following mix of operating systems that I was managing:

• (3) Windows XP 32bit
• (1) Windows XP 64bit
• (1) Windows Vista 64bit
• (1) Windows 7 64bit

By having this variety it makes it more difficult to diagnose possible crashes with software and also very hard to test the software to make sure it is in good enough condition to deploy to the masses.  Also, Greg mentioned during his presentation that Windows 7 has become the gold standard in operating systems because of its management of system resources which is especially important in an engineering environment.  All of you know that Windows XP 32bit was a really good operating system, but it still is 32bit.  Windows XP 64bit was an afterthought and therefore the operating system was probably worse the Windows Vista 64bit, and well, we all know about Windows Vista 64bit.

So that leaves Windows 7 in the 64bit platform as the “chosen” OS.  As of right now the OS’s in our CAD / CAM departments are as follows:

• (1) Windows XP 32bit running SolidWorks 2010
• (1) Windows XP 32bit running Esprit 2010
• (1) Windows 7 32bit running Esprit 2010
• (3) Windows 7 64bit running SolidWorks 2010
• (1) Windows 7 64bit running SolidWorks 2010 and CAMWorks 2009

Currently we are financially planning on upgrading the Windows XP 32bit machine running SolidWorks within the upcoming year.  As for the Windows XP 32bit machine running Esprit there are no plans on switching that over but I eventually see this happening as well in order to maintain a consistant OS platform throughout.

The Setup

As a whole, I have not made many changes to the default OS settings that come out of the box but there are some things that you should be aware of when making the switch to Windows 7.  I have already covered these in previous blog posts but here are the relinks to those articles.

• Compatibility Mode
• ReadyBoost
• Run as Administrator
• Taskbar
• User Account Control

The majority of these things were available in Windows Vista already but seem to work more how they should in Windows 7.  So have you made the switch yet?  If not, what are you waiting for?  Feel free to drop a comment and let me know why you are still waiting or what your thoughts are of Windows 7 in a CAD environment.

Note:  SolidWorks will continue to support Windows XP until THE END of its 2011 release which is 1 year after Microsoft will stop supporting Windows XP.

Over the past few weeks I have been fighting to get macros to work on my Windows 7 64bit machine.  The thing that had me baffled was that everything worked a few months back when I began writing the macro and when I resumed my work on it, all of the sudden it would not run for me.  After browsing the forums and the web I decided to contact my VAR about this issue.

The thing that I could not understand was that I could get the macro to run on a Windows XP 32bit machine and I also sent it to a user in our area that was running the exact same setup as me (Windows 7 64bit, SolidWorks 2010 SP2.1) and he could run it as well.  So what was causing this weird behavior?  User Account Control!

So what is User Account Control?  Here is Wikipedia’s description:

User Account Control (UAC) is a technology and security infrastructure introduced with Microsoft‘s Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 operating system. It aims to improve the security of Microsoft Windows by limiting application software to standard user privileges until an administrator authorizes an increase or elevation. In this way, only applications trusted by the user may receive administrative privileges, and malware should be kept from compromising the operating system. In other words, a user account may have administrator privileges assigned to it, but applications that the user runs do not inherit those privileges unless they are approved beforehand or the user explicitly authorizes it.

To reduce the possibility of lower-privilege applications communicating with higher-privilege ones, another new technology, User Interface Privilege Isolation is used in conjunction with User Account Control to isolate these processes from each other.  One prominent use of this is Internet Explorer 7‘s "Protected Mode".

So how did I fix the problem I was having?  I simply turned off UAC, rebooted my system, and the macro ran perfectly.  Then I slowly moved my UAC settings back to where they were previously and the macro continued to run.  I am now back to the original UAC settings and everything is working as expected.  You can find the UAC setting by going to Control Panel > User Accounts:

And then select “Change User Account Controls settings” which is right under the “Change your picture” option.  Then slide the bar to your desired security level.

So if you are experiencing “odd” behavior with SolidWorks in Windows Vista or Windows 7 you might want to change these settings and see if it fixes your problems.

One of the biggest responsibilities of being a SolidWorks administrator is to make sure that all of your users are using the same templates, right?  Well how do you handle that?  The generic answer would be to put all of your templates in a network folder and remap all of the SolidWorks file locations to that network location.  This is great but you will notice some lag when referencing files over a network like this.  So the best bet is to put the templates on the hard drive of each users computer but then how do you keep them updated.

Well I think I may have solved this problem at our company by creating a simple batch file that will run every time that the user logs in to his/her computer.  This idea was given to me from a local user that manages over 35 licenses of SolidWorks and probably closer to a 100 users (by using network licenses).

To create your batch file simply open a program like Notepad and right a command similar to the image below.  When using the xcopy command you will need to follow a format like this.

xcopy “source location” “destination location”

The symbols following that are command switches telling windows how to handle this situation.  To find out what these commands mean follow this link.  The last part of this command line writes a log file so that you can diagnose problems should they occur.

After you have written your command you will need to save the file somewhere that you can easily access.  My suggestion would be to great a “Batch Files” folder on your C: that you can save this file and any future batch files in.  To save a batch file, give it a file name and add a .BAT extension to the end of it.  Once you have saved your newly created batch file, RMB click on it and select Send to > Desktop (create shortcut).  You can see this in the image below.

After you have a shortcut to the file on your desktop, open up your Windows Startup folder.  You can do this by RMB clicking the “Startup” and select Open Folder.  Now drag the shortcut from your desktop into the Startup folder.

Once it is in there, RMB click the shortcut and select Properties.  In the Run dropdown, select Minimized.  This will make it less obvious during startup that this is running.

By doing this, you can now be no further than a day behind to in working off of the same files.  I don’t know about you but I would rather have the lag at startup as opposed to when I am working on a design.  As a SolidWorks administrator this can save you many headaches.

Please feel free to drop me a comment and let me know how you handle your SolidWorks templates.

Every once in a while you run into something that you couldn’t foresee having problems with.  We ran into this over the past couple of days.

The Problem

When trying to machine a profile that has a spline in it, we would end up with a jagged surface that was not desirable for our end product.  If you can imagine, it looked like a bunch of tiny flats that flow into each other to give you your splined surface.  We wanted an end condition of a nice smooth surface.

The Solution

After some research and testing, it was determined that spline sketch entities were the cause of this problem.  I was hoping that SolidWorks offered some sort of a spline to arc conversion but could not find anything so this is the solution that we came up with.

1.)  Start with your original sketch with the spline sketch entities in it.

2.)  Select your spline sketch entity > go to Insert > Reference Geometry > Point.  Select the last option which is “Along curve distance or multiple reference points” and then select the last radio button which is “Evenly Distribute”.  Now enter in the number of points you would like to space evenly along your spline.  The higher the number the more accurate your end result will match the spline.

3.)  Start a new sketch on the same plane as your original > select all of the entities in your original sketch but DO NOT select the spline sketch entity.

4.)  Hide your original sketch and do multiple 3 point arcs between the points.  For example, Point 1 to Point 3 with a center selection of Point 2.

5.)  Delete any tangent relations that are automatically added.

6.)  Repeat step 4 until your sketch is fully closed by adding all of your 3 point arcs.

Your end result should look similar to the picture below.

Now you have a profile that you will be able to work with and also but able to machine into a nice clean surface.  One thing to remember is that the more points you add to the spline, the closer your 3 point arcs will match the original spline profile.

I hope that all of that made sense, if you have any questions or having another way of doing this feel free to drop me a comment.  Eventually I hope would hope that SolidWorks would find a way to automate this process as it seems that I am not the only one that has run into this after scouring the SolidWorks Forums the past couple of days for a solution.

The Story

This year I did an internal what’s new in SolidWorks 2010 rollout for the users at the company I work at.  One of the features I was really excited to show off was the new dimension palette because I saw a ton of potential with this new addition.  When I got around to the drawings portion of my “show” and the dimension palette popped up there was a room full of ooh’s and ahh’s.  They all seemed to like it as well as I did, but then the wheels fell off…they started making drawings in production.

The Problem

It seemed as if the palette would appear in the exact locations that you would not want it to and it supposedly became more of an annoyance than what it was worth.

The Solution

Well, a co-worker of mine tipped me off on to a SolidWorks Forums thread that has a solution to turn off the dimension palette.  So here is what you need to do (straight from Jim “Wilkie” Wilkinson of SolidWorks Corp.).

1. Make sure SolidWorks is not running
2. Double click the desired registry file (“off” to disable or “on” to enable)
3. Click Yes and then OK to the messages to load the setting into the registry
4. Start up SolidWorks

So here are the registry files you will need to do this process.  Download them to your desktop in order to run them.

• Dimension palette OFF
• Dimension palette ON

Take note that these registry files are straight from Wilkie, all that I did was download them and then upload them to my file sharing site.  You can find the same files in the thread linked above.

My $0.02

I think this is a copt-out.  As with many new features in the software, some time is required using it in order to see the full benefits of it.  I heard similar rumblings before and after 6 months of use or so I hear comments like “I really like this feature now” or “I can’t believe how I worked before this was available”.  I like the fact that SolidWorks is listening to its users and coming up with work-arounds for issues like this but WHERE do they stop once this door has been open?

In each release of the software will we expect every new feature to have a on/off switch?  I ask this because for every new feature there is someone out there that doesn’t like change and is unwilling to “get used to it” and see the benefits.  Now I can see possibly adding something to the following major release of the software if the dislike continues but somewhere a line needs to be drawn.  Are you, as a user, willing to get bloated software because SolidWorks needs to write code for an on/off switch for everything.  I, for one, am not.

RANT OVER!!!

I accept no responsibility for an problems you may occur when making changes to your registry.  Use at your OWN risk!

SolidWorks 2010 introduced a lot of great enhancements for drawings.  I have personally been using it since beta 1 but we rolled it out for production last week with the release of service pack 2.

There was 1 thing that immediately caused shrieks of dislike however amongst our users.  The users were noticing that when you placed a dimension and then went back to edit it, the dimension would automatically move to a predefined distance.  This is a new feature in SolidWorks 2010 that I needed to find out quickly how to turn off.  Thankfully, this was a new feature that SolidWorks also gave us the option to turn off.

If you are seeing this same thing and you want to turn it off you can go to Tools > Options > System Options > Drawings and you will notice an option towards the bottom of the list that says “Reduce spacing when dimensions are deleted or edited (add of change tolerance, text, etc.)”.  Uncheck this option and your dimensions will stay put no matter if you delete or edit them later on.

Now keep in mind, I see a HUGE benefit of having this option turned on as well.  It would be nice to have the dimensions automatically space if you delete a dimension.  So this is just one of those commands that you will need to figure out the advantages and disadvantages of using in your work environment.

The service pack has arrived that most companies and CAD Administrators have been waiting for.  Last night SolidWorks released service pack 2.0 of SolidWorks 2010.  From my personal experience and talking to other users in my region this service pack seems to be the one that most companies wait for before adopting the new release of SolidWorks.

So, with a active subscription it is available for your downloading goodness.  Simply go to the Downloads and Updates page of the SolidWorks Customer Portal and get it.

To find out what has been changed in this service pack you can find the release notes here.

To see the complete What’s New in SolidWorks 2010 you can find it on Ricky Jordan’s blog by clicking here.  Take note that you can also browse through every What’s New document since SolidWorks 95 by visiting Ricky’s What’s New Guides page.

In an earlier post I showed you how to run a program in Compatibility mode if you are running Windows 7 or Windows Vista.  Today I want to make you aware of another semi hidden feature in the 2 newest operating systems from Windows.

The other day I was struggling to get a SolidWorks Add-in to install correctly.  I was installing it off of a DVD so I knew it was not a corrupt download, and it installed on the 3 PC’s that were running Windows XP but not the 1 running Windows Vista or the 1 running Windows 7.  Then someone suggested using the “Run as Administrator” option when installing the program.  So I did and voila, everything works perfect.

So how do you do this?  Simply RMB click on an executable file (.exe) and select the “Run as Administrator” option (see image on left).  Try this out if you are struggling with something and see if it fixes your problem.