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Archive for August 4th, 2008

OK, this is not a commercial and I’m not getting a commission to tell you this, but I thought I would pass along this information to whoever is interested. If you are looking to buy the new student edition of SolidWorks 2008-2009, you may consider taking a look at what Novedge has for sale right now. There are great offers on educational bundles that include a copy of Inspirtech’s SolidWorks 2008-2009 Fundamentals training DVD. So, if you are interested, go check it out at Novedge and take advantage of this offer before it expires.

Today is Monday, August 4^th and the NDA has been officially removed for all SW bloggers.  As a relatively new blogger, I haven’t experienced this particular time of the year before, but I suspect it’s going to be crazy cool, full of information and exciting news for everyone.  I must admit I arrived a bit late to the Beta testing.  After running into a few major problems with the installation of  Beta 2, I decided to wait until Beta 3, so I’m afraid I haven’t been playing with it as much as my other fellow bloggers. I will try to do my part and tell you about what I’ve found to be interesting and/or new so far, but I believe Ricky Jordan and Mike Pucket will have tons more to say, so make sure to visit their blogs often.

One thing I can tell all of you with files created in a student edition of SolidWorks is that the rumors were all true: SW2009 recognizes and discriminates files created in a student edition, and there’s no way to remove “the mark” from them, not even using “save as”.  I have quite a few files that were created using SW2007 student edition, and I opened one of them, mask.slprt, to see what happened. I got the following message.

I saved the file with a different name, mask2.slprt, and it was converted to the new release. I won’t be able to open this new file using SW2007 anymore. So, do you think now it will be just as any file created with SW2009 Beta3? Nope! Notice the message I get when I try to open mask2.sldprt.  The file was saved as if it was created using a student edition of SW2009. The “mark” is still there.

In an assembly created using a student edition or made with parts that were created in the student edition, you’ll also see that little icon next to the name of the parts in the feature manager. I think it’s supposed to be a graduate’s hat.

This is interesting only because, up until now, even though the files had always been “marked” in this same fashion, previous releases wouldn’t tell you right away if the file was created using a student edition of the software. You may have not even notice any difference at all, and no matter how many times you or others saved that file under different names, using different releases, it would still be marked a student edition file. You know files created using a student edition of SolidWorks are not supposed to be used for commercial purposes, right? Well, think about how much trouble and hassle this little warning will save you from! Another interesting thing to notice is that, unlike when printing directly from a student edition of SW, there is no visible printed mark present in the drawings created in the commercial version from files that were saved using the student edition.

I know what you are thinking: what if you had something really cool that you or someone else saved using the student edition and want to use now in a commercial edition of SW? Well, there is a way around it that I have found, at least for parts.   I don’t know if this is a good way to go, but I tried this for a part and it seemed to work fine. If you open a new part document, and insert the other part in it, taking care to break all links to the original part, you can then save it in the commercial edition and edit it, use it to create drawings, assemblies, etc. The mark is gone! Note also that this is only possible if you are using SW2008 and SW2009. SW2007 didn’t offer the option of breaking the link to the original part at all.