While at Concord we were treated to a hands-on session where we got to try out some of the new functionality that will be available in this new release.  Most of us had already been exploring it through the Beta testing program, but this was our chance to ask questions about it and satisfy our curiosity.  This is a big release and it was impossible to cover everything in so very little time, so we covered many of the release highlights, instead.

Jeremy Regnerus was facilitating this session for us and before starting he told us a bit about the three areas they focused as goals while working on this release:

·         Improving work experience

·         Reliability, performance, predictability and depth of functionality

·         Working smarter and faster

He pointed out to us that most of the improvements made in these areas are not always going to be so obviously shown to the user in the way of new buttons or check boxes, but it’s the kind of stuff that goes on behind the scenes and that makes the software more stable, reliable and predictable, and it’s actually 30% of the whole development. As an example he showed us a situation he called “Flipping Mates”, where all he was trying to do was to apply a mate between two components of an assembly. He did this first in 2009 and then in 2010. For 2009, as soon as the two faces are selected for mating, all other components in the assembly move around in unpredictable ways, as you can see in this image.

SolidWorks 2010 has fixed this situation and made adding mates a more predictable task, as you can appreciate in this second image.  Even if the alignment is flipped, the two components move by themselves and no other component is flipped or moved around like before.

Another example of these “behind the scenes” improvements is the fact that the rebuild time has been reduced by making improvements to sluggish, heavy features, such as Delete Face. He showed us an example of a file that used this particular feature extensively and that went from 16 seconds for rebuild time in 2009 to only 3.42 seconds in 2010. This may not sound like much to some because this wasn’t such a big part, but if you do the math for a bigger, more complex one, this is indeed a big improvement. Unfortunately, Jeremy didn’t have with him the list of the features that have been “put on a diet”, as if to say.

One more example of improvements was in the Extend Surface feature that now does a much better job than it used to in 2009. Take a look at the following images. Notice the first one, which was done in 2009, looks distorted where the edges meet, while the one made in 2010 looks perfectly smooth.

As an example of an improvement in the area of work experience, Jeremy pointed out that the installation process for SolidWorks 2010 is now easier and simpler than ever; the options are easier to find, what and where is installed is easier to find and choose, plus, if you don’t have any custom stuff in your SolidWorks installation directory, it actually goes and deletes the whole thing for you.

Jeremy also mentioned that probably for SP.0 there would be a new kind of online help available right inside SolidWorks. Unfortunately, he couldn’t show it to us because it’s not live yet, so it’s not available at the moment, but it promises to be something huge.  This online help refers to online resources, not to actual people interacting with the user, and is optional, so you will always be able to choose between online help or local help. One of the biggest reasons they came up with this is that every time they improve and update their help files, the way to make them available to the users is through the service packs, but not everybody remembers to say that they also need to update the help files when they update a service pack, because most everybody is in a hurry to download those files and get done. With online help there won’t be a need to wait for a service pack anymore; if anything changes and they need to update the help files, the user will have this new information available immediately.  With online help they can also update to different languages as needed. It’s much more flexible and it opens a lot of possibilities for what they can do in the future with online resources.

One more of these improvements you don’t always notice right away is the fact that they are trying to make every property manager inside SolidWorks to look, feel and work pretty much the same, in order to make the experience for the user a lot easier. The idea behind this is that if you know how to work one tool, you can pretty much work your way through any other tool in the software. This is probably going to be a big deal especially for new users!

The list of “behind the scenes” improvements goes on and on. Next Jeremy showed how now in 2010 they have added the ability to turn add-ins  on and off kind of on demand, as needed, while working on the files.  He showed us an example where someone may be trying to use direct editing on an imported part without knowing that they need to have FeatureWorks turn on in the add-in list.  With FeatureWorks turned off, if we click on a face, for instance, and try to edit this feature, we’ll see a message from FeatureWorks pop up asking if we want to recognize child features in this face. What is really happening behind the scenes is that SolidWorks is turning on FeatureWorks for us, so we can add features to this part and use direct editing on it. This is supposed to make life easier and expose a lot of functionality to new users that may not normally see it.

Oh, and by the way, did you just notice what I said? Did you notice that FeatureWorks was asking if we wanted to recognize child features on that face? Yes, that’s right; FeatureWorks is now smarter and able to recognize child features, as well as a handful of new other features that it couldn’t recognize before.

And the Move Face feature has also been improved as a more refined way to do direct editing. When using Move Face you’ll notice that you have the Triad and ruler, and you can kind of estimate where you want to locate it or you can take advantage of the property manager that you also have in SolidWorks 2010 and enter more precise values for the new location of that face. This provides the users with freedom and flexibility, but also with the fine tuning ability that they are asking for. The other great thing about using Move Face is that after you’ve use it to modify your part, it is added as a feature in the tree, so you can go back and edit it, delete or suppress it as needed.

These are only a few of the improvements and new functionality you’ll find in SolidWorks 2010. Stay tuned for more posts about other more obvious improvements and perhaps even a bit more of the “behind the scenes” ones too!