| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 |
« October 2006 | Main | January 2007 »
Just about every CAD jockey I know has modeled some part of or their entire house. I have to admit I have too, I've also modeled my future deck, furniture (for room layouts) and most recently a cat tree/scratching post. What fun projects have you done?
I'm not sure when this changed....because I just tried it one day and it worked. I know it works in 2006, your results for other versions of SolidWorks may vary.
Say you have a arc in a sketch and you now want to change in to a circle. Don't delete it and redraw it ....just drag one of the endpoints around the circle and drop it on the other end point. Then magically both end points will disappear and you'll have a complete circle.
The Milwaukee, WI group has a meeting coming up on Tuesday Dec. 5th featuring Jon Hirschtick, Founder of SolidWorks Corporation. See their website for details: http://www.smart-wi.com/home.html If you register soon their may still be room.
And of course the Madison, WI group has a meeting coming up on January 11th featuring Top Down Design, Sketching Techniques and an Open From. See their website for details: http://www.maswug.org/Next_Meeting/next_meeting.htm
You all can't get rid of me that easily. J/K Sorry I've need to take a break on the postings.
2007's been out for a while now and yet we still haven't upgraded. Some of you are asking why not and while others are asking how do make the determination to upgrade. Typically we like to stay on the 1 to 2 SP lag. And if everyone did this no bugs would be reported & fixed until SP 3. So, I say Thanks You to those who make the plunge earlier. SP 2.0 came out about 2 weeks ago now. Most part the reviews I've read about 2007 in general have been very positive like Ricky Jordan's blog: http://www.rickyjordan.net/2006/11/sp_20_is_out.html and even Matt has a somewhat postive tone about 2007 http://designsmarter.typepad.com/mattlombard/tech_tips/index.html
So I still really haven't answer either question. For the why, at this point it is mostly historical reasons and probably being overly cautious. The beta testing wasn't as broad in the beginning and there wasn't as many users out there to report problems. Now I hear more about many people upgrading very close to the time when they get their disks and not having too many problems.
To determine when to make the switch we look at the state of our projects. It's never a good time to have a possible slow down, but there are better times than others. We look at the major and critical project schedules to make this determination. We also look at how much SolidWorks has changed. Is the interface different enough that people are going to have trouble jumping over to it, if they haven't gone to upgrade training? And are there new features in the software that would really help us out?
We have a lot of licenses. It takes a while to do the install. Because the files aren't backwards compatible, we need to have time to do a back up and the install on everyone's computer at the same time. This grantees that the switch must be done over a weekend or holiday. I'm not going to go through the best practices for installing a new version of SolidWorks because there are many good articles out there on the newsgroups, SolidWorks' web page and other blogs (again Ricky Jordan has a post on this subject).
Finally, I look at a training schedule for everyone. Whether they go through the what's new on their own, we do something in house or go to the VAR's class, I think it's really important to do and to do it within a few days of the install date. It's often difficult to get everyone to take the time for this, but we do our best.
