Solidworks 2009 Sneak Peak

So today was the day. At the doors of the hall waiting to get in at 8:15, was the biggest crowd of all three days. In talking with a few, they were all excited to hear about what they will see in Solidworks 2009. Let me say performance was the buzzword the past three days, and today they proved its coming.

Each year the Solidworks team puts on a little skit to preview the next release. This year was "Engineers In Crisis", a Dr. Phil type talkshow dealing with engineers that have slipped over the edge after not being able to deal with P.A.S. or performance Addiction Syndrome.

First up was Tom. He noticed that things started to get real slow on his CAD system a year ago. Let's see what the doctors prescribed to help Tom deal with the large assemblies he works with.

SpeedPak technology was first up. New sliders in the speedpak interface let Tom adjust the resolution if you will of how many parts of this 560 part assembly show up on his screen. Only what's left on the screen is what gets loaded into the assembly

Next up to help Tom out, sketch enhancements.

As Tom sketches, the geometry he is drawing is automatically being dimensioned, and once he drop the line, he instantly can type in the length he wants.

The new slot tool should help ease Tom's stress. A new tool that allows you to create rectangular, or radial slots, that automatically ca themselves.

The final area to help poor Tom, was a new sheet metal functionality, Solid To Sheet Metal"

You create a solid, and Solidworks will wrap it in sheet metal, and then unfold it!

But Tom needed one more treatment, plastic tools.

New lip and groove, automatic draft and shell features, should set Tom on the road to recovery. In fact Tom now has a new name, crazy, crazy for Solidworks!

Next up was poor old Bill. Too many steps in his day to day work made him uneasy, and Bill took his rage out on his ACME coworker Bob:    

                                                                                       

                                  

                              

                              

                              

That's exactly what you see. The ability to generate a complete BOM without the need to create a drawing. Full BOM functionality is there, at the assembly level.

You can even split it off to a separate screen. Again, full BOM functions are available as shown in the second picture.

But Bill also got tired of assembly created features not carrying down to the part level, 2009 now lets him choose assembly features like cuts to carry over to the part level.

Bill also needed new sketch editing tools.

Using the new stretch tool, Bill can grab geometry, and drag them, and the dimension will automatically update, but only when using this tool. He also has the ability to type in positive or negative numbers.

The last area of frustration for Bill is the toolbox. Let's see if any of these new features help him feel better.

Changing the configuration of a washer can be done on the fly:

With Instant 3D that was new in 2008, Bill can drag the length of his toolbox items to the available configs:

Last up was Joe who needed some changes to the user interface, and Solidworks 2009 delivers:

How about the new magnifier, this allows you to zoom in on a certain area, work without needing to constantly pan and zoom.

View orientation in 2009 is also easier, click one of the arms of the triad, and the model rotates to that view.

Working with dual units has never been easier. The measure tool (and the status bar at the bottom of the screen) now supports dual units:

The command manager can now be docked like a normal toolbar on any side of the screen:

The command manager is now shorter, allowing the placement of standard tool bars at the end of it:

Some more enhancements to cables and routing:

How about ribbon cable support?

Drawings are also getting some changes, and Joe could not be happier:

Multi leader bends, you can also drag and drop chamfer, and hole call outs to other locations:

And let's not forget how excited Joe is going to be about the new title block wizard, double ckick the title block, and have direct edit access to the customizable fields, and you can write the data back to the custom properties in the model:

So that wraps up Engineers In Crisis.

One last area that was covered was performance.

Those are staggering stats! Is it true? Well they opened up an assembly on two identical machines. One was running 2008, and the other was running 2009. Once open, they inserted the assembly to a standard 3-view drawing. 2008 took nearly two minutes to complete this task while 2009 did it in well under 30 seconds!

Comments

[Paul Lemke]

I love 2009. So I don't understand people's crashing stories. I had absolutely no problems on install and have been able to get tons more work done thanks to some of the stuff I use everyday. There are some glitches but when you do as much work as they have done and it is a ton, you are bound to have a few problems.

I have 4 lessons for those that complain:

1)Perfect doen't exist anywhere that is why we have tolerances and service packs.

2)If you want something that is super polished always wait till at least sp2 if not sp3. It is YOUR choice.

3) Hardware is the most important thing you spend measly money on. It pays for itself in lack of headaches. BUY GOOD HARDWARE do the RESEARCH(533 ram is outdated bigtime.)

4)If you think that 2008 or 2009 was bad your not using the S key and you have lost the number 1 improvement which is interface changes.

[Prasad]

Its not so useful in each enhancement they added.
its good it bits n piceses..
anyways 70 out of 100 for some really good features like negative dims, large asy mode, and plastic part design tools..
Best luck SW.. try to be more engineered software... be true to your words.. "focus on design not CAD"

[Frank S]

I have been usind SWx since 2000 , one of the features I still miss is the simple defer to mate in the assmebly mode without having to jump through a lot of hoops. I ran the 2004 version for way too long I guess but I didn't find much in the other versions that I truley liked.
most were just bigger with more memory and Vga requirements not better (at least for the things I design)
I have been running 2008 for about 8 months now and every day I cuss myself for not tossing it in the trash and staying with 2004.
08 doesn't take advantage of my CPU capabilities like it could
Cmos is a flaming joke for complex parts or structural assemblies never thought I would ever find it faster to use a pencil and paper for calculations than with a computer but SWX proves you can.
and Like others I have been waiting for the save back feature since 2001.
will 09 be any better from the reports I am hearing it is just another bigger is better lets see if we can use up more ram and graphics. program.
Just because I have a big machine doesn't mean I want it used up by the base program, I have duel moniters a 22" and 48" view screen and I like to have 20 to 40 open parts and sometimes that many assemblies if my CPU has to use every thing just to run the core program what good is that. Sounds like MICROSHAFT to me

[B Riley]

SolidWorks 2009 on XP 64bit cann't rebuild one of our benchmark files. All SolidWorks can come up with is our 4 GB of RAM isn't enough. By the way our VAR cann't get the file to rebuild either. 2005-2008 can, but 2009 needs more memory to rebuild the model.

[Will]

Hey! SW 2009 has bugs too!
Lets see...

crashes on first startup, every time, every machine

forgets references that haven't changed

corrupts files on save

sketches where it wants and not where you do

dont even think about touching spline handles once they get too short...

rebuilt features fail after restart

impossible to make a line tangent to a face

impossible to make a spline tangent to a face

overdefines sketches with only one relation

won't let you edit direction of a spline handle tangent to another unconstrained handle

creates invalid geometry

no mutliprocessor support

erases existing referenced entities when the missing one is re-selected

showing a body to select it deletes existing feature references

flip side to cut reverses after restart

merge tangent faces toggles with restart

shall I go on?

SolidWorks is a piece of ****, but it's still the shiniest one!

Oh yeah...All the above bugs can be fixed if you remove your antivirus! (at least that's what your VAR will tell you when you call them wondering why they sent you a polished turd in a box instead of some excellent CAD software)

Solidworks 2009 is the number one reason to use a CAD package besides Solidworks. I will be migrating my entire CAD department to another package as soon as my WORTHLESS support subscription expires. Good work, SW!

[Andrew]

Funny, the gripes look like they were ctrl+c: ctrl+v'ed from the Autodcad Forums. Anybody know why both Co's had such heavy "08 issues?

[Diego]

Nossa dimais os desenhos são perfeitos.
Muito bom!

[John E]

I am still waiting for the day the program becomes backwards compatible.

[Justin]

Interesting changes and enhancements, and getting some speed back is good. But does it make proper use of my muti-cpu workstation, and all my memory? I really wish they would sort out the release they are on - SW2008 is one of the worst yet, just full of problems. Personally I would prefer to see a major release every (say) three years, and the software we have work properly or be fixed until it does. It seems to me the moment they release the software it is dumped on the support people whilst the designers and developers rush to start the next years offering....

[A User]

Well, this looks interesting, Solid Works now does most of the things that Solid Edge did years ago. Looks like they have a lot of catching up to do before Solid Works can match Solid Edge with Synchronous Technology...