Contemplating Migrating From Pro/E -> SW

Doug,

Good ol Pro-E "resolve feature Hell".

SW will let you continue working with failed features, you can fix them at your leisure. However, if the feature has allot of dependants, these may fail as well. In this case you may want to fix it right away. This is much easier than Pro. Lots of visual feedback, very easy to see the where and why.

Mark

Mark is correct, that is one thing i like about SW versus my previous experiences with other modelers. Solidworks will give you quite a bit of info versus other programs as to whats wrong. Does it mean it shows you how to fix every problem that arises, no. Also i have had quite a few of my customers who were die hard ProE people making the switch to other programs. One thing that was always bad in ProE is the lack of a good undo feature, it that still true?

of my employer.

You had better switch over quick!!! It looks like Pro/E will stop working on the 10th of this month. Unless they got a patch to you. Check the post on 12/22/03 subject: "Bug like this?"

Good luck,

Corey Scheich

of my employer.

I don't expect any program to hold your hand and walk you thru problems. Just say, you can't do that because of this. Just letting me know why if failed is good enough.

They added Undo to the sketcher a couple(?) of releases ago. AFA non-sketcher Undo, there's always close the model, flush from memory and reopen. Of course, sometimes Pro/E does that for you!

Thanks,

-- Windoze 2000 SP4

768 MB RAM nVidia Quadro2 MXR/EX Driver Build 4.5.2.3 Wildfahr 2003451

- Doug E. Eicher Global Inc./SFC Valve Corp mailto: snipped-for-privacy@globalsfc.com What I say here are my own thoughts and opinions and do not reflect views of my employer.

I used ProE for many years from version 7 or 8 up to version 19 or 20 I think. I actually liked ProE's failed feature recovery tools but I suppose I really took the time to learn them and deal with them rather than panic. A lot of people I worked with just caved whenever their ProE models or assemblies started falling apart.

That said, SW handles failed features very well. As other people have stated it doesn't really require you to do anything if you don't want. You can suppress them or leave them in a failed state and continue working elsewhere.

However, I think ProE was much (MUCH) better at pinpointing the reasons for failed surface features. Solidworks usually just reports failure due to "Geometry Conditions" (or something) without actually showing you where those geometry conditions are. I remember ProE being a little more specific (maybe highlighting the trouble spots in the sketch, right?).

I've been using SW for a couple of years now and while I like it a lot and would not buy ProE given the chance, I do find myself missing a lot of things from ProE.

Joel Moore

Ah...hold on there Chicken Little! ;^) Pro/E will work OK after 10 Jan. It will not play well with itself, tho. There is a new build plus a couple of stop gap patches for those who don't want that particular build. Installed the build...might back down and install patches instead.

-- Windoze 2000 SP4

768 MB RAM nVidia Quadro2 MXR/EX Driver Build 4.5.2.3 Wildfahr 2003451

- Doug E. Eicher Global Inc./SFC Valve Corp mailto: snipped-for-privacy@globalsfc.com What I say here are my own thoughts and opinions and do not reflect views of my employer.

Is this what you're referring to:

Y2K Strikes 95 Million Seconds Late

The first was discovered when a user ran Pro/E on a computer whose date had been set forward -- the software stopped working. He contacted PTC, who traced the problem to a Y2K-like coding decision.

All software programs determine the date and time by counting seconds, a process that involves billions of seconds. Programmers pick (1) a starting date; and (2) the total number of seconds that can be counted -- hoping that the ending date is far enough in the future that the software will no longer be used.

When writing Pro/Engineer Release 20 in 1997, programmers picked 1 Jan 1970 as the starting date, and 2^30 for the number of seconds; that makes the ending date is this Saturday. (Most other software, such as PalmOS and Unix, uses 2^31 seconds, which allows the software to work twice as long, until the year 2038.)

PTC says Pro/E, Pro/Intralink, and Windchill will stop working, unless you download the appropriate patch from

. The patch doubles the number of seconds to 2^32. Additional patches are to become available for PTC's other products.

Our View: Good on PTC for getting out patches quickly. We hope the patching process goes smoothly for users.

(copied from upfront e-zine.)

jk

The one I read was this one it isn't as recent

basic content though I don't recall it mentioning that they had gotten the fix out.

Sincerely Chicken Little =)

I'm learning to try to work with the failed feature. Sometimes Pro/E gets confused as to the reference plane for the sketch. Flip-flopping the reference plane seems to get the sketch into the original orientation. In this case, I tried to pattern holes. The anchor hole was extruded in two directions and the second direction referenced a surface that really didn't exist in one of the directions. Pro/E blew the assembly all the way back to the original forging part!!!! I had no way of saying..."Ah..just forget it!"

Hmm.....vague prompts are what I'm trying to avoid!! It will tell you what feature failed and offer you some options. I don't think Pro/E highlights anything in the sketch. It'll tell you what references are missing or needs updated...well, updated anyway. Missing refs are just that, missing.

When I get the demo, I have a couple of parts I want to throw at it. One is a valve body that I can't seem to get Pro/E to throw rounds in certain situtations. The other is a valve body i've modeled in Pro/E and want to see how easy it is to model in SW.

Thanks,

-- Windoze 2000 SP4

768 MB RAM nVidia Quadro2 MXR/EX Driver Build 4.5.2.3 Wildfahr 2003451

- Doug E. Eicher Global Inc./SFC Valve Corp mailto: snipped-for-privacy@globalsfc.com What I say here are my own thoughts and opinions and do not reflect views of my employer.

SW won't blow away multiple features the way Pro-E does, but it my crash and dump you into the Desktop (without warning) at least a couple times a day....but your model will be good up to the last save.

We mainly do large assemblies of prismatic parts. I think everything works great except the following: My main complaints are stability and large assembly (both modelling and drawing) performance. Also, the more in-context relations you make the longer you're going to be waiting (but they do work). I can't think of any "must-have" features that aren't already in SW. I have no real hands-on experience with any other 3D programs, so I can't compare my observations with other programs either.

Just my $0.02, Ken

If you have trouble making the parts in SW, see if your VAR can do it. If they've got some good application engineers, they'll show you cool features or work-arounds that you, as a newbie, are likely to miss.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems

UNIX year zero is 1970 and NIX systems count from then.

Now that they fixed this untill 2038 they will have the UNIX 2038 problems.

I'm guessing that they had used signed integers to count the seconds since

1970 and the patch changes it to unsigned integers (which have a highest integer twice as large but no negatives.)

Of note:

Out of curiosity, how will that be handled? does anyone know?

nick e.

"Nick E." wrote in news:kdQOb.1805$BA2.919 @newssvr26.news.prodigy.com:

I guess we'll find out in 2037.

In ~34 years? How many bits will an integer be then on older functional hardware? What will an OS or an application or hardware even look like?