RANT: Is 2006 ready for the big time yet?

I would fathom that it IS absolutely ready for the uncompensated beta . . . cough cough . . . testers who are willing to donate some of their time to SW to get the 2006 "released" version production worthy . . . (Grin) . . . I prefer to think of this leg of the product development journey as "validation via public testing" . . .

Later,

SMA

Burn both versions (2004 and 2006) to DVD send it to your VAR, ask them to fix it or get them to ask SolidWorks to fix it. This could then justify your "subscription service" fees.

Let me know if they can get it to convert and how long it takes them, then I might just start using 2006 SP4 in production.

John Layne

TimeBox says 4 hours of attempted workarounds is enough. This project was supposed to be done Monday afternoon.

Well I don't think the uncompensated part is that big a deal. There are a lot of people who put in a lot of time on beta in 2006. I was one of them, and in the top 25%. There is so much ground to cover and some of the specialty stuff just won't get covered, especially with the relative inexperience many beta testers. I wonder how many beta testers gave Alternate Position views a thrashing in the last Beta? I'll bet not many.

Hehe - Just so we are clear I am referring to the beta testing that the public is doing RIGHT NOW (for 2006), not those kind souls that previewed the software before release and gave feedback . . . I get the impression that SW is fully aware of this situation and that they don't mind putting out a product that is "good enough", but still sub-par, perhaps some gaping holes with the mentality that "we can't possibly test everything, let's let the public find it for us". Unfortunately if the thousands of folks who rush right to the new release were told "oh yeah, you are our second wave of beta testers and if things go bad, we might be able to fix it, we might not, you will now have to communicat with us via the enhancement request and SPR system (largely broken in my mind)" then we (the public) might not rush to upgrade so soon.

By the way, I am not opposed to having imperfect code released as long as the things are non-catastrophic bugs and not real show stoppers - new functionality will always have usability issues. I think that their threshold for what they are willing to release into production is much too low and the end result is that too many "heavy hitters" hit the street, wating for us all to find them and report them, costing those of us who "jump too soon" into the new release to lose productivity. There is no value in any of this for us, and ultimately for them - if they continue to erode their credibility by releasing unstable stuff. I think that for us to upgrade to a new version it should not be like stepping up to the roulette table in Las Vegas with the hopes that things might possibly work out, maybe if we are lucky . . .

My wish is that they might take some of our maintenence money and hire a few more validation engineers.

Later,

SMA

my customers and I have settled into a routine, finally, where none are adopting a new release until the next version is "finished" with its beta phase. we may skip 2006 altogether.

if only everyone would agree to go back to sw2001, we'd get a lot more work done.

The new releases certainly aren't perfect, but I think you'd be surprised how many things you'd miss if you reverted to that version.

In this case I'm missing alternate position views in a newer version. They work for simple things but not for my complex assembly. This is a big deal and I'm still cleaning egg off my face.

This situation is frustrating, it seems they aren't getting the bugs our until SP4 or SP5 now. Unfortunately these are the last updates of the software version. The functional life of a release (time from a bug free, stable release - until the last release) is now in the order of about three months or less! We are still on SW2003 due to issues we had with SW2004 and SW2005 that SolidWorks could not fix. We eventually had to find our own work-around. Now we have delayed deploying SW2006 until this pdf issue is cleaned up. My management is starting to question why we are paying subscription fees! There, I am finished my venting, sorry to put you throught it but I hope SolidWorks will eventually understand what we are all concerned about here: a continual stream of Beta releases is not good software. Brad

Not to be an ass or anything, but you should have known by now that upgrading to the first release of the year (SP0.0) was not a very good idea if you have a critical project to get done. Maybe a little testing beforehand would have been prudent. Our company tests EVERY bit of new software that may affect critical areas of the business before implementing it. Yes, I know that the software SHOULD work fine right out of the box, but you know as well as I that this is never the case wether it be SolidWorks, Pro-E, Excel, IE, etc. Seems that nothing is perfect nowadays, so you gotta be ready for that.

What are alternate position views? Do you mean views other than top, right, iso, etc? How complex does the assembly have to get before they stop working?

As to what alternate position views are the best place to discover this is in the SW training or in help. Look at your Insert/Drawing View/ menu.

As to how complex the assembly has to get, I don't know. I know it works with simple assemblies, but not with the one I have at hand. I was hoping others who have run into this could help with that question.

The problem occurs in both the last SP for 2004 and in 2006 SP3.1 which is .3 away from being current now. I have waited, and waited and waited.

...

I think willingness to mess with half-baked software is a personality trait more than anything. For what I do, the older software would have just as many workaround detours as the new stuff, but also some missing functionality which I have come to rely on. Workarounds seem to be part of the game, regardless. I'm more willing to play with the half-baked stuff than most maybe, being a touch less conservative/timid.

I have noticed, though, that a lot of people, more than with other releases, are not moving forward to 06. There are only a few compelling reasons to move forward - some new spline functionality, Display States is a huge plus. These are the only real benefits to me in the new software.

I know SW is getting the message to slow down and be more careful,and I know they take it seriously, but they are simply not delivering results. There has been a bit of a change of the guard, and things appear to be taking a step backwards rather than forwards. Again, it's not because they don't want to deliver good software or that they don't care, it's just that in the end, for whatever reason, they just don't. I suspect it's because they are going too fast, and there are other business pressures.

Anyway, I keep using it, and keep upgrading. Variably during a single day, I think "wow, what great software this is!", and then sometimes "geezis, this stuff is sloppy!", and sometimes "F$%#! This s&%* is un-freaking-usable!!" In the end, I still get my job done, although sometimes at a cost of time and quality.

There will be a point, for many it has already passed, that future "upgrades" of SolidWorks will not provide any additional profit to your company's bottom line.

Take Microsoft Office for example, we are still on Office 2000 and many companies are still on Office 97. We still get spreadsheets and docs made and we get paid even though we are not on the newest release.

Which may explain SW overarching effort to sell new seats before anything else. SW still doesn't have a save to older version like excel and word do. And I don't begrudge SW for doing this, but the future will still lie elsewhere.

So what would get existing customers to reup? Two things in my mind are robustness and speed. It would seem they are on the cusp of a falling away if things don't start changing.

I don't think there is a workaround for the problem I just ran into and it is a standard drawing functionality although not much used.

I don't mean to minimise the problems you're seeing, even though alternate position view recently worked for me on an assembly of around 800 parts. I was trying to get at the sentiment that the older versions are so superior that everybody would be more productive on them. Barring specific limitations, I just don't find that to be the case. SW was certainly more stable in those days, but that stability isn't enough to outweight the new capabilities. Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones. I was forced to revert back to 2003 when 2004 was current, and it certainly didn't save me any time. That same company wants deliverables in 05, and I'm faily certain that I'm more effective in 06.

None of this is justification for the general decline in quality, of course. New functionality and reliability are not mutually exclusive concepts. We should have both, and we certainly don't.

There are only a few

Matt I agree with you on all your point s except the above - I don't use either at all - but for the life of me I can't remember why I upgraded to 2006 except that I always hope for the best !! but am always dissappointed ;-) (actaully all I needed was the camera for Maxwell and i can't bare trying to keep two versions on the same machine - I'm just not organized enough)

Its 10 years since sw came out - it was 10 years (approx) before that PRo-E and its ilk came out (I think but someone will correct me) - What is the new 3d Cad software that we all need to change to?

How much do we need to raise as capital to start up a new company to develope the next generation - $5 m $50m £100m ? - I am sure somebody out there must already be on the case. The owner of Infosys has just bought a house next to my Mum and Dad in India. Should I ask him for a loan?

It seems that software only has a life of 10years before it just gets tied up in its own code and just can't be made to develope any further or respond if a new kid on the block arrives who cuts through the Gordian knot.

TTFN

Jonathan

Dale,

In general I can get alternate views to work too. For whatever reason though, it was not working for me this day in a very repeatable way. Perhaps it was due to the in-context stuff going on. Perhaps it was a problem with configurations. Perhaps it had to do with Lightweight and rebuilds. I rather doubt beta testing would have caught this. It was broke in 2004 and broke in 2006.

We ran into another one with eDrawings today. My boss wanted an eDrawing of a part with feature dimensions showing as he had them on the part. eDrawings did not properly scale the dimensions or the arrows. So we had to scale the dimensions to 3ft tall and the arrows to

1ft/3ft/5ft to get a decent display in eDrawings. This of course made the part impossible to see. eDrawings didn't carry over the show all dimensions the same size checkbox from SW2004 through 2006. This was fixed way back in the early days of SW like around 96 or 97.