Important SolidWorks Retirement Announcements

As a part of the partner program for publications, I from time to time get special emails from SolidWorks. Today I got one of those emails with some important information that Solidworks users will want to know. This information was not part of a non-disclosure program or marked as such, so I didn’t feel the need to tell you I’ve got some important information which I can’t tell you, which seems like a silly thing for a blog writer to do.

Some of this has been the source of speculation for some time, and these statements from SW clear things up. Clearing things up is a good thing.

1) SolidWorks 2010 will be the last SolidWorks version to support Windows XP. According to the newsletter:

Due to the fact that Microsoft officially retired Window XP in April of this year; SolidWorks 2010 will be the last release to support both 32 and 64 bit versions of Windows XP. SolidWorks 2011 (tentative release expected in the fall of 2010) will support Windows Vista and Windows 7 (32 and 64 bit versions) only.

2) That goes hand in hand with the second announcement:

SolidWorks will support the new Microsoft Windows 7 operating system as part of its SolidWorks 2010 release (scheduled for October of this year).  Right now Microsoft’s published release date for Windows 7 is Oct 22nd.  Based on this information the earliest version of SolidWorks 2010 that could support the Windows 7 operating system will be SP1 (tentative release expected in November this year).

Well, that’s neutral news to me, since all of my SolidWorks machines are running Vista, Windows 7, or both. Windows 7 should be an acceptable alternative to XP for most people.

3) And finally, the one that is probably not unexpected, but may cause a bit of a stir is that PhotoWorks is being retired after SolidWorks 2010. PhotoView 360 has been nipping at PhotoWorks heels for a while, and while it does not seem to be ready for prime time at this moment, there is a lot of momentum behind the product, and it is headed in a useful direction. Again to quote:

SolidWorks 2010 will be the last release to include PhotoWorks.  In subsequent releases PhotoWorks will not be available and PhotoView 360 will be its functional replacement and the sole photorealistic solution for SolidWorks software.

4) Since we are talking about retirements, SolidWorks 2009 is the last version we will see the Shape featue in. If you look at the FeatureManager of a 2009 part with a Shape feature in the tree, the feature has a yellow triangle with an exclamation point. The message says that Shape will not be in SolidWorks 2010.

I have never been a fan of the Shape feature. It was somewhere in between Dome and Freeform, but never really allowed you to get a shape that I would call “intentional” out of it. Retiring a feature is an extreme step, but I don’t think it is unwarranted in this case.