SolidWorks 2010 has many improvements and new features that can help engineers and designers create and documents their designs more efficiently.  As is often the case in life, it’s the small things that matter, and small, simple improvements can make a big difference when designing or detailing a design.
SolidWorks seemed to have spent more time this go-around on polishing rough edges and speeding things up.  The themes for this release were user experience, reliability, and performance.
Below I have listed just a few of my favorite improvements in SolidWorks 2010 …

If you haven’t already heard, SolidWorks graciously hosted some of the bloggers at SolidWorks Headquarters in Concord a couple of weeks ago.  The main purpose of the event was to give us, as SolidWorks users in our day jobs, a guided hands-on tour through the new upcoming 2010 release.  And after the morass that was the SolidWorks 2009 Hands-On press event in Barcelona last year, they thought it more prudent to do a hands-on event just for the bloggers.
Now there has been a lot of flak thrown around because …

If you haven’t noticed, people are different.  They have different tastes in clothing, food, and music.  You say tomato, I say ‘mater.
So it follows that designers will have different modeling methodologies.  Sometimes, even circumstances or desired design intent dictate how you model something.
Take for instance this simple part with an o-ring groove in it:

I had a new SolidWorks user approach me a while back with the question, “How do I create something like this?”
I responded by showing them several different methods to achieve the same result.
One approach would be to …