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 are interested in participating in SolidWorks usability testing, check out the post on the SolidWorks Blog for details.  They are looking for folks from all skill levels to do exploratory, free-form usability test on development builds of SolidWorks.
Most of the time, the tests are done online, and you will get to see possible new functionality and have input on the direction of the software!  Sign-up is free and all you have to do to sign up is fill out a short survey.
Image courtesy chabster.
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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 …