Autodesk Aquires Dynamite VSP & Dynamite SIM from 3AM Solutions

Yes, I know the press release is from a few days ago but I've been busy teaching in Los Angeles for the past few days.

Official press release
Posted to the area discussion group blog

Back when U.S. CAD became a reseller in July of 2009, I knew that DVSP & DSIM had great potential and was a great solution for our civil engineering customers. Even before that arrangement - as early as 2008 I was looking at these tools as being the next place to work with your civil design for visualization. I'm sure some will say boo-hiss for Autodesk aquiring yet another company - but to be honest its a perfect fit for existing Autodesk customers. For those already using DVSP & other Autodesk products, it will simplify their purchasing orders, give them a central location for support and give them access to a larger pool of R&D resources. Anyways, I look forward to the possibilities that this will open up.

Missing menu files for AutoCAD Architecture and MEP?

For those that still use AutoCAD Architecture (ACA) or AutoCAD MEP (AMEP) - you will find this of great interest. I suppose its about time I tracked this issue down. Back when I installed ACA earlier this year, I noticed there were no pulldown menu's. It didn't bother me much as I was so focused on assimilating the new ribbon. One of our customers finally came across the same issue which forced me to track it down.

After trying a reinstall of the product, looking in the Doc&Settings UserDataCache folder, and reloading CUI files to rebuild them, verifying I had the latest product version, nothing worked. I went on a week and a half long quest with Autodesk support. They told me to try all the things I had already done and then some, but none of their suggestions addressed the fact that the menus were completely missing from the CUI file. In the process of this quest, I also noticed there were no toolbars in the default ACA CUI file.

I asked Autodesk to send me their default ACA CUI file so I could try and load the menus from theirs. It too was blank as was another CUI file I got from a colleague 10 states away that worked at a different company altogether. When I posted this info back to Autodesk support I was getting rather unsettled to put it mildly.

Today they finally sent me a zip file containing all menus and toolbars that I was looking for along with instructions on how to integrate them with ACA. This left me with several questions unanswered that I'm sure you are thinking as well. Why were these not included by default with ACA 2010? Why did they not release a product update to fix this? Why did they assume we would not want these toolbars and menus in 2010? Why did it take a week and a half for them to figure out they needed to send me these files? Oh well - at least I have them now. If you are running ACA or AMEP 2010 you will likely need these files at some point. Rather than re-host them somewhere else, I found they are already posted to AUGI.

Download from this AUGI post

Bright Side of News Award given to Studio GPU

Looks like more and more people are finding words of praise for Studio GPU's release of MachStudio Pro!

BSN Review

What a week!

Last week saw the birth of my first son! Less sleep, less time and a bundle of joy. What can I say? I couldn't ask for anything better.