Philip Stears | DriveWorks

DriveWorks’ New Product

I think it’s pretty obvious by now – I’m a fairly appalling blogger. It’s gone beyond the point where I can apologize for it now to be honest, but sorry anyway. That said, everyone at DriveWorks has been working hell-for-leather on our new product – DriveWorks Solo, and it’s an exciting time to be involved in DriveWorks for sure.

I could spend ages talking about DriveWorks Solo but for now, I’m just going to refer to the DriveWorks Solo web site over at http://www.driveworkssolo.com/ where you can download a 30 day trial, view the 30+ videos including how-to’s and training, read the online help, participate in the user forums, check out the @DriveWorksSolo twitter feed, and otherwise get a feel for DriveWorks Solo.

DriveWorks Solo is a really big deal for everyone at DriveWorks, and if you’re looking for a design automation solution, I encourage you to check it out – especially if you’ve already checked out DriveWorksXpress because you can take everything you’ve already done a whole load further :-D

More to come soon! I promise!

Philip

Personal Project Launched

Disclaimer: What follows has nothing to do with my work on DriveWorks, but I know a lot of my friends follow me on this blog and not particularly on my personal blog at http://meblog.philipstears.net/ which is the only location I’ll be posting follow ups to this post.

For those that follow me on twitter, it’s probably not escaped notice that I’ve been making mention of a personal project for some time now. A couple of months ago I decided I really needed something to do out of work which didn’t involve, well, you know, more work. Much as I love what I do during the day, I was at serious risk of losing what little remains of my sanity. I also couldn’t bring myself to do DIY/gardening or one of the plethora of other activities that people seem to use for this purpose.

What I did decide to do was to put my money where my mouth was and start work on something I’ve been saying should be done for quite some time – the result of which was a project called ConnectBasic.

ConnectBasic is an attempt to create a fully featured macro programming environment which is easy to integrate into the 3rd party applications. It is based largely on the, seemingly defunct, VBA language but with ambitions to take on functionality from more modern languages which are useful to macro systems – for example, collections, dictionaries, sets, generics, integrated queries, and more. It’s probably also important to say that ultimately ConnectBasic is intended to be a superset of VBA which means I will be aiming to preserve as much of its quirkiness as possible, but possibly providing additional “Option xyz” statements to control these quirks.

The launch today isn’t me saying “it’s ready, go and integrate it!”, it is me saying that I think I’ve proved that the major components are prototyped and it seems to be workable, I’m actively seeking people to help out now, and I’m excited about kicking this project into the next gear. Be warned, it is very definitely a prototype as it exists today,

ConnectBasic is available under the terms of the Microsoft Public License on CodePlex today, and the official web site is at http://connectbasic.net/. The license agreement basically allows you to do whatever you like with the code – create derivative works, fork it, contribute, use it in open source/proprietary applications with or without attribution.

I’m really hoping that this project is going to grow into something great, the ability to write macros in modern applications has, for me, been one of the most important developments in software.

I’ll be posting more over the coming days and weeks (on my personal blog) to try and explain the major components of ConnectBasic, how it works, what it does/doesn’t do, what the road map looks like etc. In the mean time, if you’ve got any questions, please feel free to ping me at philip@connectbasic.net.

Phil(ip)

Happy New Year

It seems like only yesterday that we were looking forward to the year 2000 and the problems and opportunities that the new millennium would begin, and here we are seeing out the last year of this millenniums inaugural decade. Time truly does fly.

Let me be among those to wish you the very best for 2009.

Although I personally thing new year’s resolutions are somewhat tacky, I’m making a few anyway, one of which is to read more – I always make excuses about not having enough time but frankly that’s a rubbish excuse which can be used to justify anything. So my reading list for next month or two comprises:

Fedora 9 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

I’ve kind-of fallen behind the times with the state of Linux, I  used to use it a long time ago, and we’ve got some servers that use it, but they’re pretty much a set and forget exercise. So I’ve bought a book to reacquaint myself, and hopefully to play about with Mono – the .NET implementation on Linux (and others).

The only disappointing thing about this book so far has been my complete failure to get the Fedora 9 DVD included installed on MS VPC 2009, every time I solve one problem another crops up so I’m thinking about ditching Fedora and using CentOS or Ubuntu instead.

Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare

One of my favourite books of all time is a book called Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson, and I highly recommend it to anyone that is interested in languages, and especially English, it is incredibly witty and humbling.

This book promises to bring the full strength of Bill Bryson’s wit to bear on Shakespeare and from what I’ve read so far, is going to be incredibly fully and insightful.

My Grammar and I (or should that be ‘Me’)

I’ve not read much of this one so far but what I have read has left me laughing out loud – this book takes a humorous approach to talking about English grammar, both by way of explaining it and exploring it’s many oddities due in part to the imposition of a Latin-inspired grammar on a principally German-derived language.

The Book of Atheist Spirituality

This one is a bit random, I  was in Waterstones (a bookstore) with my brother and our parents when my mother walked over to me with this book as a Joke, but having read the first few pages I decided it was an essential read.

I’m now about 1/2 way through and find the material fascinating, though sometimes the Author does go off on a bit of a rant against Nihilism which, although it may or may not be justified, I find spoils an otherwise relatively objective text.

I’m not a philosopher, nor a theologian, and so I must confess there are certain references he makes to concepts that I’ve had to look up elsewhere, but that aside, I think this is a good read for anyone of any religious perspective.

Mathematics, A Very Short Introduction

This book is fascinating although I can’t work out who it is aimed at. I’m not by any stretch a mathematician but I do enjoy mathematics, so I bought this book expecting a relatively high-level overview of some of the fundamental areas of mathematics – which in all fairness I did get, but some of the reasoning in the book seemed a little low level.

I do think this is a brilliant book for anyone like me who “dabbles” with mathematics once in a while – I learned a great deal, for instance, that the interior angles of a triangle don’t always add up with 180degrees.

One thing it has made me question is the relationship between philosophy and mathematics, because there certainly seem to be a few areas of mathematics that fall into the philosophical domain.

Relativity, A Very Short Introduction

I’ve not started this one yet, but it purports to do for the theory of Relativity what the above did for mathematics, if so, I’m really looking forward to reading it. Sometimes it would be nice to know something a bit more than the famous E = MC^2 equation.

So it begins...

It's a hectic week for sure, Kevin and I are here in Concord, MA ready to train and certify some DriveWorks AEs at the SolidWorks headquarters, we've got both Level 1 and Level 2 training going which should be fun.

Lucinda and I are going to be attending the North Eastern SolidWorks User Conference on Thursday, we're both pretty excited to be going, it looks like a lot of people are going to be there, and there's a fantastic line up of talks from the community and some of the guys from SolidWorks themselves.

Glen and Maria are off to SolidWorks World Israel this week which I'm sure they'll be writing about in due course.

For now though, I need some dinner and a Sam Adams before I crack on with the work I need to do for rest of the week!

Interesting SQL Server Related Support Ticket

We had an interesting support ticket recently where a customer was having trouble logging into their SQL Server based DriveWorks Group - DriveWorks kept showing them a message along the lines of "The group could not be opened, this could be indicative of a problem with your system".

Ultimately we ended up in having to do a GoToMeeting with the customer to try and see what was actually going on, and as soon as we were shown the database in SQL Server the problem became very obvious:

Don't worry if it's not obvious to you, I'll do you a favour and tell you - you see that each of those tables begins with "db_owner", well that's not right at all, DriveWorks expects that its databases begin with "dbo".

It isn't normal to end up in this situation, but that said, it can happen if you configure SQL Server away from the defaults, and if it does happen you'll need to rename the tables back - this unfortunately requires a little more black magic than a lot of us IT folks are probably comfortable with, but luckily we've got a SQL 2005/2008 script that does it for you:

   1: -- Get all the tables in the database and their schemas

   2: DECLARE tableCursor CURSOR FOR 

   3:     SELECT t.name,s.name 

   4:     FROM sys.tables t 

   5:     JOIN sys.schemas s 

   6:     ON t.schema_id=s.schema_id

   7:     

   8: DECLARE @name nvarchar(MAX)

   9: DECLARE @schema nvarchar(MAX)

  10: DECLARE @fullName nvarchar(MAX)

  11:  

  12: -- Loop for each table

  13: OPEN tableCursor

  14: FETCH NEXT FROM tableCursor INTO @name,@schema

  15:  

  16: WHILE @@FETCH_STATUS = 0

  17: BEGIN

  18:  

  19:     -- Work out the current full table name

  20:     SELECT @fullName= @schema + '.' + @name

  21:     

  22:     -- Change the schema to dbo

  23:     EXEC sp_changeobjectowner @fullName, 'dbo'

  24:     

  25:     -- Rinse and repeat

  26:     FETCH NEXT FROM tableCursor INTO @name,@schema

  27: END

  28:  

  29: -- Cleanup

  30: CLOSE tableCursor

  31: DEALLOCATE tableCursor

 

Whatever you do, make sure you are in the right database before you execute this script! and obviously this has been written as a quick and dirty script to perform a task, so we make no warranty of fitness for purpose and all that jazz - but hopefully if you do come across this problem, whether it be with DriveWorks or any other product, then this might help.

One thing I can't stress enough though, is that if you do decide to start messing around with a database, be it ours or any other application's, ALWAYS take a backup first, if you don't know how, then make sure you learn, because there's nothing worse than not having a backup, and call me an idiot, but unfortunately I know this from experience :-). Luckily only ever in demo environments, but still, take it from me, it isn't fun.

Philip

How I Got Started in Software Development

Thanks a lot Luke ^o), that's your Christmas card out of the window, anyhow, here' goes.

1. How old were you when you started programming?

Uhm, to be honest, I'm not entirely sure - my father was a bit of a computer enthusiast himself, so we always had a machine around that I played about with, but I guess I first got really interested in programming when I got my own 80286 which would have made me about 10ish.

2. How did you get started in programming?

I got two main starts really. Shortly after getting the aforementioned 286; I picked up a kids book containing a load of BASIC programs in it from a boot fair, unfortunately none of them were written in GW-BASIC so I had to do a lot of modifying to get them to work and I guess that in itself taught me a lot.

But the thing that really got me going was getting a copy of VB4 Standard Edition for my 12th (I think) birthday. That, a copy of "Visual Basic 4 for Windows for Dummies", and a lot of articles from computer magazines got me really fired up about development. There's just something about seeing a machine doing what you tell it to; that never quite gets dull - especially when said computer can be hundreds of miles away and you can bring robots into the mix. It's not a God complex though. Much. Anyway, moving swiftly on...

3. What was your first language?

GW-Basic, I've still got the floppys around here somewhere.

4. What was the first real program that you wrote?

A notepad clone- when I was about 13 I got bored at the lack of anything technological at school (at the risk of annoying a load of people, they used Acorns, and I was pretty much a PC guy), so my parents got me enrolled at the local college doing some Cambridge IT certificate module thingymabob, it was pretty good fun, although my work did get plagiarised which taught me a few lessons about life a little earlier than I might have wanted.

The program was written in VB3 which was alright, but lacking a load of functionality, so I got pretty heavily involved with calling into the Windows API from VB which I probably enjoyed a lot more then than I do now :-)

5. What languages have you used since you started programming?

Ouch, uhm, a few, the ones I use professionally at the moment are VB.NET, C#, and a little bit of C++ here and there, but I've used quite a few through academia and personal playing - MSIL, Old School VB, ASP, C, Pascal & Delphi, CAML, PHP, MASM & NASM Assembler to name some, I'm sure there are others, and I won't even bother trying to list dialects of BASIC.

6. What was your first programming gig?

I did some work experience with a SolidWorks Reseller called SolidBase when I was maybe 15, which basically involved a lot of spreadsheet to database conversion using VB6. Shortly after that I found myself working on DriveWorks 3, and I've ended up working for DriveWorks throughout the remainder of my education doing bits and pieces until last year or so ago when I finished University and came to work for DriveWorks full time where I now head up our development efforts.

7. If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Are you joking? If I knew then what I know now, then by now, I'd be writing even better code ;-)

8. If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

Never stop playing - programming is a fun and enjoyable activity, the minute you forget that; you'll burn out. So make sure you make time to sit down with new technologies and fiddle.

 

Seeing as this is a meme, and I'll anger the Internet Gods if I don't continue it, I'm tagging Glen Smith, Jeff Read, Ben Hall, and Boris Shoov (I can but try ;-)) 

P.S. Can you believe that "thingymabob" isn't in Windows Live Writer's spell checker? for shame.

Reseller Training Event

We will be running both Level 1 and Level 2 technical training and certification over at SolidWorks' head quarters in Boston from September 15th, this is a great opportunity to spend some time out of the office picking up some invaluable skills and networking with other AEs from far and wide.

Level 1 will run September 15th to 17th, and Level 2 will run from September 18th to 19th.

If you're interested in attending, then please drop an e-mail to info@driveworks.co.uk.

I'll follow up with more information as soon as we've got all the final arrangements made.

Twitter

Okay, I admit it, I pretty much suck - my blogging career to date has been nothing short of tragic. It's not even as if there isn't stuff to write about, I mean, there's always stuff going on, it's just that I've got the blogging equivalent of attention deficit disorder. Every time I sit down and start thinking about writing a blog entry, my mind wanders and before I know it I'm writing code again.

So, after noticing that Ian had started twittering, I figured I'd give it a go, after all, being limited to typing 140 characters is right up my street, if anything it's 20 characters too few.

I've only been on it for a day and I've been pleasantly surprised so far, but I'm still trying to work out where it fits in. With any luck it'll hold my attention longer than bebo, facebook, blogging, linked in, and a tonne of others that I somehow seem to have got sucked in to, but Jeff's already expressed his doubts ;-)

SolidWorks World 2008 - The Aftermath

Having been, once again, berated for my somewhat less than stellar blogging career to-date (thanks Jeff!), and now that things back in the UK are beginning to return to normalish levels (whatever that means) - I figured I'd get a quick post out.

There seem to be fairly mixed feelings on the web about SolidWorks World '08 but for my part I think SolidWorks did a darned good job for the most part.

Although the general sessions weren't overly inspiring, two things really did hit me:

First was the session with Theo Jansen during which my bottom jaw spent most of the time on the floor as I watched his "creatures" move around of their own accord. The two tonner was particularly scary.

The second was the emphasis that is being placed by SolidWorks on stability and performance for 2009. I think its great that, instead of overly flashy demonstrations, and lots of "ra ra ra" stuff, there was a very down to earth attitude this year that focused on the very real needs of the user.

Admittedly I am biased, but I thought the partner pavilion was great this year - certainly better than Vegas or New Orleans (this is only my third World) particularly in terms of the number of people that decided to peruse the booths.

Unfortunately, as with last year, Delta decided to lose our bags in Atlanta, unlike last year however they arrived the next day completely in tact, hopefully next year we can graduate to just having our bags at the outset (please guys - conferences are hard enough work without stuff going missing)

The Mariott hotel was great, aside from being a stone's throw from the convention centre, the nearest bar was called DWs - no prizes for guessing the pun, and the view from the room was fantastic:

The block party was fantastic, though in all fairness, I'm bound to say that wherever free food, beer, and music are involved ;-)

On Thursday we held our own reseller event which I hope everyone found useful, one of my favourite bits was having Neil up there talking about his own experiences starting with DriveWorksXpress and moving on to full DriveWorks.

I've said it before and I probably sound like a broken record, but my favourite bit of the whole SolidWorks World affair is getting to meet people - whether Prospects, Customers, Resellers, Partners or the people at SolidWorks themselves. Some of the great people I got to meet this year were Mark Arnett from CAD Graphics West who kindly lent us two machines for our booth, Jeff Sweeney from 3D Vision who despite having a go at me is always a welcome face, Paul Gimbel from Razorleaf who has a seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge, Mike Jolly who is our newest certified AE, Boris Shoov, Jim Wilkinson, and Jeremy Regnerus if only fleetingly from SolidWorks - there are a tonne of others, just because you're not on the list above it doesn't mean your not loved! I'm sure it doesn't matter how many people I list, I'm going to get an e-mail from someone saying I've forgotten them :-)

 

On Thursday afternoon the DriveWorks team (including Neil) packed up and headed over to Denver, Colorado for a team meeting - the kind of team meeting that involved skiing, snowboarding, and a reasonable amount of alcohol. I'm ashamed to say that a fair amount of the alcohol survived the weekend, but by that time the time-zone change had really hit most of us.

Anyhoo, I think this post is quite long enough, hopefully the next one won't be so long coming!

SolidWorks World 2008

It seems pretty compulsory nowadays to leave a blog entry somewhere if you're heading to SolidWorks World, so not to buck the trend, here I go too.

Both Glen and Maria have already set off on their 5,336mi (that's 8,588km to our European friends) journey from miserable Manchester to sunny (by our standards) San Diego.

Ian, Kevin, Dan, Phil, and myself will be flying out tomorrow at 12:00 our time and landing at some point late in the evening.

I'm really looking forward to another SolidWorks World, it is easily one of the biggest highlights of the year for me - the biggest reward personally is getting to meet our customers and resellers and find out how they are getting on. Even being the technophile I am, I still think actually meeting someone in person is one of the most important things you can do.

From a professional point of view I'm also really impressed by just how much interest in design automation is increasing, hopefully DriveWorksXpress has had a large part to play in that, and I'd love to hear from anyone that has had a play with it to see how they are getting on.

Anyhow, I'm sure there is some last minute preparation I'm supposed to be doing right now, but if you're going to San Diego, please stop by the booth. If you want to buy some software, we'll be only too happy to help, and if you just want a chat, bring a bottle of beer with you and we'll be happy to do that as well ;-)

When making connections is a really bad thing...

One of the most critically important features in DriveWorks is the ability to get data into, and out-of other systems, which is why we provide a whole slew of ways of doing so.

Of these, QueryData is perhaps the most used due it's relative simplicity (compared to, say, GetData).

The problem is, QueryData is not without its own troubles, indeed, if you have a large implementation with quite a lot of queries being performed, you can quickly notice that things start to drag.

The reason for this is quite simple, every call to QueryData opens a connection to the target database, gets the data, and closes the connection again. With database servers such as Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle and the likes, the set-up and tear-down of the connection is quite an expensive operation, and something to avoid wherever possible.

Quite late in the development cycle for SP2 we put together a solution for this which involves re-using connections, unfortunately it was too late in the day to ship this with SP2 and there are still improvements that we would like to make.

However, due to the significant performance improvements that can be obtained, and because another service pack is not planned for release for some months yet, we're making this version of QueryData available as a macro.

I've created a page to explain how to obtain and use this new macro, and also explain how it works, so, if you are currently finding data access is slowing down your implementation, please take a look.

I'm really interested to hear about your mileage with this new QueryData macro, so please, if you find the time, drop me an e-mail and let me know how it works out for you. It would also be really great if you have any rough timing comparisons for before and after using it.

Service Pack 2.1 Released!

Late last week we released SP2.1 as an update to service pack 2 to the VAR desktop, which includes the fix for the file management issue I talked about last week.

We've also taken the opportunity to incorporate an update to the Flex licensing system in the network license manager.

If you haven't already got SP2.1, contact your reseller now for more information about how to get it - or if you are a reseller, let your customers know :-)

Update: Service Pack 2 - Important Announcement

Yesterday I blogged about the withdrawal of DriveWorks 6 SP2 from our VAR desktop.

I can now post more detail about the bug that caused us to take this extreme action, and our next steps for releasing an updated version of SP2.

Firstly, the bug only manifests itself in the following very specific situation:

1. You open the file management view
2. Ensure you are in the "Models" tab
3. Set "View by" to be "Assembly Structure"
4. Click a drawing from the tree view on the left to select it.
5. Right click the drawing in the list view on the right.
6. Click "Delete"

If you do this, the parent part or assembly and all of its children are deleted - not the drawing.

If you right click the drawing in the tree view and select delete, DriveWorks correctly deletes the drawing.

We have also checked and confirmed that this behavior also applies to SP1.

Until SP2.1, do not use the list view to delete drawing information from the DriveWorks database.

With regards to SP2.1, this bug has already been fixed and is currently under test. Our expectation is that we will release SP2.1 later today, hopefully before 17:00 EDT.

Although in light of the very specific nature of the bug (and the fact that it has not affected anyone in the many months that SP1 has been released and available), our decision to pull the software may seem extreme - we felt at the time, and still do, that it was the right thing to do.

Service Pack 2 - Important Announcement

[Update: please read the update to this post at http://blog.philipstears.net/2007/09/update-service-.html for more information]

Regrettably we have had to take the hard decision today to pull DriveWorks SP2 from our web site after having been available for only a little more than a week.

This decision was taken due to a bug in part of the implementation of file management, which, could in some specific cases, where the file management is used to delete data, have severe consequences requiring the restoration of the group from a backup.

Given the potential damage, we can not in good conscience continue to provide SP2 for download from our web site, even though we believe only a small percentage of you are potentially affected.

We are planning to release SP2.1, which will ONLY contain a fix for this issue and no others, in the next two days.

If you are using SP2 now, I strongly urge you not to use file management at this time.

I would also like to remind people of the importance of back-ups, this bug aside, file management is a powerful tool, but offers an equal risk due to its deletion capabilities. Please make sure you always have an up to date backup when using file management. It is a relatively small hassle to create a robust backup policy compared to the potential data loss if someone makes a mistake.

I apologize for any inconvenience this causes anyone, and for the relatively little amount of detail at this stage, we will be posting a more detailed announcement tomorrow, as well as a formal announcement on our web site later today.

We certainly do not take any situation like this lightly, I hope you bear with us whilst we ensure that we get this sorted properly.