I travelled to both Osaka, Japan and Shanghai, China last month to attend SOLIDWORKS 2016 Beta rollout events. After the Japan event, was I ready to tackle another week in yet another country? Well, yes. I was already adjusted to the local timezone in Japan, so the one hour difference between Japan and China didn’t phase me.
Since I was in town a day early, I was able to meet up with the SOLIDWORKS China team and visit a customer to talk about how we can improve SOLIDWORKS to better meet their needs. The Product Definition team conducts over a hundred of these vists each year. It was great being able to visit one of our valued Chinese customers.
Each day of the Beta rollout in China was a complete event for its attendees. In the morning, SOLIDWORKS China team presented the What’s New and explained the SOLIDWORKS Beta testing. For the rest of the day, attendees eagerly tried out SOLIDWORKS 2016 on their own models and designs in our lab.
Days two and three of the event focused on customers interested in such topics as SOLIDWORKS Electric and SOLIDWORKS PDM.
Each day of the event, SOLIDWORKS China recognized the most prolific bug finders of the day.
In the evenings, those of us from out of town explored the iconic areas of Shanghai on foot.
The Shanghai SOLIDWORKS 2016 Beta rollout event was great. Interacting with our customers as they are using SOLIDWORKS 2016 for the first time provided a lot of valuable feedback. A big thank you to our SOLIDWORKS China team for hosting this event!
There are many SOLIDWORKS Beta rollout events throughout the world each year. Beta rollout events gives local companies and particular users an opportunity to preview SOLIDWORKS functionality for the upcoming release. They are able to test drive the new SOLIDWORKS release with their own SOLIDWORKS files from their projects. The rollout events allow them to help us find bugs and to preview functionality so they can get a heads up on what to expect in the next release. 
These also give customers a chance to directly interact with SOLIDWORKS team members from Development, Product Definition and User Experience. Japan, China, Germany, Brazil, US, Mexico, etc all host events during the summer leading up to the official product release in September. This year, I attended the Beta rollout event in Osaka, Japan and Shanghai, China.
Have you ever noticed there is a gap on the corners of your lines when you have model edges or sketch lines? You will usually notice this when you try to use very thick lines on a SOLIDWORKS drawing. Why are you seeing this gap? Welp, as with most visual display characteristics in SOLIDWORKS, there is a setting for that. You actually have three options for corner appearance: Flat (default), Square and Round. This is found in your drawing’s document properties at Tools pulldown>Options…>Document Properties>Line Font on a setting called End cap style.
