After attending a GoEngineer 2012 Rollout event, it was apparent that there were some nice new features.

Two enhancements I'm excited about are the "freeze" function and the ability to import iges and step files without having to create each of the parts.  Both of these features will speed up my work, which is always good.  I may save dozens of hours this year due to these improvements alone.

BUT...

SolidWorks has once again FAILED to fix one if it's biggest (and perhaps most controversial) bugs.  They have know about it from day one.  I have been asking for it's fix for roughly a decade.  And it reared it's ugly head at the rollout without anybody noticing.

What is it?  It's the ZTG bug, or ZERO THICKNESS GEOMETRY.  For those of you who don't know what it is, just search the forums.  The fact remains, that this lack of functionality, commonly thought to be a characteristic of the ParaSolids kernel, causes many of us problems.  It also causes many of you problems unknowingly.

During the presentation of 2012 in Sacramento this week, Michael Binford, a GoEngineer support engineer, was flying through his presentation of all the great new features.

One feature he was demonstrating was the ability for 2012 to leave sectioned parts and assemblies highlighted at the cut (WOW, only took 15 years to get this one!).  As he was trying to do a section, he got an error that said something to the tune of:

He quickly hit OK and then found a new place to section the assembly.

BUT WHY?  WHY COULD HE NOT SIMPLY SECTION THE FILE??

The ZTG bug!!

Try it for youself.  Creat a sketch like the one below:

make a circle that intersects the origin and who's center is horizontal to the origin.  put a rectangle around it and extrude it.

Now try to do a section view at the vertical plane through the origin...

if you've done your sketch correctly, where the hole is tangent to the plane, then you will get the same error.

Some will say, no big deal, just move the section to one side or the other just a little bit and all will be well.  But that's not what I want.

ProE and Inventor do not have this issue and I'm suprised that SolidWorks is not embarassed enough to fix this.

For those of you who agree that this is an ongoing problem that should be fixed, please help sound the alarm. 

PLEASE, SolidWorks, less buttons and widgets.  Concentrate your efforts on fixing this!!!  There were 200 people at the rollout event and not a single one was interested in the Sustainability module.  Take all the people at SolidWorks working on this usless feature and put them to good use!  FIX, FIX, FIX!!!