Hello all,

this is Volker Sachse from ICIDO in Stuttgart, Germany using my colleagues account. We would like to develop the import of SolidWorks assemblies and parts into our Virtual Reality application called VDP. We have an installation of SWX 2010 available for it. It is planned to use the ISldWorks Interface to import the structure, geometry, material etc. from SolidWorks via the C++ unmanaged API. The application will be a COM client which talks to SolidWorks as COM server, i.e. it will not be an add-in application.

What is unclear to me right now is how such an application would be deployed. Must there be a installation of SWX available on the machine the application is running, or is it possible to ship a subset of SolidWorks dlls? Maybe the ones that can be found under the 'redist' folder in the api sub folder of the installation?

We would like to keep SolidWorks in the background as far as possible. I learnt from the ISldWorks Interface documentation that the properties 'Visible' and 'UserControl' of the can be set to false in order to archive that. But at the moment a document is opened via OpenDoc6 resp. OpenDoc7 IModelDoc2 interface method, the SolidWorks application pops up anyway and stays after the exit of the api program. Did I miss something there?

It would be nice if someone could help me on these points.
Thank you very much.

Volker