Solidworks World 2018 – DraftSight Review

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Well folks, that’s it all done and dusted for another year.  SOLIDWORKS World 2018 is now over.  All the bags are packed and we’re ready to head home to our own corners of the globe.  Once the dust has settled, I’m sure you, like us, will start thinking about SOLIDWORKS World 2019 in Dallas, Texas next February!

The DraftSight team hosted three excellent sessions at SOLIDWORKS World 2018.  On Monday, Vivek presented the “Using the DraftSight API to Create Add-ins for DraftSight“ session. It was an excellent session dealing with a topic that can be intimidating for a new user.

Vivek from the DraftSight team explaining about the DraftSight API.

On Tuesday, Wai-Ming and Marco presented the “What’s New in DraftSight 2018“ session.  When DraftSight 2018 was released late in 2017, there were a lot of new features. Wai-Ming and Marco went through them all and gave simple and clear advice on how to get the most out of the new features.

Wai-Ming going through some of the new commands in DraftSight 2018
Marco explaining some of the new options available to users in DraftSight 2018.

On Wednesday, Don Glaske presented “DraftSight Essentials: DraftSight for the AutoCAD user”.  If you’ve ever seen Don present before, you know just how knowledgeable he is on DraftSight and he explained how easy it is for an AutoCAD user to switch to DraftSight.  The Q&A session afterwards was excellent with attendees asking some great questions.

All three DraftSight sessions were broadcast live on Twitter and on Facebook, so if you’d like to go back and review them, just go to the DraftSight social media pages and you’ll find them there,

What else did we learn at SOLIDWORKS World 2018.  Well Graebert are releasing a a 2D Electrical CAD plugin for DraftSight called G-Electrical for DraftSight. This is sure to be a favourite with Electrical Designers using DraftSight. G-Electrical requires you to have DraftSight 2018 SP1 Professional or Enterprise installed.

We also saw DraftSight 2018 SP1 running on a Microsoft Surface Studio.  I’ve used DraftSight on laptops with touchscreens before, but using the stylus brought me right back to the days of drafting board. It felt very natural.

One of my non DraftSight related highlights of the week took place on Tuesday at a packed Microsoft stand. I stood and watched the successful Falcon Heavy test launch, an amazing feat of engineering.

Earlier in the week during the General Sessions, Gian Paolo Bassi spoke about seeking inspiration from the innovators and Bernard Charlès called on us all to “Dream Big”. I think this launch showed just what can be achieved when you do seek inspiration and are not afraid to dream big!

So that’s a brief review of what the DraftSight team got up to over the course of SOLIDWORKS World 2018.  As always, it was great to meet with DraftSight users and get their feedback on the new features. Feedback from users is invaluable and lets us know that we are on the right track.  So, keep it coming.

We look forward to seeing you all in Dallas for #SWW19!

To learn more about DraftSight 2018 here. 

Purchase DraftSight Professional 2018 for as low as $149 here.

MJ Smyth

MJ Smyth

The first time I used CAD, it was on a DOS PC with an 8088 processor, 640K of memory and a Hercules Mono Graphics Card... That, well that was a long long time ago. I switched to DraftSight the day it was released and haven't looked back!
MJ Smyth

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