Monday, December 08, 2008

Autodesk University 2008 is over with...

Well - I feel guilty... They gave me an "AU Blogger" ribbon for my badge - and then I didn't manage to Blog during the show. It was an incredibly busy week, including:

- Setup of the Altogether Smarter Challenge stations for Avatech (I'd like to throttle somebody at UPS who thinks that 11/21 to 12/1 constitutes 3-day delivery)...

- The Autodesk Developer Network DevDays conference... for my money, the best day of guidance you can get from Autodesk... Although this year there was a little bit more talk and a little bit less specifics than in previous years.

- We launched our new BIMreview application, which helps check your Revit models for standards and practices, to great feedback from Revit users! The crowd was 3-deep for most of the open exhibit time.

- I did my first solo class - CP315-4: Getting Down to BIM, Advanced Revit API to a crowd of perhaps 60-80 people. That went well (the contents should be posted on the AU site this week... after a little while there, I'll release it more broadly).

All in all, though - an incredibly busy week. And I only got to see about 1/3 of the sessions I had wanted to see.

While I can't share the specifics (much of the ADN stuff is under NDA), my general impressions of what's to come is that:

  • Autodesk continues to invest significantly in AutoCAD, even around 3D and other topics which you might imagine that they would delegate to the vertical products.
  • Autodesk continues to find ways to leverage the Media & Entertainment division software into the Design software side of things.

There's not much more I can say until whenever they free us from the blackout...

Oh yeah - and I think most people know it, but 2010 WILL be a new DWG format, and will break many of the existing applications out there (they plan this - only once every three years).