Tag Archives: Service Pack

AutoCAD 2017.1.1 Update

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Thanks to Jimmy Bergmark, I now know that the controversial subscription-only* AutoCAD 2017.1 Update has itself been updated. Jimmy was brave enough to install and run the execrable Autodesk desktop app and discovered the update update. Rather you than me, Jimmy!

Here’s the readme. You’ll need to get at it using Autodesk Account.

I note that a bunch of crashes are fixed by this update update. Perhaps that is related to the magical missing AutoCAD 2017.1 crash information? Who knows?

The update was apparently released over a month ago on 17 November 2016. Autodesk needs to work out an alternative mechanism to Autodesk desktop app so that those of us who won’t/can’t use it will still be informed when updates become available. If only there were some other method Autodesk could use to communicate with customers! Too hard, apparently.

* not really

Hotfix for AutoCAD 2017 SP1 Autoloader bug

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As reported earlier, AutoCAD 2017 SP1 breaks third-party add-ins that use the officially approved Autoloader mechanism. Autodesk is to be commended for acting quickly to produce a hotfix for this. In order to make this hotfix available quickly, Autodesk has taken the very unusual step of allowing a third party to distribute it. See this post from Jimmy Bergmark, who pointed out the bug in the first place. Kudos to whoever at Autodesk made the call to think outside the box to do this. It’s a very un-Autodesk Corporate thing to do, and particularly commendable for that very reason.

It’s important to note that because of the way Service Packs are now handled in AutoCAD and the vertical products based on it, this SP1 bug affects all of those products, not just base AutoCAD. Here is the list of affected products*:

  • AutoCAD 2017
  • AutoCAD Map 3D 2017
  • AutoCAD Civil 3D 2017
  • AutoCAD Mechanical 2017
  • AutoCAD Electrical 2017
  • AutoCAD Architecture 2017
  • AutoCAD MEP 2017
  • AutoCAD P&ID 2017
  • AutoCAD Plant 3D 2017
  • AutoCAD Utility Design 2017

*See links in comments below for further information about this.

Having heaped praise upon Autodesk for acting so quickly, it still needs to be said that Autodesk has done the wrong thing very quickly. Customers who go along with Autodesk’s continuous update push will see third party applications failing. The third party developers will be getting support requests from those customers and will have to persuade them a) that it’s Autodesk’s fault, and b) to go and deal with a manual hotfix that requires admin rights and requires copying/renaming things in Program Files. For customers without sufficient confidence to do that, or for whom just getting permission from IT to perform admin-rights operations is onerous, that’s pretty inconvenient.

It is wrong for Autodesk to offload the consequences of its incompetence onto its victims. Those customers and developers who have simply followed Autodesk’s direction and done nothing wrong deserve better than this.

What should have happened? SP1’s immediate withdrawal. It should be pulled now and reintroduced later (perhaps as SP1a) with this bug fixed. Given we’re only talking about one file, a week or two should do it. The hotfix should remain available for those customers who have already installed SP1, wish to keep it in place, and are happy to do the manual hotfix steps.

The lesson for customers and developers is not to blindly follow Autodesk’s direction. Make your own informed decisions about how you use, manage and develop for Autodesk products.

There are lessons here for Autodesk, too.

  1. Test stuff properly before releasing it. If serious bugs like this are discovered, delay the release until they’re fixed and retested.
  2. When you do screw up, fix it not only quickly but correctly. Don’t offload your problems onto your customers and developers; clean up your own mess.
  3. You’re not competent enough to do the automated continuous update thing. Your customers won’t trust you to do it, and they will be right. Give it up.

If item 2 above involves extra inconvenience and expense, so be it. It’s part of the cost of doing business; people pay a lot of money for Autodesk software, particularly if they’re forced to rent it. But doing item 1 right is actually cheaper and it means item 2 is much less likely to be relevant.

Will Autodesk learn from this? Unfortunately, I can’t be confident about that. I’ve seen too many such lessons unlearned or simply ignored over the years.

AutoCAD 2013 Service Pack 1 – Now you see it, now you don’t

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Last week, Autodesk released Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013, and then removed it a few days later.

Service Pack 1 for AutoCAD 2013 has been temporarily removed due to a newly discovered fatal error. The AutoCAD team is actively working on resolving this and a new service pack will be posted here as soon as it is available.

This is the sort of thing that Beta testing is supposed to prevent, but in this case it obviously didn’t. Somebody in a position of influence at Autodesk needs to investigate whether this is just a freak one-off, or if there is some systemic weakness within the Beta testing program.

One of the supposed benefits of Cloud software is that there are no updates for users to worry about. It’s all taken care of on the vendor’s server and you’re always using the most up to date version. OK, now fast forward five years and imagine how this scenario would have panned out if AutoCAD was a SaaS product.

You come in one morning to find your AutoCAD keeps crashing, or worse, corrupting your files. It keeps doing this for several days until Autodesk is convinced that the problem lies at its end and reverts the changes on its server while it works out how to fix it. In the meantime, there’s nothing you can do to keep your business running except use one of those old-fashioned copies of AutoCAD you have lying around the place. Except your Subscription agreement only allows you to go back 3 releases. Autodesk no longer supports the release you happen to have handy, and won’t allow the software to be activated. You don’t have a 30-day window because you once evaluated that release on your PC and your 30 days are well and truly gone. Oh, and the file format of the drawings you have been using lately has changed several times and the old release won’t open them anyway.

Why would anyone want to put their business in this position?

Edit: A couple of weeks later, Autodesk released AutoCAD 2013 Service Pack 1.1 to resolve the problem.

Will Autodesk have to explain itself to the SEC?

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The observant among you may have noticed that for many years, Autodesk’s free patches, service packs and updates haven’t added any new functionality. Bugs may get fixed, severe performance issues may be addressed, but design errors generally have to wait for the next release (at the earliest), and new features definitely don’t get added.

The last time new functionality was added to AutoCAD in a free maintenance release was Release 13’s c4 update which shipped on 12 February 1996. (There was a public beta available some months earlier; I picked up a copy at Autodesk University 1995). That free update contained not only a host of bug fixes, but also more useful new features than some later full-price upgrades (e.g. AutoCAD 2000i). In an outbreak of outstanding customer service, a c4 CD was shipped free to all registered users. Maybe Autodesk was trying to recover from disastrously shipping Release 13 prematurely, but issuing such a comprehensive update free of charge was still highly commendable.

Why did Autodesk stop providing new functionality in free updates? While it involves more work for Autodesk and hardly encourages paid upgrades or Subscription, the reason we’ve been given over the years is that there are accounting regulations that prevent Autodesk from providing new functionality in free updates. This does not apply to benefits from paid Subscription, and various new features for Subscription users have indeed appeared (albeit in fits and starts) over the intervening years.

I have to admit that I have always thought that this accounting thing was a pretty unlikely-sounding excuse for Autodesk’s inactivity. This attitude was reinforced by a lack of Autodesk response to my requests for further information about the alleged regulations. Until recently, I didn’t care enough about this matter to bother finding out for myself, but something extraordinary just happened that piqued my curiosity.

What happened? Autodesk released a free Service Pack that included new functionality for the first time in over 15 years. I was particularly interested in this, because part of what’s new is a new command providing a subset of the functionality of my ClassicArray™ plug-in. When I put in the time and effort to develop this product to fill a hole of Autodesk’s making, I did so on the assumption that Autodesk wasn’t going to provide an Array dialog box until at least AutoCAD 2013. It turns out that this assumption was wrong.

So what’s all this about accounting regulations preventing new functionality being provided free between releases? Was I right to be vaguely cynical about that? After some research, it would appear that I was wrong about that, too. There is an FASB (responsible to the SEC) accounting standard called SOP 97-2, which covers software revenue recognition. I’m no accountant and the regulations are large and complex, but here is my layman’s understanding of the basics.

In a simple case where a vendor (e.g. Autodesk) sells a complete product (e.g. AutoCAD 2012) at a given date, it records and declares the revenue for that product in the appropriate period as a single unit of accounting. If there are multiple elements of the product, things get more complex. If Autodesk ships part of AutoCAD 2012 (the main product) at one time and part (e.g. a Service Pack with new functionality) at another, then it is required to separate the elements into multiple units of accounting. It is required to make available vendor-specific objective evidence (VSOE) for each element of the product. If Autodesk has not done so (which seems likely), there is probably a problem. My understanding is that without VSOE, Autodesk is required to allocate the revenue for AutoCAD 2012 sales not at the point when it was received, but when all the elements have been delivered (i.e. when SP1 was released).

What about an argument that the new ARRAYCLASSIC command and new SNAPGRIDLEGACY system variable are not new functionality in themselves, but merely mechanisms to restore functionality that was available in previous releases? I don’t think that matters. The functionality is new to those customers who purchased AutoCAD 2012 and thereby provided Autodesk with revenue between March and September 2011. If that revenue has been allocated incorrectly, then Autodesk has some revenue shuffling and explaining to do.

I repeat that I’m not an accountant and this is all a layman’s uninformed opinion. It is quite possible that the regulations have recently changed, or that a relaxed interpretation is now permissible, or that I have the wrong end of the stick entirely. I’ve admitted being wrong in this post twice already and it could well be thrice.

If I’m wrong and Autodesk is in the clear, that’s great. Why? Because it means Autodesk customers can look forward to a lot more functionality being provided in future service packs.

AutoCAD 2012 Service Pack 1

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The first update for AutoCAD 2012 is now available on the Autodesk site. As usual, read the readme first and exercise the usual paranoia. Make sure you install the right version (32 or 64 bit). The update is also available for AutoCAD LT 2012. There is no news yet on equivalent updates for vertical variants of AutoCAD, so just talk amongst yourselves for a while until Autodesk gets around to it.

Autodesk has, thankfully, abandoned the confusing nomenclature for its service packs. So this is not 2012 Update 1 with a filename that includes SP1 and which results in the software being considered 2012 Version 2. It is 2012 Service Pack 1 with a filename that includes SP1 and which results in the software being considered 2012 SP1. Why Autodesk thought the former convention made sense is beyond me, but at least it’s over now.

This Service Pack is unusual for more than that, though. It’s the first free update since R13c4 in 1996 to include new functionality, i.e. a new command (ARRAYCLASSIC) and a new system variable (SNAPGRIDLEGACY). I’ll have more to say on that later.

Autodesk shows Dassault how to treat customers

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There are areas of Autodesk’s treatment of customers that leaves much to be desired, and I will most likely continue to be critical of that until a) I die; b) Autodesk dies; or c) the bad stuff stops happening. One thing for which Autodesk deserves praise is the distribution of bug fixes to its customers, without imposing the sort of conditions that SolidWorks customers have to put up with.

  • Do Autodesk customers need to be on Subscription to receive bug fixes? No, they do not.
  • Do Autodesk customers need to have purchased the software within the last 90 days to receive bug fixes? No, they do not.
  • Do Autodesk customers need to have reported certain specific bugs to receive bug fixes? No, they do not.
  • Do Autodesk customers even need to be running the current release to receive bug fixes? No, they do not.

AutoCAD 2010 Update 2 (that’s Service Pack 2 in the old language) has just been released for the users of last year’s software. This includes the Update 1 changes. The usual caveats apply, including reading the Readme first. As usual, Autodesk’s oddball numbering system means that after installation, Update 1 shows up as Version 2 and Update 2 shows up as Version 3 in the About screen.

This Update applies to straight AutoCAD (and LT), not the vertical variants. I have no news about non-English versions. Patrick Emin informs me these updates are language-independent.

When is a Service Pack not a Service Pack?

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When it’s an Update. This year, Service Packs are called Updates, and the first one for AutoCAD is out now. The 32-bit version is here and the 64-bit version is here. The Update includes LT, but there is no news yet about Updates for any of the vertical AutoCAD variants.

As usual, read the Readme first. Also, as this Update has had a considerably shorter gestation period than the traditional six-month wait for the first AutoCAD Service Pack, you may be wise to exercise more paranoia than normal. Save and export your AutoCAD profiles, save your workspaces, make backups of your CUI files and put them somewhere safe where AutoCAD and the Update can’t find them.

Does the shortened time before the first Update indicate that there will be more Updates in store? Probably. Although Update 1 (U1) fixes a lot of stuff, there’s still plenty more stuff left to fix in 2009. Oh, and just because it says in the Readme that something is fixed, don’t take it for granted that your particular variant of that problem is fixed. Try it out for yourself.

I know that many of you don’t put an AutoCAD release into production until SP1 is released, so should you go now with U1 or wait for U2? (No, not the band). Or U3, even, if there ever is one? It’s up to you, of course, but in my own CAD management role I won’t be distributing AutoCAD 2009 with U1 to my users. I just don’t think it’s ready yet.