[purCAB]

I realize that this is a bit early, but FYI -- It appears that the current 1.7 plugin is not compatible with SW2009-Beta2. The message received is "An unexpected Exception occurred while loading the Maxwell for SolidWorks plugin: Exception Message: Version's parameters must be greater than or equal to zero. Parameter name: minor"

Ken

[JDHill]

Thanks for the (nicely-detailed ) heads-up, I can see where that's coming from. It shouldn't actually be incompatible - I'll fix this for the next update.

JD

[quigley]

I can confirm this as well. Beta 2 for SW 2009 crashes the latest plug in.

The odd thing is that I'm not sure why the plug in is even registering as the installations are on different directories (I'm running SW 2008 and 2009 on the same machine).

[JDHill]

All SolidWorks installations will attempt to load a plugin based on generic information found in the registry - it does not work in such a way as to target specific versions of SolidWorks (there was a problem in the past with SW 2005/2006 attempting to load the plugin - it would error out when it asked SW for camera info which was not implemented in those versions). It is during the 1.7 plugin's load-up that it reads the SolidWorks version which is trying to load it and decides whether or not to let the load continue. It is when attempting to compare the version information gotten from SolidWorks that this issue is showing up.

Also, could you please clarify what you mean by 'crashes'? Do you mean you see an error box, or do you mean that SolidWorks actually crashes?

Thanks,

JD

[purCAB]

Just to add further to what JD has already said. There is only one registry key for all SolidWorks addins. Specifically -- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SolidWorks\AddIns. You'll note that there is nothing that ties back to a release or a version number, therefore SW treats all addins the same. For example, turning the loading of an add-in under SW2007 off, also turns it off under SW2008 and SW2009 at the same time and vise-versa. IMO, this is a SolidWorks shortcoming, because one can certainly envision a situation where you want to load one add-in when running one version of SW and another add-in when running another. Currently the only way that I know of to address this is to turn them (the add-ins that have multiple versions) all off at load time then then load the specific ones needed for that session at run time.

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Ken

[purCAB]

After a little additional research, it appears that it is possible to place add-ins in two different locations. The standard is HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SolidWorks\Addins, but it also appears that one can make entires to version specific add-ins as well. For example, HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\SolidWorks\SolidWorks 2008\Addins. I don't know if this would be of any benefit for Maxwell, but thought it worth mentioning, although I'm sure JD is already familiar.

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Ken