For those of you that are interested in future releases and developments for Autodesk Inventor we thought you might like to take a look at the Inventor Fusion Technology Preview an innovative new Digital Prototyping technology that will change th way people thing about their 3D machanical design software.

Also for those of you that want to be involved in beta testing, Autodesk Inventor 2010 beta testing is underway. Information on this can be found here.

This technology preview gives you more flexibility when creating designs with vendor or customer data by allowing you to directly import CATIA V5 files into Autodesk Inventor. This translator reads both CATPart and CATProduct files bringing solids, surfaces, wires, and points into Autodesk Inventor to be directly utilized while modeling. Being able to import directly from CATIA V5 files eliminates the need to convert the CATIA data to make it usable in your projects.

Supported Autodesk Inventor Versions

You must have a licensed copy of Autodesk Inventor 2009 SP1 or the Autodesk Inventor LT Technology Preview 2009 SP1 to run this add-in.

Supported Versions CATIA® V5 versions R6 through R18 are supported with this technology preview.

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The decision to make Mechanical Desktop 2009 the last version of the product frees additional resources for development of the Autodesk® Inventor® and AutoCAD® Mechanical product lines.

We recognize that your company may have a large inventory of models and drawings created in Mechanical Desktop and that a large proportion of this Intellectual Property remains extremely valuable to you. To protect this data, Autodesk will continue to:

Provide product support for Subscription customers for a period of no less than three years after the removal of Mechanical Desktop from the Inventor product line.

• Make Mechanical Desktop 2009 available for download with future releases of Inventor.
• Support the DWG Import wizard in Inventor for Mechanical Desktop part, assembly and drawing files.

While you can continue to use Mechanical Desktop 2009 software as well as earlier versions, the best way to protect your existing data is to migrate your design operations to Autodesk Inventor. As a reminder, Mechanical Desktop has been provided "in the box" with Autodesk Inventor Suite since 2002. By using the latest version of Inventor software, your company will benefit from an industry leading 3D design tool for Digital Prototyping with the ease of use characteristics pioneered by Mechanical Desktop.