The Solid Edge Developer Community is a community of Solid Edge customers and partners.
- Solid Edge 2020 SDK
- Solid Edge 2019 SDK
- Solid Edge ST10 SDK
- Solid Edge ST9 SDK
- Solid Edge ST8 SDK
- Solid Edge ST7 SDK
- Solid Edge ST6 SDK
Mark Burhop jumped through a lot of hoops to get permission to create the first Solid Edge open source project. We took the open source plunge and uploaded all of our developer day conference material onto CodePlex at http://solidedge.codeplex.com.
During his yearly contract renewal with Siemens, Jason Newell proposed that Siemens allow him to carry the torch that Mark had started. Jason saw great potential and opportunity in the open source arena for the Solid Edge Developer Community. He authored and maintained several Solid Edge open source projects that year.
At Solid Edge University 2014, Jason Newell announced that the decision was made to migrate away from codeplex.com to github.com.
Jason Newell quotes from #SEU14
We all spend way too much time “reinventing the wheel”. Open source encourages us to share our hard work with others and consume theirs when we need it.
I’ve had two awesome projects since 2005 that I kept to myself, Solid Edge Spy and PowerToys for Solid Edge. Until recently, that was the normal mindset. I wrote it, it’s mine. For me, it was a competitive advantage mindset. I have since realized the value of open source and shared my code for the two projects.
At the end of 2013, I rewrote Solid Edge Spy from the ground up and renamed it Spy for Solid Edge. Every line of code is available on GitHub. PowerToys was a suite of applications and Windows shell extension written in C++. I ported the code to .NET and published it on GitHub (SolidEdgeContrib.Reader). That library has the ability to read Solid Edge files without any Solid Edge API. How cool is that!
It is normal for most people to initially feel uneasy about open source. There has been a long running stigma toward open source. I’ve seen it time and time again when I talk about the work I’ve been doing. Can I trust the author and the quality of their work? I don’t want to have dependencies on open source libraries.
My thoughts on those concerns? Ok, don’t use them. Nobody is making you. The code is open sourced! Go look for yourself and see how the author implemented the functionality you need. You are free to take what you need but remember, someone spent time figuring it out.
It us up to debate on how successful the initiative was. Certainly, people have benefitted but the reality is very few contributed back or volunteered to help. Most of the content is archived but remains available in the hope that someone find it useful in the future.
