Earlier this week I fired off a post about the on-going Microstation and Autodesk battle for the State DOT software contracts and how that affects all the rest of us.
Oops
In that post, I stated the Bentley software had "lost" FDOT (the State of Florida Department of Transportation) to Autodesk.
Not true. My statement was inaccurate.
FDOT has actually adopted an enlightened or "diverse" platform approach where both Microstation and AutoCAD Civil 3D deliverables are accepted.
This is the fact of life that many civil engineering firms and organizations live with anyway on a practical daily basis. All of us who move from old CAD software (no matter the software vendor) to Model-based Design Software (MDS) like AutoCAD Civil 3D will be dealing with the practical aspecits of that revolution (or evolution) for a long time.
By definition - All model-based software is Style based (even if it's not called "Style").
The Key Point of My Earlier Post Remains...
We need More evolved model-based standards based on published open documentation.
We need to be able to get the engineering work done and publish our deliverables without major hassles to multiple "CAD Standards" that actually exist for good rational and functional reasons.
Sucking up the old CAD Standards is Child's Play
Oh, it's a pain in the tail to do the work. I can speak to that in considerable detail.
As far as AutoCAD Civil 3D is concerned, what we NAME those representations or Styles (how it looks) is a MUST DO set of standards whether we like it, recognize it today, or not.
What Style and Label Styles look like may vary and MUST do so.
We need the design and quality control flexibility that diverse Style representations can provide to improve our final product faster and better.
How we NAME Style inside AutoCAD Civil 3D should be something we can mutually agree on.
We Put Our Money Where Our Mouth Is
We provide our Civil 3D Style Naming Conventions as FREE open source documentation to anyone and everyone. We've done so for years now.
We invite and desire your comments and feedback.
A hearty "Thank You" to all of the many people who take the time to do so and have made those Naming Conventions better in significant ways. Keep it coming.
Doing this alone is impossible.