You can order the tombstone – Land Desktop is “reeeeaaaalllly” dead!

Got your attention don’t I? The truth is that Land Desktop is now in its final production release.  There will be no Land Desktop 2010 product – download or box.  Those seats of Civil 3D that remain on Subscription will be able to download the Land Desktop Companion via their Subscription portal access only – no disks will be shipped for LDT in the Civil 3D 2010 release. 

How long Autodesk continues to keep the Land Desktop Companion seat available depends on how many of us actually need it and are willing to download it.  The writing is on the wall but it keeps getting BIGGER.  You will need to transition to a Civil model technology or be left behind.  To help this transition, Autodesk is introducing a new “AutoCAD Civil” product that is geared towards design & documentation. Removed are the Map 3D and Hydraulics+Hydrology capabilities and users will not have access to the Land Desktop Companion via the Subscription web site.  Sort of giving you the capabilities of what Land Desktop originally had 15 years ago but in a “building information modeling” sort of way.  “AutoCAD Civil 3D” will continue to be the complete package for those that used Land Desktop, Civil Design and Survey.

So now that the writing is clearly written on the wall, you may need to transition to AutoCAD Civil and Civil 3D sooner than you anticipated.  Use this time to gear up for the product that you will base your success on for the next 15 years.  If you need help with this transition, please feel free to contact me (post a comment with your information and I’ll contact you offline). We would be glad to get you started! Our entire Civil staff are Certified Implementation Experts for Civil 3D. So don’t fret, there is hope and you CAN learn new tricks. 

Random AutoCAD hot fix addresses unrelated issue….

I was going through my list of bugs/problems with Civil 3D 2008 and checking 2009 to see if they had been addressed.  One issue i had was with AutoCAD tables in 2008.  The table row and column headings (you know, A, B, C & 1, 2, 3) did not appear.  That has been addressed, sort of…

Inserting a table gives you those headings now.  But yuck, the default shade of white background just hurts my eyes so back to black it goes. OK, let’s edit the table now. Oh crap, now where did those headers go?