Sycode's Pro/ENGINEER Plug-ins Updated For Creo Parametric 1.0
Sycode’s 14 data exchange plug-ins for Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire have been updated to work with Creo Parametric 1.0. In Pro/ENGINEER Wildfire our plug-ins used to add a menu to the main Pro/ENGINEER menu. In the case of Creo Parametric 1.0, the menu shows up in the TOOLKIT panel of the Tools ribbon.
There was not much that we needed to do to port our plug-ins from WildFire to Creo. This is because, contrary to what many believe, Creo is not a rewrite. Pro/ENGINEER has a C based API called Pro/TOOLKIT which third party developers and users use to build plug-ins for it, which is the exact same thing used to build plug-ins for Creo Parametric 1.0 as well. This fact is emphasized by the ribbon panel titled “TOOLKIT” in the Tools ribbon in Creo Parametric 1.0. In fact, part of me is glad that PTC didn’t rewrite Pro/ENGINEER. Otherwise Sycode along with thousands of third party developers and users would have to rewrite their plug-ins as well.
Back in 2009 I posted a couple of articles on this blog about Pro/ENGINEER (“Pro/ENGINEER: Old Is Gold” and “Pro/ENGINEER And Direct Editing“) in which I highlighted the use of antiquated code in Pro/ENGINEER and likened it to an old lady. Just about every PTC employee I met thereafter had something to say to me about those couple of posts. Here is how I ended one of the posts:
So now that the old lady has been given a makeover, I ask again, can she do the split? 😉