As a Pro/ENGINEER user, during your day you will use a vast amount of features such as Rounds, Chamfers, Variable Section Sweeps, and even a Shell or two. What you may have not noticed though is that you are really writing a computer program. Yes, you could be considered a “Pro/E Coder”…

There are actually a lot of similarities between creating a 3D solid model in Pro/ENGINEER (or any CAD modeling tool for that matter) to writing a computer program. I did not really realize this until I started to make the cross and write some programs of my own.

It makes sense – Pro/ENGINEER was written by computer programmers. If you can think like a programmer you are that much better off when learning Pro/E. My Pro/E skills actually got quite a bit better once I became more comfortable with writing VB.Net applications. There are a few reasons for this…

Features are similar to Libraries or Class files – A feature is really just a pre-defined function that knows what it is and the variables that it can take. Once the feature is placed, you can make all the changes you want to it, but it still retains the main concepts such as diameter, depth, thick/thin, etc. In the programming world, this is known as inheritance and is an extremely powerful way to build objects.

Robust – There is always 20 ways to build the same model within Pro/ENGINEER. However, there are better ways than others… For example, a washer created in 3 features is typically much better than one that incorporates 50 features. When you begin to change the part (Think using the program or debugging), the robust model will regenerate (build) much more reliable than the one that has too many features and regenerates unpredictably. Some programmers will speak to this as “elegant” code writing.

So, when someone covers over to your cube and notices a large assembly on your Pro/ENGINEER screen, let them know you are building a program. A computer program…