Autodesk CDK

Bernie Roehl ([email protected])
Wed, 7 Jun 1995 16:55:14 -0400


According to Aaron Brancotti - Virtual:
>[quoting me]
> >CDK has a *lot* of good ideas, but Autodesk appears to have more-or-less
> >abandoned it.
> Welll.... what I do NOT understand is, if it's true what you say, why on the
> earth they just ( well.. some months ago, but they did it ) released the
> Win32 version?

Good question. As far as I know they haven't officially dropped the
product, but...

* At previous Meckler conferences, they've given sessions on how to
use CDK; this year they were absent.

* I was chairing a panel at Meckler, and tried to get someone from
Autodesk to speak about CDK; they declined.

* They weren't exhibiting CDK on the show floor.

* It's my understanding that a large number of people who were working
on CDK are no longer at Autodesk; I spoke to one person in particular
who had been on the CDK team and has been laid off.

* The folks at Micro Green (who do Navigator) indicated that release
2.0 of CDK was probably going to be the final one; Autodesk would continue
to support existing customers, but was not planning any new development
on CDK as a commercial product (though they may continue to use it
in-house).

I hope that they're planning to continue developing CDK, but based on
everything I've heard it does not look very promising.

> Well... I hope they won't, because I am using it and I am really
> enthusiast..

I haven't used it myself, but it looks like a well-thought-out design.

> even if it is VERY difficult to master...

Yes, and the fact that the latest version apparently requires a very, very
specific development environment doesn't help. As I recall, you have to
be running Windows NT 3.5, Visual C++ 2.0, have 32 meg of RAM, and have
several thousand dollars to spend on CDK itself. All that in *addition*
to being a C++ programmer.

Small market...

-- 
   Bernie Roehl
   University of Waterloo Dept of Electrical and Computer Engineering
   Mail: [email protected]    Voice:  (519) 888-4567 x 2607 [work]
   URL: http://sunee.uwaterloo.ca/~broehl