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Cadalyst Labs Review: Bentley Systems MicroStation V8 XM
November 1, 2006 By: Randall S. NewtonNew interface promises to triple user efficiency on routine tasks
Bentley Systems has worked hard over the years to position itself as the enterprise-class provider of design software in the AEC and geospatial fields. It seeks to distinguish itself from its much larger competitor Autodesk by catering to the industry's largest firms. More than a dozen acquisitions in recent years have expanded the Bentley portfolio to more than 120 products, allowing it to be a one-stop shop for its customers. The foundation for all these products is MicroStation, Bentley's 2D/3D CAD platform.
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The latest version of MicroStation is officially called MicroStation V8 XM edition, but most users are calling it XM, which doesn't stand for anything in particular. It was introduced with much fanfare at the 2005 BE (Bentley Empowered) Conference, but did not ship until July 2006. Bentley never commits to a specific release date. The long period between its first public preview and its general availability is attributed to the need to ensure a tight fit with Bentley's wide portfolio of applications for architecture, civil engineering, plant design and geospatial users (figure 1).
 MicroStation V8 XM |
When Bentley released the first iteration of MicroStation V8 in 2001, the company told users that its vision for the product was larger than its ability to deliver at one time. Key deliverables in that first release were a new file format (only the second time in 20 years that Bentley had changed the DGN format) and the ability to choose an optional AutoCAD-like user interface with Autodesk DWG as a second native file format. It was a tacit acknowledgment, much appreciated by MicroStation users, that full DWG compatibility was too important to leave to the file-translation approach to interoperability. To this day, Bentley tells its users that if they can't open or use a DWG drawing in MicroStation, the company considers it a bug that it needs to address immediately.
 Figure 1. A rendering of a dock site created with MicroStation XM. |
Bentley updated V8 in 2004. Improvements included a new print engine, support for digital signatures, revision control, standards management, support for Visual Basic and nested references (the AutoCAD equivalent is xrefs). Bentley also broke ground by being the first major CAD platform to embrace Adobe PDF as a key publishing format.
MicroStation XM builds on these and many more features with a complete overhaul of the graphics subsystem, a modernization of the user interface, compatibility with Google Earth and Google SketchUp, distributed file access and many more under-the-hood improvements.
Cozying up to Microsoft
In the late 1990s, Bentley made a detour toward Java that co-founder Keith Bentley has since regretted publicly. It wasn't uncommon in those days for Bentley employees to belittle the foundational support provided by Microsoft. Today, Bentley seems to have done a 180° turn with enthusiastic support for Microsoft products and services.
XM will be Vista ready whenever that next version of Windows ships, but that's just the warm-up. Previous versions of MicroStation, including the two previous V8 editions, used OpenGL as the graphics display technology. In XM, Bentley drops OpenGL in favor of DirectX, the gaming industry's preferred display technology. The immediate benefit to users is a significant speed increase in 2D and 3D redraw, navigation and geometry creation.
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