AutoCAD Turns 25

I'm in San Francisco at Autodesk today for the launch of AutoCAD 2011. This is the 25th release of AutoCAD. There will be a live webcast starting shortly at www.autodesk.com/webcast. I'll be in the audience at that webcast along with a number of other bloggers, authors, and analysts. I'll also be blogging throughout the day. So please stay tuned.

In the pre-briefing this morning, the main points raised were:

• 76,000 man hours spent on Q/A of the new release
• 6,000 total code reviews of new release
• 2,000 commands tested
• 4,600 Beta customers involved in AutoCAD 2011
• 1.4M lines of old code were removed

Autodesk will also announce Alias Sketch for AutoCAD, which will also be launched today as a plug-in. The program adds sketch rendering capability right inside AutoCAD. A single inte4grated environment enables you to combine 2D paint with AutoCAD geometry with a 3D model as an underlay.

I'll provide more details as the day developes.