Answer: See the Installation Requirements section of the Installation chapter for a list of supported operating systems.

Answer: The Prerequisites for Bentley Desktop Applications are Microsoft packages that are installed to your workstation when you install AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition. A complete list of the components of the Prerequisites for Bentley Desktop Applications, along with information about them, can be found in the Installation Requirements . These components are required because AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition has a dependencies on them.

Answer: You have the option of installing the Prerequisites for Bentley Desktop Applications manually prior to installing AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition or you can allow the AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition installer to download and install them during the AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition installation.

Answer: Yes, you can install AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition on the same workstation as MicroStation V8 XM Edition or MicroStation V8i. The only restriction is that you do not install both versions to the same directory. For information about installing AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition on the same workstation as MicroStation V8i, see "Before you start" in the QuickInstall Guide .

Answer: Yes, you can install AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition on the same workstation with the previous versions of V8i (SELECTseries 1) Building Applications. Please note, only one instance of a major release of each application for V8i is allowed to be installed on a workstation. See "Before you start" in the QuickInstall Guide .

Answer: Activation can be accomplished during or after the installation process through License Management Tool. You will need two pieces of information in order to complete activation: the name of the SELECTserver and an activation key, which should be available from your system administrator. See Activating Your Product for more information.

Answer: No, AECOsim Building Designer is a PowerPlatform application. Predecessor Building applications were "layered" applications that ran on top of MicroStation. As a PowerPlatform application, AECOsim Building Designer is a standalone product and does not require and does not use, previously installed versions of MicroStation. AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition will not check for a corresponding MicroStation license. AECOsim Building Designer incorporates most of the MicroStation capabilities natively within its application and install set.

Answer: No, a new license will be introduced for AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition. A new AECOsim Building Designer license will be provided for each qualifying Building application license in good standing. Qualifying building applications are: Bentley Architecture, Structural Modeler, Bentley Building Mechanical Systems and Bentley Building Electrical Systems. This new license provides full access to the complete Architectural, Structural, Mechanical, Plumbing and Electrical capabilities offered within AECOsim Building Designer. AECOsim Building Designer is not limited or constrained to any one discipline; however it can easily support individual discipline workflows. AECOsim Building Designer also includes Bentley's clash detection capabilities as an integrated feature, so clash detection can be part of the Building Information Modeling process. Since, this is an integrated feature AECOsim Building Designer, no additional license or cost is required to run clash detection within AECOsim Building Designer.

Answer: No. AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition requires SELECTserver XM Edition or later and will not run with SELECTserver 2004 Edition. Bentley now provides two options for application licensing: (1) SELECTserver ONLINE hosted by Bentley, or (2) you may choose to download and deploy SELECTserver at your organization. More information can be found regarding our SELECTserver ONLINE option.

Answer: The End User License Agreement is named "EULA.pdf".

Answer: AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition adds an additional licensing mode for new users to "test drive" our products prior to purchase. Evaluation mode allows full use of the product for up to 30 days. A window will display daily presenting the option to purchase or continue the evaluation. After the evaluation period concludes, the product will not function until it is activated. If you want to purchase a product, contact your account manager or fill out a Sales Contact Request.

Answer: Clash Resolution is included as an integrated feature within AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition and does not require any activation or special license. AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition does not include a ProjectWise Clash Resolution Visa. that permits the use of Clash resolution outside of AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition application. To obtain a ProjectWise Clash Resolution Visa, contact the Bentley Sales Support Center at one of the phone numbers or Web sites listed.

Answer: Schedule Simulation in AECOsim Building Designer is initially available running in a pre-activated trial mode. It will run in trial mode for up to 29 days following the first use. To license Schedule Simulation you must obtain a ProjectWise Schedule Simulation Visa. For more information:

• See Activating Your Product for more information about using the License Management Tool to obtain a visa.
• Contact the Bentley Sales Support Center at one of the phone numbers or Web sites listed.

Answer: Yes, while early attempts at hyper-threading on single core machines actually degraded AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition performance, the new generation of multi-core processors from Intel (Nehalem) actually yield 20% gain in rendering performance. Therefore users with single core processors should make sure hyper-threading is not enabled on their workstation and users with multi-core processors should enable hyper-threading to realize the performance gains.

Answer: When running a graphics card that supports either DirectX 10 or DirectX 11, most users will see significant performance gains, particularly with display modes that include transparency, edges, or shadows. We see many examples where complex models displayed in hidden line, illustration, or shaded monochrome mode are 3 to 5 times faster with DirectX 11 than with DirectX 9. Even users that already have DirectX 11 capable hardware or that work with predominantly 2D models can generally boost display performance by upgrading to a faster graphics card.

Answer: Yes, however, for new purchases, it is recommended that you choose a video card that supports DirectX 11.

Answer: Yes, See the Installation Requirements section of the Requirements for a list of approved Virtualized Environments.

Answer: MicroStation BASIC is supported in AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition. However, MicroStation BASIC has not been enhanced and is likely to be unsupported in future versions. Bentley recommends migrating existing MicroStation BASIC code to Visual Basic or Visual Basic for Applications.

Answer: User Commands still run in AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition, but have been unsupported since the initial release of CONNECT Edition. It is anticipated this will be the last release permitting User Command to run. For assistance on migrating from User Commands please check the BE Communities Web site or contact Bentley SELECT Support through the Service Ticket Manager.

Answer: Most pure MDL applications that run on MicroStation V8 XM Edition and MicroStation V8i should run on AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition without modification. There are some incompatibilities. These are noted in the MicroStation SDK Readme. If the application contains portions written in native code (compiled with Microsoft Visual C++ compiler), then the application should be recompiled with Visual Studio 2005 service pack 1.

Answer: Yes

Answer: AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition is compiled using Visual Studio 2005 service pack 1. We recommend that applications be compiled using the same compiler.

Answer: Running applications compiled with Visual Studio 2008 is not recommended. This is due to the possible incompatibilities and differences in the C runtime between the Visual Studio 2008 and Visual Studio 2005 compilers. For example, the way memory is allocated and freed can be different. Such issues can make it extremely difficult to debug problems.

Answer: Batch Print will not be supported in future versions of AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition. The functionality in Batch Print has been replaced by Print Organizer. Existing Batch Print job set (.job) files can be imported to Print Organizer. For more information on Print Organizer please refer to the help.

Answer: Settings Manager will not be supported in future versions of AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition. The functionality in Settings Manager has been replaced with Templates and Tasks. Existing Settings Manager configuration files (.stg) can be imported into AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition using the Customize tools. For more information on migrating existing Settings Manager configuration files please refer to the help. Back to top

Answer: Archiver has been replaced by Packager. Archiver (.mar) files will not be supported in future versions of AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition. Existing Archiver files can be extracted in AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition and saved as Packager (.pzip) files, when needed. For more information on Packager please refer to the help.

Answer: Yes, AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition includes the Pointools Vortex™ engine which provides fast, efficient display and manipulation of point cloud data. Please refer to the help for additional details.

Answer: If you are using AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition to encrypt files, users of earlier version of the Building Applications (Bentley Architecture, Structural Modeler, Bentley Building Mechanical Systems or Bentley Building Electrical), MicroStation V8i or MicroStation XM Edition will not be able to open the files. If you are using AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition to publish i-models, users of earlier version of MicroStation will be able to open the i-models if you grant them the right to export data. You will not be able to open the i-models if you do not grant the export right.

Answer: The Bentley iWare Apps for interoperability are Bentley's free software serving infrastructure professionals. The following Bentley iWare Apps for interoperability are installed as part of the AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition installation.

Bentley DGN Reader for Windows 7:

• Preview DGNs and i-models and search for embedded information using Windows Explorer or Microsoft Outlook
• Preview DGNs and i-models in Windows 7
• View thumbnails in Windows applications
• Search for text within DGNs and i-models
• i-model ODBC Driver for Windows 7
• Access data within DGN files and i-models

The Bentley iWare Apps for interoperability can also be downloaded from http://www.bentley.com/en-us/free+software/.

Answer: The Bentley DGN Indexer is a shared indexing service that is used by the Project Explorer to retrieve data from DGN files. If enabled, it replaces the harvesting technique from previous versions of Project Explorer. The performance of the indexing service is much better than the conventional harvesting technique. The Bentley DGN Indexer is installed as part of the AECOsim Building Designer CONNECT Edition installation.