In my everyday work, I spend a lot of time waiting on SolidWorks to finish a task. The SolidWorks task scheduler is able to remove some of these burdens by allowing them to be run overnight. The great thing about the task scheduler is that it allows me to select folders or groups of files and runs the task in a separate SolidWorks instance for each file it finds. It also has a timeout for each file to complete its task. This means it can keep churning through all of the files and recover from a problem with one of the files (SolidWorks 2008 is notoriously unstable).

The problem is that the number of tasks available is limited. There is the Custom Task which allows you to run a custom program or macro, but for some reason removes the file selection capability. It is for this reason that I set out to recreate the functionality of the task scheduler, but with the ability to run any macro (or multiple macros) in separate instances of SolidWorks for entire groups of files. I call it SolidWorksBatchRunner.

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