Users of Autodesk's AutoCAD 2009 have plenty with which to keep themselves busy these days. Within the last week the company has put out a new features release and a service update (previously service pack) release for AutoCAD 2009.

Both releases were announced in Between the Lines, a blog written by Shaan Hurley, who is a technical marketing manager for Autodesk's Platform Technologies Division.

AutoCAD 2009 and AutoCAD LT 2009 Update 1 (Service Pack) links directly to the service update release and lists the various and sundry fixes that have been made. Notes Healey:

Updates have been made in the following feature areas: 3D Visual Styles, Annotation Scaling, External References (xref) palette, Raster Images, Partial Open, Plot, Properties Palette, Hatch [and] Remote text (rtext).

Various other fixes were made as well. These range, alphabetically, from .NET functions throwing exceptions to zoom in certain cases causing AutoCAD 2009 to crash.

Meanwhile, New Feature Releases Now Available for Autodesk Subscription Customers indicates that a variety of tutorials, webcasts and training DVDs are now available for AutoCAD as well as Revit, 3ds Max, Impression, Inventor and Maya, among others. As the blog post title indicates, these resources are available only to subscription customers.

Enjoy.