Learning Inroads has been interesting. It's a little wierd having two windows to control the program, the regular Micostation program and a separate one for Inroads. Inroads also works differently from Microstation in that it doesn't save the changes as you change the drawing. I am getting tired of dialog boxes not working the way I'm used to. If you open a surface file and hit open, the dialog box stays open instead of closing and it seems like every dialog box exhibits this behavior. I find this very frustrating after working with Windows based programs for the past 15 years.
Creating alignments and profiles can be vary similar to Civil 3D in that you use different types of segments to make up the portions of the alignment or profile. Modifying them using grips doesn't appear to be possible.
There are some very confusing methods to draw the objects in the dgn file. You have to choose to use a pencil or a pen. The pencil option just creates a temporary graphic of the Inroads object and a pen adds the corresponding linework to the drawing.
The tutorials for Inroads are hard to find. The program, at least in the version I am using, doesn't install with the program and you have to go to the Bentley website to get the files ftp://ftp.bentley.com/pub/knowledgebase/attachments/InRoads_V8.8_Tutorial.zip.
Overall I think I would rate the program slightly over Land Desktop because of the ability to edit the alignments after creation, never did figure out how to do it in Land Desktop. The pencil/pen confusion I have makes it so I can't rate the program higher. I'm only going to use Inroads when required by a project and stick with Civil 3D as my prefered program. I hope to start looking at PowerCivil, but the use of it won't get vary far since the company I work for doesn't have licenses for the program.
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I've been using InRoads since it was called TDP and ran on a VAX.
I've worked for two companies using both it and LDD, although the second company only hired me a week ago. Here, I'm supposed to help improve the skills of our InRoads users, while improving my knowledge of Civil 3D.
I've used Pencil mode almost exclusively except for the last three years.
Let me clarify how each works: Pencil mode writes graphics to the file, but the graphics are automatically removed if you redisplay the item, or in certain instances, erases them if the underlying item is edited, rendering the original graphics obsolete. An example of this is alignment stationing or annotations - if you modify the geometry of the alignment, any annotation drawn in pencil mode gets erased.
Displaying something in pen mode always erases old pencil graphics but leaves pen mode graphics alone.
To help you remove pen mode graphics, there is delete ink lock, which when enabled, causes pen mode graphics to be erased as though they were pencil.
Let me close by mentioning that the new Roadway Designer (V8.7+) is an awesome tool!
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