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CodeWarrior Version 6.0

By Richard Atwell, ©2001 by Metrowerks, Inc., all rights reserved

It's been a while since I last wrote an article for this column. Around the time of my last article CodeWarrior Version 6.0 was in the final stages of development and we decided to devote all of our energies to making what we think is the strongest release ever. For the next while this column is going to be every other month.

In this column I'd like to catch up on the latest release.

In The Beginning

CodeWarrior has been the choice of many Macintosh developers since late 1993. Since that time there have been 17 major releases: three DR, eight Gold and six Professional. Although we've changed the name along the way, the goal has remained the same: provide best of breed tools for the serious Macintosh application developer.

This time around, we felt so confident about the latest release that we decided to use it for it's own development. That is, with the exception of the compilers themselves, everything on the Pro 6 CDs was developed and built internally with Version 6.0.

If you're new to CodeWarrior, Metrowerks offers seamless integration of standards-compliant compilers, clever linkers, a powerful editor, project manager, visual interface constructor, modern application framework, profilers and debuggers in a single package.

Version 6.0

With Version 6.0, our focus has been Carbon compliance and initial support for the as yet unfinished Mac OS X. Using the same Universal Interfaces that we shipped on the CDs, we carbonized the IDE and all the accompanying tools for Mac OS X Public Beta. This Carbonization isn't 100% complete, but we'll catch up before Mac OS X goes final.

CodeWarrior now requires Mac OS 8.6 or higher because of its Carbonization. If you remember, Pro 5 was the last release that let you host the IDE on 68K-based Macintosh computers. Given the upcoming trends from Apple and feedback from our customers, we made the decision to make Version 6.0 the last release to support 68K code generation. Going forward, we will support code generation on PowerPC only. We see very few FAT applications being created these days and it has been a number of years since 68K hardware was sold by Apple, so we're going to focus on PowerPC.

New Find Dialog

Much in the way the Mac OS Finder bears an uncanny resemblance to the original Finder that shipped with the original Mac 128k, the IDE Find dialog seems to have been with us almost unchanged since DR/1. Over the years we've collected plenty of feedback and decided to take the plunge and rewrite it for Version 6.0.

The first thing you'll notice is that we've split the Find Dialog into two separate windows. Accessible from the Search menu, the menu items Find and Replace and Find in Files are available.

Select Find and Replace and the window that appears, Figure 1, looks similar to the upper portion of the old Find dialog. This window is for searching editor windows and the window options behave as before with the addition of two new options: Search Selection Only, and Direction, which lets you control the direction of the search from the insertion point. Gone from the old window is the batch checkbox, which has been replaced by a Find All button.

The Find in Files window is the more interesting of the two new windows. If you don't like the default key binding that we gave this menu option, just change it using the Commands & Key Bindings... menu item from the Edit menu.

The Find in Files window is a tabbed window. The In Folders tab allows you to select a starting folder from which to base your searches. You can selectively search sub-folders and filter your searches by file type.

The second tab, In Projects, is an improvement over the old Find dialog's Project pop-up. It provides the ability to broaden the search to all open projects, or refine the search to specific targets. Also new is the ability to search cached sub-projects. As always, you can filter your search by sources, project headers and system headers.

In addition, you can now search only files that are in the symbolics for xSYM files that you have open. Searching through your symbolics is efficient, but the list will only contain the files that were actually used to build your targets. Any files in your symbolics that are missing, like sources for libraries built on someone else's machine, are noted in the search results window.

The last tab is an extension of the old Find dialog's Other button, but you can now search just the open editor files in addition to any set of file you wish to create. You can still drag and drop files and folders into this pane.

Editor

The editor has been rewritten from the ground up. Although the editor's appearance hasn't really changed, performance has been improved when editing huge files. The insertion point is now tracked by column and a new symbol completion popup is available to help you write code. This is helpful if you've forgotten the names of methods that the browser database collects for your project when you have that build option on.

New Target Panels

A few new panels have been created and improvements have been made to others. A long requested feature has been an option to modify the Finder bits of your target's file name. So, a new target panel was created so you can easily set the shared bit, among other things.

The other new target panel allow you to create Mac OS 9 packages from your output directory as part of the build process. This capability is provided via post-linker, so be sure to select the Mac OS Package post-linker from your projects target settings panel.

Improved IDE Preferences

With Version 6.0, we've provided the ability to build projects on locked volumes such as CD-ROMs. You can now find references from the Search menu using Apple's Help Viewer. Select this from the IDE Extras preference panel.

A new panel was created to allow you to further filter your find and compare operations in addition to filtering other project options. One of the default filters we've provided allows you to skip the contents of your invisible CVS folders if you use Mac CVS Pro for version control. The shielded folders panel uses regular expressions to specify your filters so you can easily write a single filter for a variety of project directories that you may want to omit.

The last major improvement to the IDE's preference panels is for remote debugging, which we introduced with Pro 5. The IDE 4.0 that shipped with that release forced you to restart the IDE in order to switch between debugging an application on a local machine or a remote machine.

We've removed this limitation with Version 6.0 and to simplify the remote debugger settings we've created an address book to store the TCP/IP addresses of the remote machine that you may wish to remote debug.

Once you create a remote connection, you can specify on a per target basis that you wish to remote debug your application. Each target now has a Remote Debugging panel that lets you select the remote connection and specify where you want to transfer the output target on the remote machine and/or the name of an application you wish to launch.

These options make it possible to remote debugging applications on several machines at once in case you ever find the need to debug both client and server applications at the same time. With some additional panel settings you can also download any supporting files such as shared libraries when you start remote debugging.

URLs

• Mac CVS Pro: http://www.maccvs.org/

If you'd like to get in touch with us about CodeWarrior issues, post to our newsgroup or email us directly. Visit our website at www.metrowerks.com to learn more about us.

• Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.programmer.codewarrior
• Technical Support: cw_support@metrowerks.com
• Report Bugs: cw_bug@metrowerks.com
• Suggestions: cw_suggestion@metrowerks.com

Richard Alexander David Atwell, aka ratwell, is a Mac OS Debugger Engineer at Metrowerks and takes time out from development to keep MacTech readers informed about the world of Metrowerks. Good ideas for CodeWarrior t-shirts can be sent to ratwell@metrowerks.com.