Creating Carbide C++

New Screencast: Build Configuration Options

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:32:27 -0600

If you're not sure what all those different signing options are for when creating .sis files or if you just want to know what options are available for tweaking the build system to add your own little customizations, this is the screencast for you -- it's a basic overview of the Build Configuration Options dialog, but also includes more advanced info like where to go to put in your own command-line parameters if you've been hacking on the bldmake and abld scripts, or if you just want to change how they behave.

Help from our Friends

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:09:06 -0600

One of the things we have heard about the last couple Carbide releases is how much better the code navigation features have become. Most of those rely on the C++ code indexer built into CDT so the better the indexer gets the better all the code navigation features perform.

While our team tests these features and has fixed a few bugs most of the recent improvement is due to work by other committers on the CDT project. Markus Schorn at Wind River has lead the great improvement in the CDT indexer over the past couple releases and Andrew Ferguson at Symbian has addressed a lot of issues that effect Carbide.c++ users in particular.

The CDT C++ indexer code isn’t easy to just pick up and play around with so there aren’t a lot of people with the skills and experience to work on improvements. So we’re very happy Andrew’s work on CDT has continued: he’s fixed over a dozen bugs in CDT 5.0.x that we’ll be using in the upcoming Carbide 2.0 release. You can see the details by searching the Eclipse bugzilla. Thanks Andrew.

Launching from the SPN View

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 16:16:40 -0600

This week I looked at a couple issues with contextual launching: that's what happens when you hit the Debug button and Carbide determines what to launch in the debugger. Carbide 2.0 is based on the new Eclipse 3.4 release and this includes some new APIs for contextual launching. I added support for those and now when you hover over the Debug button it will show you the exact name of the launch configuration you’ll get, not just the project name. I then looked at bug 3904 which asked that the selection in the Symbian Project Navigator View be used to determine which executable would be used by default. So now if you hit "Debug" while an mmp is selected in the SPN view it will launch the executable built by that mmp by default.

Tips for using the CodeScanner tool!

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:34:05 -0600

Have you ever wondered exactly how to use the CodeScanner tool? Well if so, you're in luck! This week's screencast installment features this topic:

You can find this and other videos at: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Carbide_Training_Videos

Got ideas for screencasts you'd like to see? Leave us some feedback here and we'll get on it!

Carbide in the summer

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:13:52 -0600

So, summer is here and as you may have noticed the number of entries on this blog has dropped a bit in the last few weeks as the team takes some well deserved time off to enjoy the Austin heat with their families. Unlike our corporate headquarters in Finland we don't take the entire summer off, but we do grab a week or two here and there to spend time away from the office recharging ourselves for the next project sprint.

Austin Eclipse DemoCamp

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 15:39:00 -0600

I'm back at my desk now trying to stay awake after a coma inducing lunch of Stubb's BBQ following the Austin DemoCamp. A bunch of Nokia people from our office joined Chris Aniszczyk and people from IBM, Freescale, and others to look at a few demos and talk about Ganymede, the just released new version of the Eclipse platform.

We're starting to build Carbide.c++ 2.0 with the new platform and so I got to talk to some Eclipse people outside the mobile community about our experiences and contributions.

The session was also something of a reunion of former Metrowerks people: the team that developed the CodeWarrior tools was bought by Motorola years ago which then spun them out along with Freescale. The CodeWarrior for Symbian team then moved to Nokia and now develops Carbide.c++ at our office here next to the coma inducing BBQ. So a lot of people who created the CodeWarrior tools back then are working with Eclipse now. It was great to have a chance to visit with some old friends and make some new ones. I'm hoping we can continue to get the Eclipse people in Austin together now and again.

Where's my console output?

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:28:26 -0600

In Carbide 1.3.1 we revamped the wording and internal code for the generation of console output. Mainly this was done to unify the option's wording and make it easy identify which console program and error output was sent to. Remember, the Console view has several default pages associated with it.

However, an additional step was overlooked in the Carbide manual, the editing of the epoc.ini file, which must be made for a couple of these options to work. Here's how to correct that.

Code Navigation tips illustrated!

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:36:39 -0600

We have yet another screencast to bring to you. This one is a quick overview of some helpful shortcuts for working within Carbide.c++. Hopefully a few of these tips will make Carbide.c++ even easier to use:

You can find this and other videos at: http://wiki.forum.nokia.com/index.php/Carbide_Training_Videos

Got ideas for screencasts you'd like to see? Leave us some feedback here and we'll get on it!

Debugging DLLs Screencast

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 13:52:36 -0600

A new screencast has been posted -- it walks you through debugging a simple project with DLLs and talks a bit about the Executables view. Shouldn't be anything special to many of you, but maybe a few could use the review...

Building a better build system - Part 4 Benchmarking

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 18:14:27 -0600

So I've talked about the improvements we made in our build system in earlier articles. These include

1. Allowing the compiler to do the dependency tracking
2. Tracking changes to the mmp (and bld.inf).
3. Allow multiple jobs to be spawned by setting the Make environment variable to "make -j N" to allow the make rules to run concurrently in multiiple jobs and thus the compilation time will be faster.
4. Allow the user to turn on the Eclipse incremental builder to determine if anything has changed in the workspace.

But how much faster? We did some example benchmarking to give us an idea.

Building a better build system - Part 3 Eclipse incremental builder

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 16:59:41 -0600

In the third part of this series of articles I want to tallk about a problem customers ran into during the beta cycle when using the dependency tracking of the Carbide 1.3 build system and how we tackled that problem. It resulted in the next major improvement in the build system.

Lost in the Shuffle

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 14:37:09 -0600

Some people make heavy use of real-time console debug messages via the RDebug::Print interface, only to discover that their messages have fallen off the end of the console buffer before they could read them. We limited the size of the debug console buffer for a very good reason: letting it grow without bounds until it consumed all available memory caused all kinds of problems. And while we strongly discourage people from removing the buffer size limitations for that reason, it's simple enough to increase the buffer size via Window > Preferences:

So set it to the value of your choice (within reason) and use RDebug with confidence!

Launch configurations and other revisionism's

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 09:33:07 -0600

I've just spent the last week revising the entire launch configuration section of the Carbide manual to make it easier to understand, remove redundancies, and show its advantages when writing and debugging projects. The whole concept of a launch configuration was a bit strange to me when we first began developing Carbide but its gradually become a critical component to understanding how to link the code you write with one or more ways of running or debugging it to ensure its correctness. Therefore it seemed an obvious choice for a good edit and update. So that's what I've done.

Improving the N-gage development experience

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 23:25:43 -0600

The Carbide team worked closely with the N-gage SDK team on Carbide 1.3 to try to meet the demands of getting a workable development environment for a unique set of developers. But, I admit, we fell a bit short in a couple of key areas that we plan to look at fixing so we'll have a more complete solution. So I'ld like to talk about these shortcomings and some ideas on what we might do in our next release, Carbide 2.0 since some of these improvements will benefit all developers who do on-device debugging with Application TRK.

Building a better build system - Part 2 Concurrent builds

Sat, 31 May 2008 10:59:47 -0600

Another build issue we addressed in Carbide 1.3 was a performance issue concerning compile times when compared to CodeWarrior. CodeWarrior has an option to run compiles concurrently, which reduced overall build time signficantly. Make has a similar feature which can be enabled with the -j switch. When specified it will run the make rules concurrently in multiple jobs and thus the compilation time will be faster. This works on multi-core and hyper-threaded machines.