Thursday, January 24, 2008

Carbide.c++ beta winding down

Our Carbide.c++ tools for Symbian OS development have spent the last several months in front of hundreds of people in our beta program. Now it's time to wrap things up and get ready to release. For this update we moved to version 3.3.1 of the platform and 4.0.3 of CDT, added lots of little enhancements, fixed hundreds of bugs, and posted about a dozen patches for CDT and the platform.

People really like the improvements to the indexer and code navigation tools in CDT and gave us lots of feedback on where they could be improved, especially support for C++ templates. All the positive response was tempered by continued frustration with the way projects have to be organized so we are still looking for solutions to that problem.

Symbian OS projects have their own build system and our support for it is now better integrated into the new CDT project model. Our debugger now takes better advantage of the contextual launch support in Eclipse 3.3 and we added a view for managing and debugging lots of executables.

Opening up our bugzilla to everyone in the beta program has really been helpful and brought our team a little closer to everyone using the tools. Making our nightly builds available has let us get fixes out to people fast for quick validation. Overall I think running our beta program much like an Eclipse project has let us make the right kinds of changes faster than we have before.