Here is my feature wish list for CodeWarrior for the Palm OS.
You may notice that the screen captures I have below are Windows XP which is not yet supported by CodeWarrior. Rest assured all of these problems appear on my Windows 2000 Professional machine.
I am running CodeWarrior for Palm OS version 8.1 under Windows 2000 & XP. All of these problems are the same whether I have
It seems that about every fourth or fifth time I start to debug an application POSE displays this dialog box.
CodeWarrior then silently quits a few seconds later. I'm using version 3.4 of POSE.
I have found that this happens less when I wait longer between debugging sessions.
The frequency of this bug seriously hampers productivity since I usually wind up seeing this dialog 40-50 times per day!
The C and C++ compiler does have support for compiling UNICODE strings, but they are not displayed in the debugger. Here is my project settings:
First off: it looks like the "Enable wchar_t Support" checkbox only works when the "Activate C++ Compiler" is enabled. If this is the case then this checkbox should be dimmed if the C++ compiler is not active. Note that I do not have "Multi-Byte Aware" enabled. As I understand it this is to tell the compiler that your source files are multi-byte, nothing more.
When I debug this application here is what I see:
Notice how the Unicode string is displayed:
\\21504\\13617\\13360\\12636\\13875\\14129\\12636\\13107\\12342\\12636\\13874 ...
This appears to be decimal, but only the first value 21404 seems to be correct. I can't figure out what the other numbers mean.
| Decimal | Hex | First Byte | Second Byte |
|---|---|---|---|
| 21504 | 0x5400 | 0x54='T' | 0x00='\0' |
| 13617 | 0x3531 | 0x35='5' | 0x31='1' |
| 13360 | 0x3430 | 0x34='4' | 0x30='0' |
One way I know to display the Unicode string is to add pszText to the Expression window, and then to change it to pszText[1], and then select "View As Character". This allows me to at least view one character at a time. Also, when I change the index value, let's say from pszText[1] to pszText[2], I have to re-specify "View As Character".
You can download this test project here.
This is a known bug, and yes I know that Constructor is now maintained by Palm so this is not directed at MetroWerks.
Command-line builds are a must for nightly automated builds which are a must for any real product.
CodeWarrior does have limited command-line build support. However there are two deficiencies one of which make this feature useless.
The first limitation is the lack of output of error messages, warnings, or info messages to stdout. All you know from the command-line is that the build either succeeded or failed (actually a little more), but any meaningful information, like the file & line number on which the error occurred is not displayed by the IDE.
The second limitation is that the IDE comes up and is the topmost window. This is annoying since the machine can't be used for anything else. This poses a second limitation for those wishing to invoke the build as a scheduled task. Somebody must be logged into the machine for the scheduled task to complete.
My workaround for this problem is to write a Perl script to automate CodeWarrior via COM. Here I have access to the messages and can display them. The second workaround is to configure the machine to auto-login upon startup. These work, but don't completely solve the problem.
Take note: VisualStudio does both of these things correctly.