Carbide.c++ 1.3 Overview

A new version of Carbide.c++ was presented this year at the Symbian Smartphone Show. This version is due to be out by next spring (current target is March 14) and hopefully will bring several enhacements:

1. Better UIQ support:
   
   1. The UI Designer can be used to generate S60 or UIQ3 projects. Being resource driven, the UIQ environment is quite well adapted to UI design tools. The new Carbide.c++ 1.3 designer is very similar to the existing one, and in UIQ project, the only difference is the list of UIQ specific controls: . The treeview (on the right part of the screen on the screenshot above) is especially useful and shows you all the organisation of the application controls. Creating a view with a couple of building blocks and controls is now just a matter of seconds and a few drag and drops. Cool
   2. UIQ support for the On Target Debugging (this may comes out earlier, as the only remaining problem seem to be related to a signing issue)
2. Platform Security integration:
   
   1. a Capability Scanner. This scanner check the APIs used throughout your code and reports the capabilities that you must include in your MMP file. This scanner is not yet 100% accurate but will be a great help if you forgot to track this from the start of your project.
   2. a Certificate manager do directly manage your developer certificates from Carbide.c++.
3. Enhanced debugger
   
   1. Improved and more stable On Target Debugging (see this topic on Forum Nokia discussion board)
   2. Improved watchpoint support
   3. a new Executable view
4. a Code Scanner to report basic issues with Symbian guidelines
5. a Dependency explorer to show the DLL dependencies of your project.
6. a Epocwindout display
7. Eclipse 3.3 / CDT 4.01 support

Several other smaller improvement are also to be included, the most important one being the compilation speed and Carbide is now a lot quicker in detecting which files need to be recompiled and which are not (figures given by Nokia says that on a rather big project, if you modify just one file and recompile your project, this will be done in a matter of seconds with Carbide.c++ 1.3 while almost one minute could be necessary in Carbide.c++ 1.2).

The Beta program of Carbide.c++ 1.3 is about to start in a month or so. Just signup if you want to participate.