Fix IT Slump
This past week at work has brought about zero free time for the Princess. With a multitude of virus attacks (no we weren't affected directly, we just had to calm the users), my own PC's sudden death and our standard daily work load, it was tough. All that being said, none of it was as frustrating as dealing with CodeWarrior.
CodeWarrior is such an unusual piece of software. One of the boys on vince's team had quite the odd experience when he would try to compile, the app would just disappear! Nice. Just when I thought I had troubleshooting this software down, it brings about a whole new set of problems. It's been a year and some change since I've had to go into the registry and rip out all of 1,000 entries, and that's after the uninstall has taken place, so I was in no mood to have to relive the past. After a nice uninstall, upgrade and reinstall of the version we actually wanted, tossing the old data directories, the creation of fresh install locations and too much of my time, this bug has been squashed. Metrowerks tech support was helpful, but did not offer a valid solution. That's a shame. It did, however, cure me of my recent Fix IT Slump. The new 3.6 PS2 version has some interesting uninstall features. You may pick and choose what you want to toss, including prefs. Also, there is no longer an installation of an empty Metrowerks directory in the Windows system folder. I do have hope though, that one day Metrowerks will get this application under control. Until that day, I will have a lovely dose of job security.
Comments
I've said it to Metrowerks many times, all I want from them is a shit-hot compiler and debugger. In fact, I encourage them to dump the IDE. It is obviously not one of their core competencies, and there are plenty of other good programming environments out there to integrate with.
Posted by: vince | August 23, 2003 12:31 PM
I've used both CodeWarrior and SN (currently using SN). I have grown to love SN's debugger. Extremely utilitarian and customizable. IDE? They don't bother providing one. So SlickEdit, UltraEdit, Notepad, emacs, or MSVC can be your IDE. SN does have it's problems, but I likes it.
Posted by: Paul | August 23, 2003 2:21 PM
The main problem with SNs debugger is that it's slow. I hate having to step through code with that thing because it takes forever.
Posted by: crowdpleazr | August 24, 2003 9:14 AM
In case of the mysterious IDE crash, just remove the data directories. That should fix it.
If it's still happening, his project is using recursive include directories. (I kid you not!) Switch that off, NOW!
Metrowerks knows about this for at least a year, but nothing has changed. From my point of view, there's a bunch of rather incompetent nitwits somewhere in the cycle. Funniest experience so far: Uncovered a bug in the compiler, provided them with a minimal testcase to reproduce it, plus detailed explanation what happens.
6 weeks later, I get an e-mail from their tech support dudes. "Hi! I just wanted to follow up on this - what's the status on that bug?"
WTF? How about you run the test case I gave you?
In other words, MUST...RESTRAIN...FIST OF DEATH
- Robert
Posted by: groby | August 24, 2003 3:23 PM
Yeah, the removal of the data directories helped, if not cured it by itself.
Unfortunately, I did not have time to take my troubleshooting piece by piece to narrow it down to the exact cause. That would have been much better, but this kid was out of commission for a good while and we needed to move on.
Fist of Death, oh man, that is classic. Maybe their tech support should use that as a logo.
Posted by: Princess | August 24, 2003 3:49 PM