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Codewarrior Analysis Tools 2.0 |
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Your Price: $697.99 |
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Description:
CodeWarrior Analysis Tools helps Windows software developers maximize the execution speed of programs by providing a view of what will happen at execution time. This product incorporates two independent applications: Metrowerks Hierarchical Profiler for identifying slow spots in programs, and Metroworks Code Coverage for visualizing the completeness of test routines. Both run under Microsoft Windows and operate on 32-bit Windows applications, written in C/C++ with CodeWarrior Professional for Windows, Microsoft Visual C++ 4.x or later, or Microsoft Developer Studio 4.x or later. Metrowerks bought these products from TracePoint (they were called HiProf and Visual Coverage by that company), so this software may look familiar to you from its earlier incarnations. The Metrowerks Hierarchical Profiler provides a visual guide to the execution speed of your programs' functions, both in absolute (time) and relative (percentage) terms. To analyze a program with Hierarchical Profiler, you must compile a project in one of the supported development environments, leaving debugging symbols on. Then, you direct the attention of Hierarchical Profiler to the executable and any .DLLs files of interest and allow it to create and save an instrumented version of the code. The Hierarchical Profiler's work includes calls that allow it to monitor what's going on during execution (you can exclude portions of your program from instrumentation if you'd like). When you then run and test the instrumented program, Hierarchical Profiler keeps track of which functions call other functions, and the time spent executing code in each. Upon quitting, you can look at the time data organized as a hierarchy, displayed as either a list with pie charts or a graphical tree that shows function calls. In this hierarchy, you'll be shown parent functions listed with their execution times, as well as those of their children. Hierarchical Profiler automatically generates a list of your program's slowest functions and displays a very handy Critical Chain window, which shows the slowest path through the program. It's easy to identify the functions that tie up the processor longest, so you know where in your code to try to improve your design. The Metrowerks Code Coverage application helps you make sure that the test routines you use to validate your software are doing their job adequately (monitoring which lines run during tests). To test a program, Code Coverage builds an instrumented version of it, similar to the one Hierarchical Profiler creates. You then run the instrumented version and exercise it (manually or with a test driver), in an effort to make the program run through all the code that applies to the conditions you're testing. Based on the information it gathers from its instrumentation code during the test runs (you can do several, with different arguments if you like), Code Coverage tells which parts of the software were exercised during the testing, as well as which portions were left untested and which are dead. You can choose from among several views, including a very cool one that color-codes your program's source to show specifically which lines are executed during testing, how many times, and in response to what conditions. You can export reports to the printer, or write them to HTML or text files. Together, the two applications in CodeWarrior Analysis Tools will help you deliver software of higher quality. While no tool can actually improve the quality of the code you write, the two in this suite go a long way toward showing you where to look for performance gains. --David Wall
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