Productive Projects in Workbench 9.3

By Marty Lewis, Software Engineer, Synergy/DE

Last month's Workbench article (Workin' It with Workbench 9.3) was really just a teaser of what's in store for this new version of your Synergy Language IDE. Workbench has no shortage of enhancements and fixes. We've included a new version of SlickEdit, 64-bit toolset support, improved tagging performance of your object-oriented code, improved support for the .NET Component project, and a full set of project types and build options to allow for a more streamlined development process.

Licensing
While creating a feature-rich release was very important to us, we also kept in mind that performance and ease of use would be important to you. First and foremost, we wanted to get you up and running with Workbench faster. As a result, you no longer need to go in and license SlickEdit manually. As long as you have a Professional Series Workbench license configured, all you need to do is launch the program.

Context Tagging
Context Tagging performance is a key component in providing a smooth and rich working environment in Workbench. The introduction of binary prototypes in 9.3 has enabled us to greatly improve Context Tagging speed and efficiency when working with object-oriented code. Workbench is now able to process your imports in a fraction of the time, providing more responsive Context Tag information. And we've taken it a step further with the new project build system. Certain settings from your compile command (such as -qvariant) can now make your tag information more accurate.

Project Configurations
In any individual project in Workbench, you are able to create, edit, and switch between project configurations that allow you to differentiate your tools for the purposes of Debug, Release, or anything else you can come up with. We are now taking better advantage of this feature by providing more than the classic "Release" configuration by default. Workbench 9.3 provides four configurations in a new project: Release32, Release64, Debug32 and Debug64. The only differences are the inclusion of the "-d" debug flag and the use of "-qcheck" in a Debug configuration, versus no debug flag and the use of "-qstrict" in a Release configuration. The 32 and 64 suffixes give away the next topic.

64-bit Support
While we are not able to offer a 64-bit version of Workbench, we are able to support our 64-bit tools from within Workbench. Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Synergy/DE must be installed to make use of this feature, but you'll see the option in any new project that you create. You can select a 64-bit configuration from Project > Set Active Configuration. When you do, Workbench makes the appropriate changes to the environment to run from the tools in the 64-bit installation. Selecting a 32-bit configuration again will put everything back to normal. In an effort to put everything in your control, we've added a flag that you can set on any project configuration to turn this feature on or off. You'll find it in the Synergy/DE Options dialog, described below.

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