Since anyone who hasn't upgraded to CW 7 is probably wondering if it's
worth the cost, I felt I had to share my experience for the benefit of
Palm community, because, in short, I think it is extremely worth it.
Everyone's mileage may differ, and if you've been having little to no
problems using CW 6, then this is probably not an issue.
I had many difficulties using CW 6 (that the patches didn't fix), so I
had to take a gamble and pay nearly $200 to upgrade to CW 7.
When doing this, I was wondering if it would help:
-> Will CW 7 actually solve my problems?
-> Will CW 7 be noticably improved?
-> Might CW 7 not even be as up to date as my CW 6 with the latest plug
ins?
-> Am I about to blow $200 and a day's install time for something worse
than I have now?
Well, I ordered CW 7 (from the Metrowerks website) and received in
within 48 hours.
And I must tell everyone - YES, YES, YES - it is WORTH IT! It is a more
significant upgrade than any I'd found previously, it solved my
problems, and it boosted my productivity so much that I made up for the
install disruption in about a day! (I also verified that all elements
of CW 7 are more recent than any of the updates/plugins for CW 6, except
if you are currently using SDK 4.0)
Here's what most benefitted me in order of importance:
(1) Totally new way of emulator debugging:
-> instant start of debug sessions
-> communication problems almost non existant
-> occasional errors are recoverable without rebooting
-> extremely stable debugger (no crashing)
-> stack works, code stepping works, symbolic debugging works and much
faster than in CW 6
(2) Better "live" source code awareness in the IDE
-> Much easier to "hyperlink" around symbols and files
-> New cool features make writing code easier
(3) Overall great stability
-> Nothing's 100%, but I haven't had CW 7 crash yet, and I've certainly
never needed to reboot my machine. I can freely debug on my emulator
and Palm as often as I want, with no fear of overdoing things and
pushing my luck.
The honest truth is I used to somewhat minimize my time spent debugging
in CW because it was unstable. Now I flourish in it and spend all my
time developing with it.
Again, some of you may have had no problems with CW 6, but for those
that are having problems, I can't think of a better silver bullet than
upgradeing to CW 7.
- Jeff
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