Thursday - September 2, 2010
The IDE is an intuitive and powerful environment for creating applications; for example, the Repository Explorer is patterned after the Windows Explorer which provides a consistent look and feel so you can get to work right away. The Repository Explorer allows you to browse projects, applications, libraries and DLLs, modules, entities, classes and errors.
The IDE offers a sophisticated and powerful environment for the advanced developer, with features that allow you to spend more time on the business logic aspect of application development. Visual Objects, for example, automatically tracks and maintains the relationships between the various pieces of an application for you, determining which components need to be compiled in order to build an application. Make files and compiler and linker script files are, therefore, obsolete.
Additionally, the IDE offers the capability of incremental linking when running from inside the IDE or debugging. This feature enables fast prototyping and quick feedback when you make changes to your application, it also enables you to test and debug your applications efficiently using the debugger in the IDE.
Visual Objects offers a just-in-time debugging feature. If an exception or a runtime error occurs while running an application (that has the debug option turned on in the application properties) from within the IDE, the debugger will be invoked in order to look at the error.
After developing, testing, and debugging your application, distributing it as a standalone EXE is easy. You simply click a button to generate an EXE, which can be distributed royalty-free to your end users.
Visual Objects is a repository-based system. The multi-tiered repository is where the IDE stores all application components, and it automatically manages the relationships between the various components of an application. If you make a change to a library component, for example, the repository automatically marks every application with that library in its search path, indicating that it should be rebuilt.
With Visual Objects 2.5 you can create and use multiple repositories which are represented by projects. This allows a repository to be used on a system different from the system that created the project. Being able to use different projects makes it much more convenient to have a backup copy of your work.