Think Top 10

By Yuen Li, SQA Engineer, Symantec Corp.

Top Ten Questions about VA (Visual Architect) and Symantec C++
Cross Development for PowerMac:

Q. How can I use VA to create and add a tearoff menu to my menu bar?

A. Go under View menu items and select “New View...”. Pick “Tearoff Menu” from the “View Kind” list, and name your view. Now you created a tearoff menu. To add this to your current existing menu bar, go to the Edit menu items and select “menu bar..” Choose from the “Add menu” scrolling list, and you’ll find an item called “tearoff”. Rename the menu item from the generic “tearoff” to your own tearoff menu name. Otherwise, it may become unclear when you try to generate another tearoff menu, it will be generated with the default name “tearoff” again.

Q. What is the field “library class” in the Classes dialog box for?

A. It’s so you can put in your own defined class. This lets your user-defined object use this class rather than use a TCL class directly. Then you can select the TCL base class that the user-defined class derives from.

Q. How can I create a scrollable editing text pane from the VA?

A. First you create a scrollable window. Remove both the vertical and horizontal scroll bars, but keep the sizebox. You can select the edit pane icon from the Tools tearoff menu, and paste it on the window. Then try to expand the size of the edit pane to be the same size of the window. If you can’t do a perfect match up with your eyes, you can always do it by coordinates!

Q. I’d like to add one of my own color icons to use with VA. But why doesn’t it show up in CIconButton icons list, even after I added the icon to the VA resource?

A. You need both the color and black and white versions of the same icon resource added to the VA resource, in order for the icon to show when you want to choose from CIconButton list.

Q. Do I need to know a lot about TCL 2.0 before I can use VA?

A. No, but it helps. You can just start using VA without any prior knowledge in TCL. However, if you know how TCL works, then you’ll find the relations between the objects you created with VA and TCL classes much easier to understand.

Q. I tried to change the default window type to other window types in the View info dialog. However, after I did that, selecting the default window type with scrollbars doesn’t generate a window with a scrollbar or sizebox at all. What’s the problem here?

A. When you selected a different window type that doesn’t have scrollbars, the vertical, horizontal scrollbars, sizebox checkboxes were unchecked. Even though you went back and selected the window type with scrollbars, these checkboxes remained unchecked. Checking them again will turn them back on. This is our current choice for the correct behavior.

Q. I have the latest and the greatest Symantec C++ Cross Development for PowerMac. When it gets to linking, it stops with a link error like “Bad xcoff file....”? What does it mean?

A. It may not mean anything at all, but you may be running out of memory from ToolServer because of PPCLink. For the first attempt to resolve any ambiguous link error, try bumping up the ToolServer partition size.

Q. How do I convert my 68K projects to PowerPC projects?

A. You can create a new PowerPC project using the project mode and then add your source files to the project. Or you can simply delete all the standard libraries in the project, then add the following libraries:

/* 1 */
 InterfaceLib.xcoff
 MathLib.xcoff
 PPC CPlusLib.o
 PPCCRuntime.o
 StdCLib.xcoff
 StdCRuntime.o.

Then you need to copy both the “PPCBuild.ts”, “cfrg.r” and “SIZE.r” files to your project folder. Add them to your project as well. Rebuild the project and it’s now a PPC project !

Q. How do I debug a PowerPC application with the Cross Development?

A. You can use either the Macintosh Debugger for PowerPC from Apple, which you should find it in your “CDK Extras” folder after the installation, or use MacsBug v6.5dx with dcmds. The Macintosh Debugger for PowerPC from Apple is a two-machine debugger for Macintosh with PowerPC applications. The instructions are in the Mac Debugger ReadMe inside the same folder as the debugger.

Q. How do I build a fat application with Cross Development?

A. A fat application contains both 68K and PowerPC executable code so the application can run its native processor-based code on either 68K-based or PowerPC processor-based Macintosh computers. To build a fat application, you simply add a filename extension to your pre-built 68K application. Then add the file extension mapped with the Resource Copier in the Extension option dialog in the TPM. And now when you go ahead and build the PowerPC project, the 68K code is stored in 'CODE' resources in the resource fork as before, while the PowerPC executable code is stored in the data fork.

Special thanks to the entire QA staff, John Micco and Jeanne Munson for helping me with this article.