We are excited to announce the release of Understand 3.0 (build 611 and later). 

We don’t like to make you wait for new features, so many of these features were already added in beta form and you may be familiar with some of them. There is an updated manual covering all of these new features, and several new floating licensing options are also available.  The upgrade to 3.0 is free as long as your maintenance is up to date and Understand 2.5 and 2.6 Licenses will also work with Understand 3.0.  Grab Understand 3.0 here

Features Added Since Understand 2.6 Release

• Objective C/C++ Language Support
• C++ Support for Templates and Overloads
• COBOL Language Support
• Python Language  Support
• Python API
• Re-written Command Line Tool ‘Und’
• Improved Parsing Tools
• Unused Entity Highlighting
• Keybinding Enhancements
• Clustered Call Graphs

New Floating Licensing Options

Node-Locked Floating License

A node-locked floating license is designed for a single machine that many users will be accessing, such as in a lab or a secure environment.  It is similar in concept to a Standard Floating License but no license server is needed, and it will only work on the one machine.

USB-Dongle Floating License

This license is ideal when the license needs to be shared between different people on different networks, or if there is a lot of traveling involved. The license is mailed to you on a USB drive. As long as that drive is attached to the computer, Understand will work. The license dongle can be shared between users as needed.

Dongle licenses expire after two years and will need to be replaced. There is an additional fee for new and replacement dongle licenses to offset the setup and shipping costs.

We’ve added a new option to highlight entities that are defined but not used.

To enable this option go into Tools->Options->Editor->Advanced->Unused Entities

Right now this only works for functions and variables. Let us know if you find it useful, and if there are other entities you want it added for.

We just added a plugin to identify duplicated lines of code. You can grab it at the bottom of our GUI Plugins page.

Update April,26 2012 – I’ve made some extensive changes to this script to improve performance and remove repeated results

If your team uses cmake to build your projects, you can use it to generate your Understand project. It will add all of the files, setup the correct macro definitions for each file, and setup the correct include files for each file in the project. The advantage of creating an Understand project like this is that the project will be much more accurate than can be created by hand, allowing you to have easier access to all the features of our new strict parser.

In order to use this,

1. Navigate to your build directory
2. Edit CMakeCache.txt and set CMAKE_EXPORT_COMPILE_COMMANDS to ON.
3. Run make again, you’ll see a file called compile_commands.json in your build directory.
4. To import into an understand project run the following from the command line (skip the red part for existing projects):
        und -db path/to/db.udb create -languages C++ add path/to/build/dir/compile_commands.json settings -c++AddFoundFilesToProject on analyze

Structure101 has several great tools for analyzing and refactoring your code base, and they have just finished adding the ability to import Understand projects into their tools. You should definitely check it out.

As an extra incentive, they are offering a free license to the first 3 Understand users who demo one of their tools and send an exported image such as the one below of any part of their code or an Open Source project. Just send it to hwsupport@headwaysoftware.com and tell them Kevin sent you

To be fair to another great partner, Lattix can also import your Understand projects and is a great tool for organizing and refactoring your code, so give them a look.

Some customers have asked us to provide test files for validating the output of CodeCheck feature. For example, Avionics teams using DO-178B can use it for Tool Qualification.  The attached file includes a test suite for each of the CodeCheck Checks, as well as a script that uses our Perl API to automatically run each of the Checks on the corresponding test suite. Before running the script, modify the paths at the beginning to point to the appropriate location, then simply run it from the command line with uperl codecheck_validation.pl

As always, let us know if you run into any questions or problems – support@scitools.com

With build 596 we’ve added support to Understand for Objective-C and Objective-C++, and we would love your feedback on it.  This support is added as part of the new strict analyzer, so make sure your project is fully configured to get an accurate parse. Please point Understand and your Objective-C code, and if you run into any problems or questions, shoot us an email – support@scitools.com

CodeCheck can be set up to run from the command line using Und if that is your preferred work environment, or if you are looking to automate the task. To see all of the options available in Und, run und help. For specific documentation on each option run und help optionName.

To run CodeCheck from the command line, first you will need to export the CodeCheck configuration file from the Understand GUI that has the checks you wish to run selected.

Once that is saved to a file, the command line option is

und codecheck C:\path\to\configuration.ini C:\path\to\OutputDir  

Where configuration.ini is my saved configuration file and the results are saved to the OutputDir. 

We moved our main office this week. 

We are still in scenic St George, near Zion National Park and less than two hours from Vegas. If you are in the area feel free to stop by and visit us!

Our new address is:

Scientific Toolworks, Inc.
249 East Tabernacle, Suite 200
St George, UT 84770