I’ve covered making Snapshots from the Current Database and by checking out source to an alternate location in earlier posts. Now I’m going to tell you the EASY way to do it…. Just use TrackBack.
Assuming you have had TrackBack B443 or later monitoring your source trees, you can recreate the state of any monitored directory at any time. This includes file modification, file existance, file renaming, everything.
User tools are a convenient way to quickly access external tools or other applications. In an earlier post, Ken shared his SVN User Tools, which provide quick access to version control commands right inside the application. If you use a different version control system, or want to launch another application, you’ll need to know how to make your own user tools.
The Understand 2.0 editor’s “Browse Mode” makes all entities in the editor behave like links in a web browser. With a single click you can visit and update the Information Browser.
In both 1.4 and 2.0 the usual way of exploring/learning about code in the editor is via the Right Click context menu. For instance, if I want to learn about allocstrAppend() I right click on it:
The Understand 2.0GUI has command line options that may prove useful to you automation and personal efficiency reasons.
To see the options, just start Understand with “-help”:
%understand -help
I’ve just realized that while I’ve written a bunch of posts referring to snapshots and using snapshots, I’ve never explained what they are and how they can fit into a software engineer’s workflow. Hence the “missing piece of the puzzle” clip art above.
Q: What are snapshots?
A: A snapshot is a binary store included within an Understand database. A database can hold be any number of snapshots. Each contains three things:
Q: What are snapshots used for?
A: They are used throughout Understand 2.0 to provide details and metrics about what has changed in source code between two points of time. The “Change”, “Metrics”, and “Estimate” menus all use snapshots intensively.
“Change” will tell you what has changed at the semantic level. For instance, what classes or types changed, versus just what files/lines changed.
“Metrics” can tell you the number of semantic changes – classes removed, changed, added, so forth.
A frequent complaint of Understand 1.4 users was that unless their project was syncronized to an MSVC project it was difficult to keep Understand projects up to date about new files and especially hard to keep files removed from a project from showing up again when adding new code.
Understand 2.0 addresses this with the “Watched Dir” concept. By default any directory you add is a “watched dir”.
Understand 2.0 scans all project “watched dir” for new/removed files and the project file list updated automatically. Importantly, any modifications you have manually made – either by removing or by changing file filters is remembered. In 2.0 you only have to remove a file once it won’t come back unless you add it specifically.
You can trigger a rescan with the Project->Rescan button:
Or automatically on a schedule with the Project scheduler available in Project->Configure Project:
It is very common to walk a call, call by, or class hierarchy tree seeing what is “going on”. You can do this in the Information Browser, or in the various graph views we have provided for years.
A new way in Understand 2.0 is the Entity Explorer window. It permits keyboard based fast exploring of reference hiearchies with syncronized source and informatoin updates.
To see this just click on any entity that has relationships. For instance, a function, and choose “Explorer”. It will list the reference hiearchies availble to explore:
Have you ever looked at a call tree and wondered “is somefunction()” in there?
B453, which you can download now, introduces a new “incremental search” feature to the Information Browser that makes answering questions like that a snap.
To use it hit select where you want to start searching from and then hit the Ctrl-F key while in the IB or click on the 
icon.
That brings up a search box on the bottom of the IB:
Some of you may have noticed that the quality and timelyness of our support has improved this week. That is because I’m not there bugging everybody. My son and I are fishing on a lake in upstate New York. Here I am with a 4 lb largemouth bass. Normally I throw them back, but this one seemed just right to feed us this evening. And it was tasty. The trip is almost over, so support will return to its slower lower quality form on Monday. 
Metrics have always been very tightly coupled with software engineering. Love them or hate them, there is usually no avoiding them. In Understand 2.0 we’ve significantly increased our ability to provide useful metrics about your project.
The metrics capabilities vary depending on what version of Understand you are using: Understand Engineer provides high level project metrics, Understand Pro lets you explore and export project and entity level metrics, and Understand Analyst lets you do all that, create custom graphs, and even compare how metrics are changing over time (trend analysis).
All of this Metrics capability is accessed through the new Metrics menu.
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