UNDERSTANDING COMPLEX CODE has become a little bit easier for Lexient's customers since Surveyor's 2.0 release earlier this year. The newest version of the platform independant code analyzer provides major language-specific improvements for the development team seeking to update, migrate, or integrate with C/C++ code. Additionally, Surveyor has become significantly more stable due to a departure from the strategy to be both platform and source code language independant.

"By retooling Surveyor so that it was language specific (but still platform independant), rather than being both language and platform independant, we've significantly improved the stability and usability of our productivity tool" said Mike Dershowitz, Lexient's CTO. Over 180 features were upgraded in the major overhaul of Surveyor's functionalities, while retaining the same easy to use interface developers have come to love. Dershowitz went on to say "However, this strategy shift doesn’t mean that customers who haven enjoyed the language independent capabilities of surveyor will lose that incredible technology. Instead, projects can be analyzed in their respective versions of Surveyor and meta-data can be combined into one Surveyor project through the use of the super-project feature set".

The single greatest concern new users of the previous version of Surveyor had was with stability during analysis of new code. By separating out the various means of parsing and generating a language-generic repository for the many source languages Surveyor supported, Lexient has been able to eliminate this concern. Separate versions of Surveyor are now required in order to fully analyze source in a language specific manner, and build a language generic repository that can be shared with users of Surveyor for different source code languages. In this way, Java code can be fully analyzed with Surveyor for Java, and COBOL code analyze with Surveyor for COBOL in order to language generic repositories for each code base. Then, Surveyor Multilanguage can be used to study the interactions between the code in both languages. All versions of Surveyor will share a common user interface, with language specific source checks, reports, and metrics.

The feature upgrade includes significantly enhanced support for .NET developers. MSVC projects, workspaces, and solutions can now be analyzed from Visual Studio versions 5, 6, or .NET. Many more specific upgrades have also been added, to for example enhace support for ATL, and support the -msc #pragma once, attributes 'using', and _INTEGRAL_MAX_BITS 64.

Additionally, Surveyor's Version 2.0 sports a further refined user interface, with upgrades such as enabling metrics to be exported, custom color configurations, and augmented auto-generation of reports and help files. These feature requests were submitted by Lexient's long-established and loyal customer base made up of embedded systems, defense, and ISV customers, among other industries. Through close work and feedback from Lexient's customers, the user interface has consistently improved each year, and is of vital importance to Lexient's goal of ensuring that new users gain familiarity very rapidly.

Separate versions of Surveyor for C/C++, the VB language family (versions 5, 6, and .NET), Java, and COBOL have been released. Additional versions for ASP and FORTRAN will be released shortly.

ABOUT LEXIENT:
Lexient Corp. is the provider of reverse engineering, documentation and understanding tools. Lexient’s Surveyor product typically enables development organizations to compress development timelines 20-40%, while improving code quality. Visit www.lexientcorp.com for more information or to download a trial version.