I don't know if you are like me but often when you redefine a feature, I used to copy/paste the comments so that I still know what the feature is supposed to do in english terms (in addition to the contracts of course). In 6.2, we are introducing a new facility so that in the editor and in the flat-view of the feature you do not have to do the copy/paste.

I've been in hiatus from using EiffelStudio on the Mac for a while because since the upgrade to Leopard, EiffelStudio exhibited some strange behavior related to expose actions. As a result elements of the UI, that are custom drawn, went missing. I was left unable to see set breakpoints and the docked tool tabs.

EiffelStudio 6.1 has just been released. For those who haven't followed the intermediate releases, here is an idea of what is included:

• New default layout for EiffelStudio tools to highlight the most common used tools whereas other tools are still available at the bottom or via the View menu.

If, like me, you are always wanting to get to an Eiffel class file from within EiffelStudio there's a simple external command you can invoke that will launch a file browser selecting the editing class' associated file.

This tip is only for Windows.

Open the External Commands Editor using the Tools | External Commands menu item, and add a new command.

A new feature of the 6.1 release of EiffelStudio appears in the Console tool. Basically in addition of what you could do before, you can also insert the following:

1. {A}
2. @{A}
3. {A}.f

where A is an Eiffel class and f a feature of A.

The meanings are:

1. {A}: location of a file containing a copy of the text of class A.

It has been a while since I last blogged here. We've all been busy with wrapping up 6.1 and I've been busy working on extension points for EiffelStudio.

When you have a performance problem, profiling an application will help you figure out where the bottleneck is. However, most profiling tool have a tendency to slow down the execution by a significant factor and EiffelStudio is unfortunately no different.