I have been bitten for years whenever I have used precompiled headers with C++ platforms. It doesn't matter what platform I'm using, they just never quite seem to work properly and reliably. From time to time you just get bizarre error messages that just don't make any sense. So as a matter of course I just leave that option turned off and suffer the extra compilation time.

Recently, I've been working with Xcode 4 which we use for our Scorecerer iPad development. Precompiled headers are enabled by default and one of the first things I did was turn that option off and forgot about it.

However, one of my partners who also just switched to Xcode 4 did not turn off that option and guess what --- he just got bitten. In his case, he built an update of the product with changes that I checked into our version control system. The code compiled and built perfectly but the Xcode IDE still displayed a bunch of those red error marker icons in various places and suggested that some classes and some variables were missing. Cleaning the project and rebuilding made no difference.

Comment (0) Read More...

Cross-platform development for desktop applications is becoming increasingly important. Chances are that your application user uses OS X, Windows, Linux or has a combination of these. For example - it is not uncommon for people to have a Windows based desktop and an OS X laptop.

In the recent years OS X platform really took off with the introduction of Intel based Macintosh computers. This makes the OS X platform hard to ignore.

As a developer - you have a few tough choices to make, but by far the toughest one is selecting the right development environment.

Comment (0) Read More...