Developer Product Briefs
Coverity Prevent and Quince UX Patterns Explorer
Improved support for managed and native code in static-analysis software.
Coverity Prevent
Coverity Inc. has improved the support for managed and native code in its static-analysis software. With Coverity Prevent, developers can automatically scan and analyze C#, C, C++ and Java source code on their desktops or on the build server. It's one of the few static-analysis tools that supports both Visual Studio and Eclipse integrated dev environments.
The product ships with a Web server, which connects to the help desk or Active Directory server on your network and a back-end database. Developers open the Coverity browser and log on to the Web service. Prevent builds the source code, analyzes it based on selected quality and concurrency checkers, and then commits the results to the database. A build-utility wrapper wraps around the build but doesn't change it. Depending on the number of checkers, the build and analysis typically take three to five times the normal build time.
After a run, developers can view a breakdown of the code base in the browser: how many files and lines of code, the number of new defects since the last Run ID, and outstanding defects that still need to be inspected and classified. Developers can't edit the code from within the Prevent interface, however.
The latest version beefs up VS integration, enabling developers to perform static analysis from within VS 2005 and VS 2008. The company has also added support for Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, Windows Automotive and Xbox.
In addition, Coverity has extended Prevent's C# functionality with new quality and concurrency checkers. Prevent is the first product to support C# concurrency testing for issues such as deadlocks and race conditions, according to the company. With this upgrade, it also now offers concurrency modeling to help developers find critical defects in multithreaded Win32 apps.
Prevent is the flagship product in Coverity's Software Integrity Suite, and the only product that currently supports C#. Upcoming static-analysis tooling will take advantage of Microsoft's efforts to put annotations into its system header files.
Coverity Prevent
Coverity Inc.
Price: Contact vendor for pricing
Web: www.coverity.com
Phone: 800-873-8193;
415-321-5237
Quince UX Patterns Explorer
Components vendor Infragistics Inc. has launched a unique Silverlight 2 application called "Quince" UX Patterns Explorer. The app offers developers a resource for best practices in user experience design and user interface patterns. With Quince, developers can hone their UI design skills with guidance from the community-driven catalog by seeing what patterns other practitioners have used and by viewing developer feedback. Developers can also share and upload their own UI patterns.
Quince offers guidance on common patterns for complex data entry, label alignment and navigation, among other UI tasks. The library is initially based on tools and practices that the 20-year-old company uses internally, as well as expertise garnered from industry sources.
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Quince aggregates close to 100 patterns and shows implementations via a carousel format on various platforms, including ASP.NET, Windows Forms and PHP. Developers can search Quince for commonly used patterns based on end user tasks, wireframe map locations and tags. The patterns catalog is set up so that the community can comment on patterns and their experiences in real time. The patterns are aggregated based on community feedback.
Yahoo! Inc. and Google Inc. offer pattern libraries, but there isn't a de facto resource in the .NET and Microsoft space .
Quince
Infragistics Inc.
Price: No fees; registration required
Web: www.quince.infragistics.com
Phone: 888-448-0097; 609-448-2000