Introduction

Every year, the start of December, it is time for the yearly reunion for Embedded Software Developers. It is called ESE Kongress (yes, in German) and is held in the “Stadthalle Sindelfingen”.
This is near Stuttgart and home of Daimler Benz, the makers of Mercedes.

ESE is organized by Microconsult and Elektronik Praxis, a training company, and a publishing company, for 12 years they started doing that.
I’ve been on all of them and I really like the event.
It is smaller than the Embedded World but that is exactly the charm of it, the noise is limited, there is time to speak in-depth with visitors, the presentations are controlled and contain no or just a really little bit of marketing, the information depth is very good.

Because we have a table there I traveled by car with a booth full of folders, flyers, roll-ups and more.

The highlight of the ESE is, of course, the Table Football Tournament… And the Developer party but in the daytime, it was Johannes Trageser’s presentation “Do you still draw or are you already generating code”.

Rhapsody

Some Rhapsody news. Version 9 is on the way. There is no fixed release date but it will be “any moment now”.

My colleague Wolfgang Sonntag has solved a long year problem…. The Rhapsody #$%^&* Editor that adds whitespace if you do not click on the start of the line.

It turns out that there is an option that prevents that. Just right-click in the editor, open the properties, go to the “misc” tab and tick the option “Confine caret to text” (Don’t ask….)

Questions still stay…. why isn’t that the default? Why does somebody think that “confine caret to text” is something people look for when they want to change the whitespace behavior of the editor?

For the “new” Rhapsody users… here you can also switch on the line numbers. Please choose decimal and “1” as Start at….

These settings are not stored in the model… and also not in Rhapsody.ini. The Editor is an open-source editor that stores its settings in the registry. “HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Telelogic\Rhapsody 8.4\Code Window-Ansi”. “SELBOUNDS” is the key that controls this.

Anyway… this solves it. Better late than never. It works also for fields in the statecharts (Yes! also the guard!!!)

Have fun editing in Rhapsody without extra whitespace!

Walter van der Heiden ( wvdheiden@sodiuswillert.com )