The update 1.0.0 for the MCU10.2 release has been published on the Freescale CW MCU V10.2 Updates & Patches web site. Downloading the 500 MByte zip file and installing the update will take a while. After downloading I select Help > Install New Software … and specify the archive file.

Note: In general uninstalling an eclipse update is not possible. If you want to keep our original MCU10.2 on the side, then follow this trick: Copy your existing MCU10.2 installation folder and rename it (say to ‘MCU10.2_without_update’). Then apply the update to the normal MCU10.2. If you want to revert to the version without the update, simple delete the updated installation and rename the one without the update again. No need to reinstall things again. And you can use both the updated version and the normal version in parallel too: simply launch the eclipse\cwide you want 🙂

Time to read the release notes and dig into what has been changed and improved.

RSE Settings

The update comes with a fix for an issue I was running into with the original MCU10.2: I have a lot of projects in my workspace, and I do a lot of ‘open project’ and ‘close project’. But I had cases where I lost RSE (Remote Systems Explorer) settings if they were not referenced any more. The workaround was to use the setting ‘Show a dialog; ask me what to do‘:

While this workaround works, it causes an annoying dialog for every project close action. The good news: with the update that problem is fixed :-). I can revert back to the much more convenient mode which removes unreferenced systems automatically:

At opening time the RSE settings are restored from a file inside the project. And here there is another change with the update: the name of the file where the RSE settings are stored. As outlined in Dissection of MCU10 Projects the file rseHostSettingsCache.xml is used. This is still the same for existing projects. But now with the update, that file has now a different default name: ReferencedRSESystems.xml:

So existing projects keep using the old name, but new projects will be created with the new naming. This means if I create a new project with the update 1.0.0 and want to use it in base 10.2 (without the update), I consider renaming that file to keep things compatible.

Syntax Parsing of Language Extensions

On the eclipse side a notable extension/fix is that it now correctly parses in the editor view different language extensions. While this sounds like more of an annoyance, it makes the look&feel of the tool much better especially if you are using a lot of non-ANSI extensions.  Language extensions like

void interrupt 7 myISR(void);
volatile unsigned char myPORT@0x12;
extern asm __declspec(register_abi) myFunc;

are now properly parsed by the eclipse editor syntax parser.

Debugger with Restart Toolbar Icon

The update adds the feature to restart the application from the Debug view toolbar:

So far, the restart action was only available in the context menu. That makes restarting an application I’m debugging much faster now :-).

Other Changes

There are many other larger or smaller changes and improvements listed in the release notes. Many of the documentation packages have been updated. I noticed as well a new OSBDM/OSJTAG firmware. As MCU10.2 was the first eclipse release for the Freescale DSC family of microprocessors, the update addresses many issues around DSC. But the update comes with many fixes and improvements for the rest of the families supported, so this update is a must for me.

Happy Updating 🙂