The Startup Wizard
We’ve just added a new Startup Wizard to all our C++ tools.
The purpose of the startup wizard is to unify the various different dialogs that would be shown the first time the software ran. These would configure different aspects of the software. Placing them all in one place, a wizard, provides a better first run experience. We’ve also taken this opportunity to configure software updates for non-evaluation users of the software. As a final touch, we’ve included an overview video for the software.
Introduction
The first panel explains what’s going to happen next.
Symbol Environment Variables
The second panel allows you to configure which environment variables (if any) you wish to use to control the symbol search process for symbols contained in PDB files.
IDE / Compiler
The third panel allows you to configure which IDE / Compiler / Linker you are using. This is important as it affects how symbol lookup is performed (Visual Studio has various quirks in its history of symbol handling, we have to work around that).
Software Updates
The next panel is not shown to people evaluating the software. Only purchasing customers see this panel. The panel allows you to configure your software update information and also where the software updates are downloaded to.
It is important to be able to specify where they are downloaded to because of potential security risks that arise from allowing the TMP directory (c:\users\[username]\AppData\Local\Temp) to be executable. We use the TMP directory as a default, but if you think that’s not a good idea you can specify your own download directory and set permissions for TMP to deny execute privileges.
Video Overview
The final panel is a video overview of the software. The purpose of this video is to quickly show many areas of the software to encourage you to explore the capabilities of the software.
