49 Secrets of the Envy Masters

Waterfront Centre Hotel
Cheakamus Room

ENVY/Manager is the dominant team programming tool for Smalltalk. With its inclusion in VisualAge for Java, it is now gaining prominence in a wider arena. While it provides all the basics for productive team development, we wouldn't be Smalltalk developers if we didn't constantly extend and modify our tools. This tutorial provides a tour of ENVY internals. These are the secrets which ordinary developers don't need or want to know, but which are essential for the power users and tool builders. Concepts will be illustrated through concrete examples in both VisualWorks and VisualAge. This is not about using ENVY for project management or day-to-day development, except insofar as these motivate tool-building. It is about slides full of code and why you can't usefully inspect shadow metaclasses.

Participants will gain an understanding of mechanisms that can be used to extend the ENVY environment, and knowledge of many important details required to do so effectively.

Attendee Background: Participants should be experienced Smalltalk programmers who have used ENVY in a significant way.

Alan Knight is a regular columnist for "The Smalltalk Report" and reigning ENVY guru at The Object People. He has been programming in Smalltalk for over 10 years, and currently works on TOPLink, a framework for object-relational persistence. He enjoys drinking coffee, complaining about programming tools, and diving into undocumented mazes of hidden source code to fix them. He lives in Ottawa, Canada, and can be reached at knight@acm.org.