|  | M6pm The Dark Secrets of Tcl Development: Debugging, Testing and Packaging Jeffrey Hobbs, Siemens AG Who should attend: Intermediate or advanced Tcl developers familiar with core Tcl/Tk as well as Tcl and C integration. Since Windows and Unix systems packaging will be shown, basic knowledge will be assumed, but is not required for single-platform developers. Basic knowledge of debugging principles is also helpful, but not required. Tcl/Tk is a simple, but powerful, interpreted language. In just a matter of days you can build your first application. In another week, you can build a spiffy graphical interface to go along with it. However, when you decide to build applications (large or small) that would be useful to others, the tasks of ensuring the software is bug-free, polished, packaged and distributed effortlessly can be daunting for an interpreted language. This tutorial will discuss how to maximize the Tcl development process through useful techniques and available tools. Participants will gain skills to more rapidly develop clean Tcl code that can be packaged and distributed without major pitfalls. We will examine the following processes in a multi-platform environment (UNIX and Windows 95/NT), with both pure Tcl/Tk and Tcl/C applications:
| Debugging Tcl code
| Coverage testing for Tcl
| Interactive debugging of Tcl and Tk
| Coding for configurability
| Managing the interaction between Tcl and C
| Packaging a Tcl application
Jeffrey Hobbs has worked on Tcl projects ranging from 5 to 100,000 LOC at Siemens AG. He is author of TkCon and TkTable, among other Tcl utilities, and maintains the Tk Usage FAQ. Jeffrey received a BA and MS in computer science from the University of Oregon, where he taught classes on using Tcl/Tk.

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