Title: Pushing the VA Smalltalk Editor Onward and Upward
Speaker: Seth Berman
Fri, August 22, 12:00pm – 12:30pm

Abstract: Last year saw the introduction of our new modern editor fully integrated into VA Smalltalk. Being based on the popular Scintilla editor component, it gave us instant access to so many battle-hardened capabilities that we knew this was just the beginning of a series of exciting features we would have to push the productivity edge for our developers. This year, VA Smalltalk will see the largest set of features and enhancements to the editor since the product's inception.

I'm going to discuss the radical performance improvements we achieved by changing how we communicate with Scintilla, as well as special memory optimizations we used. During a live demo, you will see our revamped source analysis engine in action. It provides the identification and visualization of compiler errors, popular lint checks, as well as type checking using an enhanced version of our code completion engine. All these activities have been carefully designed to run unnoticed in the background.

I will be showing off our new "interactive refactoring sessions", allowing the developer to refactor code using an interactive workflow, instead of the more traditional series of popups that slow them down. To initiate these refactoring, I will demo our new action list calltips...interactive calltips that allow you to make selections from them as if they were list widgets.

Will all the great new visualizations, we felt strongly that it was time VA had a comprehensive editor theming capability. Themes cover everything from the margins to visual indicators over text. I will show a new UI which a developer can use to create a fully  customized theme in seconds. We have also updated our existing themes, as well as added some new ones.

This is going to be another exciting year for VA Smalltalk!

Bio: Before joining Instantiations in May of 2011, Seth Bernan spent 10 years developing software for the U.S. government. During this time he worked on a wide variety of projects and gained experience working with many languages, technologies and problem domains. He has a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.S. in Software Engineering. Seth is currently the Engineering Director at Instantiations focusing on product development of VA Smalltalk
	
Slides
	http://www.slideshare.net/esug/pushing-the-va-smalltalk-editor-onward-and-upward-esug2014
	
Video:
	https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJFGwmCMhJ0