EchoStar Easily Moves to Linux Platform with Visual SlickEdit

EchoStar Communications Corporation has been a leader in the satellite TV industry for 20 years and is the parent company of Dish Network, its small dish service. Headquartered in Littleton, Colorado, EchoStar is a public company with more than 10,000 employees. The company and its subsidiaries deliver Direct Broadcast Satellite (DBS) television products and services to customers worldwide. After launching seven satellites, EchoStar has the capacity to offer more than 500 digital, video, data, and audio channels of programming, including local networks and HDTV.

Visual SlickEdit Fits the Way Developers Work

Bruce Johnson and O’Ryan Anderson, software engineers in EchoStar’s Software Engineering Department, are currently working on a satellite receiver development project. They use Visual SlickEdit® for Linux along with the C programming language. A multi-platform, multi-language editing environment, Visual SlickEdit includes a graphical user interface that allows developers to quickly analyze source code, compare files side-by-side, and program in their preferred language and coding style.

The EchoStar development team is especially impressed with Visual SlickEdit’s high level of customizability. “We can apply our own color schemes to source code,” comments Johnson. “This allows each of us to work in our own individual styles.” According to Anderson, “We can now go through each other’s code very quickly, which speeds up the entire development process.”

Visual SlickEdit also enables the developers to easily set up keyboard commands to create shortcuts or to emulate other editors with which they are familiar. “Visual SlickEdit supports multiple keyboard emulations, such as emacs and vi,” comments Johnson. “To customize my key bindings, I simply select a particular emulation and then change the command function of specific keys to reflect my style of programming.” He notes that the ability to assign frequently used commands to individual keys makes it much easier to get started with Visual SlickEdit and to quickly become more productive.

For faster navigation within a project, the project window provides graphical symbols for different procedures or functions. “The window lists functions in the source code file, global variables, structures, and different data types,” says Anderson. “With a click of a mouse, I can go directly to one of these functions. They can also be presented alphabetically or in the order in which they were found in a file.”

Visual SlickEdit’s powerful file differencing feature, called DIFFzilla™, is also very helpful to the EchoStar team. DIFFzilla, along with 3-Way Merge, allows developers to view and merge changes between two files, two directories, or two source trees. “After checking a file out of the version control system, we compare it with the one we are currently working on,” explains Anderson. “DIFFzilla and 3-Way Merge enable us to seamlessly merge our changes into a final file before checking it back into the version control system. The most recent code changes are then available to other developers.”

Easy-to-Use Editing Environment Dramatically Reduces Development Time

Visual SlickEdit for Linux is a graphical editing environment designed from the start to be easy to use. Johnson noted that Linux has traditionally been a text-based platform. “Most Linux editors still work within this type of environment,” he comments. “What developers really need is a full-featured graphical editor.”

An extraordinarily powerful editing environment on different operating systems, Visual SlickEdit works transparently across most major platforms. Visual SlickEdit makes it very easy for the EchoStar developers to work on the Linux operating system.

Johnson continues to say, “Compared to the others, Visual SlickEdit is much easier to learn. When our department first started using the product, I made significant progress in minutes. With the other code editors, I gave up after several hours of wrestling with them. I’m confident that most developers working within the Linux environment would convert to Visual SlickEdit if given the opportunity.”