It's been a long time in the making, but FinalBuilder 7 is almost here. FinalBuilder 7 has been in private beta testing for a few weeks, and today we are opening the beta to existing customers.
If you have an account on our website, and have a license for any version of FinalBuilder then you should have access to the FinalBuilder 7 Beta Forum. If you don't see it, try logging out and in again.
What's new in FinalBuilder 7?
NEW IDE
Well, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words.. so lets take a look :
FinalBuilder 7 sports a new IDE. The FinalBuilder 7 IDE is capable of opening multiple projects (whereas FB6 only allows 1 at a time). The new IDE includes docking, something that has been requested many times over the years, so you can lay out the IDE to suite your taste. The current theme is modelled on Visual Studio, however by the time FB7 ships we should have an alternative theme available too.
There are many little enhancements and tweaks in the IDE. The most requested feature that we did implement is the renaming of variables. In FB6, when you rename a variable it does not rename references to it in the project. FB7 will attempt to find and rename all references (there may be a few cases we have missed, if you find any let us know).
Core Changes
Unicode Support
FinalBuilder is now compiled with a unicode aware compiler. The native internal string type is UTF16, and we have worked hard to ensure that all actions that work with files respect the original files encoding. This has been a massive endevour, and we are still in the process of testing actions to ensure compliance. The user interface should fully support unicode. Note that while FinalBuilder may support unicode, many of the tools it calls do not.
Variable Types
In FinalBuilder 6 and earlier, all FinalBuilder variables are implemented as Variants. Those of you who have done some COM programming, or used Visual Basic 6 or earlier, or Delphi might be familiar with Variants. A Variant is a type that can store values of various types. Variants are very useful in many cases, but are not without their problems. For example, if you want to store a string "03" in a variant, you will have to put the double quotes around the 03, otherwise we have no idea it's not a number. To circumvent this problem, in FinalBuilder 7 we allow you to specify the variable type :
When you specify a variable type, that is how the variable will be treated, so for example if you attempt to assign a string value to an integer variable it will fail. Typed variables also allow you to specify a format string, which will be used when the variable is evaluated in an expression. For example, if you have a build number variable, that you always want to use as 4 digits, with zeros padding out the left, setting the format string to %.4d will do this.
Local Variables
In addition to the existing variable scopes (environment, application,user, project) and action list parameters, FinalBuilder 7 includes a local variable scope. The Action Group Action has a new property page that allows you to define the local variables.
These variables are only visible to child actions of the group. Since groups can be nested, this provides the ability to override variables locally, and define variables for temporary use.
Local variables cannot be persisted and cannot be used as environment variables.
New Actions
Of course as with every new release we added a bunch of actions:
- NDepend Action
- Git Actions
- Plastic SCM Actions
- Check If Host Exists Action
- SetupBuilder Actions
- SecureZIP Actions
- Signtool Actions
- Hyper V Actions
- Mercurial Actions
- SSH Actions
- XML Node Exists Action
And many of the existing actions had enhancements to them, support for filesets added to more actions.
What about FinalBuilder Server 7?
The FinalBuilder Server 7 beta will be ready in a day or two. It's currently being used to build FB7 (FB7 is built using FB7 and FB Server 7).
What now
FinalBuilder 7 is feature complete for the 7.0 release, there are still many more features we would like to implement in updates. Right now we are in Test/Bug fix mode, that is all the team are working on. So now it's time for some feedback.. let us know what you think, and more importantly, if you find something that isn't working right then let us know. Please keep all beta bug reports and feeback to the FinalBuilder 7 Beta Forum. If you don't see the Beta forum and you are a customer please contact support at finalbuilder dot com and we'll grant you access.