Version 1.9 is now out of beta and available as a stable release. Thank you to those of you who have already tried out the beta - especially those who reported issues.
This version brings major changes to the notifications system. We redesigned it using a common architecture, that makes it much easier to add new notification publisher types. Where previously, only email, XMPP and private message notifications were available, there are now publishers for Slack, Teams, Hipchat and Stride. And we can now add more (let us know what you need).
We are no longer limited to one publisher of each type. You may, for example, have different email servers for different teams on your company. You can set up two email publishers, one for each server, and set up subscriptions so that notifications from different projects go to different email servers. Likewise for different Slack workspaces, Teams channel connectors and so on.
We have also improved the XMPP publisher to support sending notifications to rooms. Subscriptions have been improved, allowing you to specify a room and/or channel for this and other publishers.
User preferences have been updated allowing each user to specify a recipient id, username or channel per publisher.
You can see some metrics on the throughput of each publisher (number of messages on queue, messages sent per second, average send time, etc.) on the Publishers page in the Administration area. This also shows real-time counts of any errors occurring while sending messages and also any messages waiting on a retry queue due to rate limiting or service outages. This allows you to know when you need to upgrade rate limits or make other service changes.
The Templates page has been updated. Templates are now divided into a tab per publisher. The list of available variables for each event type has been moved to a expandable side panel.
This release is built on .Net Framework version 4.7.2, which has allowed us to upgrade a number of third party libraries, including the database ORM and PostgreSQL drivers. This has noticeably improved performance, as well as providing us with a richer platform to build future features on. The setup wizard will prompt for you to install .Net Framework version 4.7.2, before continuing with the installation.
Note that applications running on .Net 4.7.2 do not run on versions of Windows prior to Windows Server 2008R2 and Windows 7 SP1. We are also dropping the 32-bit server installer. This is mainly to reduce testing overheads. We will still be releasing 32-bit agents for those who are using 16-bit compilers.
We will continue to provide bug fixes to Continua CI version 1.8.1 for while to give you time to migrate from older platforms.