Version 6.0
 

Released on October 11, 2005

Note: See http://visualbuild.com/Manual/?visualbuild5_x.htm for issues to be aware of when upgrading from earlier releases.

New Features

Unlimited undo/redo.

Visual Studio 2005-style dockable panes, menus, toolbars and themes.

Customizable keyboard shortcuts.

System tray icon.

Forward/back navigation (via Alt+Right/Left Arrow, Go menu, and dedicated mouse/keyboard buttons).

Replace Insert Step dialog / action toolbar with auto-filtering Actions pane.

Quickly navigate to location of last build error via menu (Go | Last Error) or shortcut (F8).

GUI designer for user action components.

Add option to disable logging for each step.

Add ability to specify which failure step subroutine to run on failure (instead of building all failure steps).

Add option to continue building after executing failure steps.

User options to persist step expand/collapse state to project file and control activating, expanding, and showing current step during a build.

Implement WScript.Echo, Sleep and CreateObject methods for compatibility with WSH script code.

Application option to write BOM to XML project, log and configuration files; also write encoding tag to all XML files.

Log step failure and highlight failed step in step grid even if ignoring failure.

Show build rule in tooltip of step grid (and evaluated result if Shift held down).

Support side-by-side installation with earlier versions.

More samples.

New Actions

ADO action

Ant action

Burn CD/DVD action

ClearCase action

Exit build/subroutine action

HTTP send/receive action (w/ SSL support)

IIS Virtual Dir action

InstallAnywhere.NET action

InstallAWARE action

Kill Process action

MSBuild action

NAnt action

NDoc action

Newsgroup Post custom action (w/ SSL support)

NSIS action

NUnit action

Play Sound action

PLink Tunnel action (secure SSH for networking actions)

Rename Files action

VSTS Team Build action

VSTS Team Foundation action

VSTS Team Test action

Enhancements

GUI App: 1) Enhancements to Insert Macro dialog; 2) Ctrl+A/Select All in the Macros pane selects all of single type of macro; 3) Find also matches on step action; 4) Improvements to populating of step fields for multiple selection for fields with varying values.

Script editor: 1) Auto-completion; 2) Improved syntax highlighting; 3) Customizable menus and toolbars; 4) Incremental search capability; 5) Block comment/uncomment; 6) Automatic font resizing (Ctrl+mouse wheel); 7) Automatic brace matching; 8) Syntax coloring for Python and Ruby.

User action enhancements: 1) Support registering actions by placing in application data path; 2) Support icons for images; 3) Array and name/value pair array property support; 4) Support password type fields, file filter, and browse type flags; 5) Support radio button fields; 6) Support declaring temporary macros created by action.

Object model enhancements: 1) Provide access to the last step and failed step objects from script; 2) Support retrieving all defined step property names via PropertyNames property; 3) Support storing objects in macro values.

Scripting enhancements: 1) Project-level step script events; 2) Add support for Ruby and Python scripting languages.

Builder component: 1) Process build rules from the parent down when nesting of build rules and include in build status enabled (the default); 2) Build reset deletes temporary macros if configured to delete temp macros after build.

Store breakpoints in user configuration file instead of in the .bld file.

Add 'is false' conditional build rule comparison.

Additional options for specifying application data path.

Improve Active Accessibility support.

Add support for Windows x64 editions.

Action Enhancements

All File actions: Support filenames longer than 260 chars (specified by prefixing the filename or path with \\?\).

COM+ Application/Component actions: 1) Support unlimited property grid; 2) Populate drop-down list with available properties.

Delphi Action: Add support for Borland Developer Studio 2006.

FTP Action: 1) Support incremental copying (only if file has changed) for servers that support it; 2) Support synchronize option (purge destination files that don't exist in source); 3) Support recursive copy; 4) Support secure SSL transfers for servers that support it.

Help & Manual Action: Add support for Help & Manual v4.

InstallAnywhere Action: Add support for v7.

JBuilder Action: Add support for JBuilder 2006.

Make VS.NET Action: 1) Add support for VS 2005 July/August 2005 Community Tech Preview, Beta 3, RC, and RTM; 2) Add support for upgrading solutions to VS2005; 3) Add option to exclude /project flag when building individual projects.

Replace in File action: 1) Add option to log file contents before/after replacements; 2) Add no replace (debug) option; 3) Provide drop-down for Encoding field and support MIME encoding names; 4) Support extended (comments and ignore whitespace) mode; 5) New option to log file before and after replacements; 6) Button menus providing assistance creating regular expressions; 7) Automatic detection of UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded text files.

Run Program action and Builder.RunProgramEx method: 1) Store exitcode of process in RUNPROGRAM_EXITCODE temporary macro when waiting for completion; 2) Store process ID of launched process in RUNPROGRAM_PROCESSID temporary macro when not waiting for completion; 3) Add Remote tab for running program on a remote computer via PsExec.

Write File action: 1) Provide drop-down for Encoding field and support MIME encoding names; 2) Automatic detection of UTF-8 and UTF-16 encoded text files.

Subroutine Call action: 1) Support unlimited parameters grid; 2) Push and pop parameter values to allow the same parameter name to be used in nested subroutines.

Send Mail Action: 1) Support secure SSL connections; 2) Add return message options for servers that support it.

SourceSafe Action: Add option to treat exitcode of 1 (returned by diff, dir, and status commands in some cases) as successful.

Surround SCM Action: Support v4.

Telnet Action: Support secure SSL connections.

VisBuildPro Project action: 1) Support unlimited macros grid; 2) Add Remote tab for building project on a remote computer via PsExec; 3) Add Options tab for specifying additional options; 4) Add checkbox for starting process in single-step debug mode.

ZIP/UNZIP Files actions: Support AES strong encryption.

Bug Fixes

FAIL/LASTSTEP_STATUS macro value was 0 when Run Program step failed referencing an undefined macro.

GUI App: 1) Support find and replace in array step properties; 2) Move down with collapsed children didn't always work.

Timeout long-running script expression evaluation instead of allowing application to hang.

Errors saving application configuration files could result in changes getting lost.

Prevent errors on startup if any of the application configuration files exist but are empty.

COM Register action: Call regsvr32 instead of LoadLibrary/Dll[Un]registerServer to workaround bug in .NET Framework 1.0/1.1 causing "Two different copies of MSCOREE.DLL have been loaded" error when building Make VS.NET step after COM Register step within a build.

CVS action: Add option to not treat revision starting with D as a date.

Send Mail action: Logging did not include QUIT command even though it was being sent.

Sign Code action: Common name field is now optional.

UNZIP Files action: Not all files extracted if DynaZip DLL > v5.0.0.3 installed.

ZIP Files action: Correct 'Zip file structure invalid' when updating .ZIP files.

Wise action: 1) Fix to pass variable values with extra space to Wise Installation System properly; 2) Pass Release flag correctly for WFWI.

Wrong default path for VSTUDIO_NET_DIR global macro.

REG_READ/READ_INI system macros: Double special VBP chars (%[]) so they are treated as literals.

Shouldn't be able to rename system macros.

Allow Python to work as the default script language.

Fix for proper reloading of global macros file stored on a network share.

Miscellaneous minor bug fixes.