VSoft Technologies Blogs

Big day today...

Mon, 21 May 2007 14:00:00 GMT

A day of releases today. FinalBuilder 5.5 is released today, and so is our newest product, FinalBuilder Server!

FinalBuilder 5.5 adds plenty of minor enhancements (including support for CodeGear Delphi 2007), bug fixes, etc, but the main thing is that the Professional version now gets a license of FinalBuilder Server thrown in! That's how we're justifying the jump from 5.0 to 5.5 :) We've already received a ton of very positive feedback on FinalBuilder Server, and I must say that it is quite nice to use.

In a nutshell, FinalBuilder Server is a web interface for centralizing and managing your builds. It relies on the FinalBuilder FBCMD.exe underneath as the build engine, but there are significant differences especially as far as logging is concerned. There is now a separate logging server, and FBCMD redirects all the logging to that server. This means that you can run more than one instance of the same project at the same time - plus of course FB Server needs access to the logs during and after the builds so that it can display the log output, statistics, build history etc.

FinalBuilder Server has been almost a year in development, and we've had quite a long beta period for it too. We have really been concentrating on ease-of-use and quality. Many features were put on the todo list instead of implemented straight away because the number one goal was to build a very solid base to work on. It's been running the FinalBuilder, FinalBuilder Server, and Automise builds for almost 5 months now, and we've had a fair number of customers use it during the beta - so, finally, today is the day for it's first release :)

More information on FinalBuilder Server here: http://www.finalbuilder.com/finalbuilder-server.aspx

Also - I forgot to blog about it before, but Automise 2 was released a couple of weeks ago. We added over 140 actions - there's some seriously cool stuff in there :) More info: http://www.finalbuilder.com/new-in-automise-2.aspx

HelpMaster Pro

Mon, 12 Mar 2007 14:00:00 GMT

PRD Software is a Canberra based company, just like VSoft, and they develop excellent help desk software. As we grow our needs for a good CRM solution is becoming a top priority... so HelpMaster Pro is looking like it'll do just what we need: handle support, sales, bug and issue tracking, and with a solid workflow system which pulls it all together.

I'm especially looking forward to the priority manager module, which can escalate jobs and notify both us and our customers :)

PNG Compression

Sun, 11 Mar 2007 14:00:00 GMT

After reading Getting the Most Out of PNG on Coding Horror... I thought I'd give it a go. That is, try out the PNGOUT tool that will re-compress PNG images files; but not for the images on the website, on the PNGs in our help file.

These are the results of running all of our 882 PNG Images in the help file through PNGOUT:
Before PNGOUT 13.2 MB
After PNGOUT 12.3 MB

(Unlike Jeff, I used a short project in Automise instead of a batch file...made it easy to pause the compression when I needed extra cpu cycles for other things :)

So that's a saving of almost 1MB. Not too shabby if you consider that this would directly translate to about 1MB shaved off the installer!

We're looking for a sales and marketing person

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 14:00:00 GMT

The job market (well, at least in Canberra and Australia) is generally pretty, ummm... tight. Good for people looking for jobs, but we're finding it hard to find a sales and marketing person. Please pass this on if you know anyone that might be interested - http://www.finalbuilder.com/jobs.aspx

Who cares if the build is broken?

Sun, 04 Feb 2007 14:00:00 GMT

"If the development team is serious about creating quality software, then the entire team should care about the build being broken. Even if the team does not use any sort of continuous integration practices, a broken build is never a good thing."

Read the whole blog post at Dim Blog As New ThoughtStream(me)

Automise 2 Public Beta

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:00:00 GMT

Automise 2 is now in public beta testing.

Here's the download (the beta download is at the bottom):
http://www.automise.com/automise-downloads.aspx

Now - here's the real news... for Automise 2 we've added literally hundreds of new actions. Some of the really cool new stuff is all the Windows Admin type actions, eg. Windows Update, Activate Windows, Active Directory admin, managing System Restore Points, NTFS Junction Points actions, changing file permissions and even Emptying the Recycle Bin!

Here the what's new:
What's new in Automise 2

We're really keen to hear about any issues or bugs with the new version - so please give the beta a whirl and let us know via email if you find a bug (or even if you've just testing some of the actions and they worked for you).

.t8

Xmas special - only a few days left!

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:00:00 GMT

If you're sitting on the fence, one side is batch files, xml files, or no build process at all, and the other side is a fully automated build process - well, now's the time to take the plunge :) And this applies to those network admins and sys admins also who want to automate some of the tedious and just plain boring stuff they have to do day-in-and-day-out!

We've got a special 20% off all FinalBuilder and Automise licenses purchased until the end of 2006!

See the home page for more details:
http://www.finalbuilder.com
http://www.automise.com

Flickr Emailr

Thu, 21 Dec 2006 14:00:00 GMT

I'm a big fan of flickr. Mainly because I'm using it as an offsite backup, and it's a great way to share photos with friends and family.

I've got a flickr pro account, which gives me up to 2GB of uploads per month. I've still got a big backlog of photos to upload (I've almost done all my 2006 photos, so only another 5 years worth of photos or so to go...).

Anyway, I've found the flickr uploadr to be very unreliable lately. And I'm even using one of their unofficial betas of the uploadr because it fixes some bug that I was experiencing. It's a pity they don't do a bit more work on the uploadr. For one, it could retry if there was an error or timeout! Normally I set it going just before I go to bed, and lately it's been dying after uploading only a few photos :( I've also tried the jUploader Java based tool and it didn't work at all for me!

So.... the solution to the problem?
Answer: An Automise project to scan for photos and send them to flickr via email (using the magic email address).

I've designed it so that it retries if there was an error sending the email, plus it will not upload a photo that it's already uploaded! The project is set to scan for all .jpg files in the chosen directory, and you can change it to do a recursive search by checking one option. It only sends one photo per email - which is much safer than trying to send multiple photos per email.

The Automise project can be renamed to .fbp5 or .fbp4 for use in FinalBuilder also.

Download from here:
http://www.automise.com/community-downloads.aspx?grm2id=34

Simplicity ain't so simple

Mon, 18 Dec 2006 14:00:00 GMT

I've been reading Nick Bradbury's series of posts about simplicity vs. features. Definitely worth a read, here's the links:

Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part I: Decide What to Hide
Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part II: Stop Showing Off
Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part III: Don't Add Features You Can't Support
Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part IV: The Blessed Curse of Power Users
Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part V: Combine Features
Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part VI: Simple = Secure
Simplicity Ain't So Simple, Part VII: Know When to Stop

So... you've just read all of them I hope? Good. Here's some of my comments in relation to FinalBuilder and Automise :)

Firstly, I reckon it's a great series of posts - definitely some great advice in there to stop featuritis creeping in... which bring me to FinalBuilder and Automise... FB and AT have so many features that we loose track of them ourselves. I'm not joking either. And I don't know whether we should be ashamed or proud... (probably ashamed after reading that above post). Sometimes a user will ask "can I do X?" and we have to ask around if anyone knows if we've implemented that or not... But, more features can make a wider audience of users satisfied.

It's a fine line of course. You need to put features in to keep people happy, but you must present them so they don't get in the way during day-to-day use. It's also interesting to note that FinalBuilder has gone through a long growing phase of about 6 years with a huge amount of features added each release. We take a lot of suggestions (and opinions) from our users, and will generally add a new feature or option as opposed to not adding it in for the sake of simplicity. But, we tend to be quite careful of where we add the option, and to make it obvious from the icon or wording or placement of what the option is for. Plus we think hard about the default behaviour.

One interesting example that we added in for FinalBuilder 4 is a Build Summary screen. It's implemented as a tab which changes the main view from the "Design and Debugging" of your project into a view designed to show overall progress. It was a major new feature for FB4, and it has some advantages over the old way of watching a build. But, we knew a lot of existing customers would hate it. The default behaviour is that the IDE will automatically switch to the Build Summary screen when a build starts.

These are the options we added to make everyone happy:

A set of radio buttons (only one option can be chosen, top one is the default):

Always show build summary (Run, Run from Current, Run Selected, etc)
Only show build summary on Run
Show Build Summary when build completes
Never show build summary

And some checkboxes (either, both or none can be turned on):

Always show build summary if auto build
Show build summary on startup

So, quite a lot of options, and you have to access them via the Tools menu | Options | FinalBuilder category | General IDE Options | Runtime Options tab. Pretty hidden away - maybe we'll get a tick for that :) But self explanatory - it's unlikely you need to read the help file to understand what those options are going to do.

Another interesting graph I came across a few weeks ago is the Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak graph. Somebody mentioned that they thought FinalBuilder was on the top - thanks for that! But, the perception of a product is different for every person. FinalBuilder is the type of product where there will *always* be users who need more (eg. please support completely unknown product X - our forums are full of people asking for new features EVERY DAY), whereas other people get lost in the sea of configuration options.

If I was to choose an application with too few options or too many, I reckon I'd choose the one with too many (most of the time)!

Chistmas special for FinalBuilder and Automise!

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 14:00:00 GMT

If you're sitting on the fence, one side is batch files, xml files, or no build process at all, and the other side is a fully automated build process - well, now's the time to take the plunge :) And this applies to those network admins and sys admins also who want to automate some of the tedious and just plain boring stuff they have to do day-in-and-day-out!

We've got a special 20% off all FinalBuilder and Automise licenses purchased from today until the end of 2006!

See the home page for more details:
http://www.finalbuilder.com
http://www.automise.com

Automise 1.5

Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:00:00 GMT

We've just released a minor update to Automise, so it's now at version 1.5

There a lot of bug fixes, enhancements, and a few new features. Free update to all existing Automise customers!

See What's New. Download Automise 1.5 Here.

A One Day Special

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Background

A while ago, I read a message on one of the ASP (Association of Shareware Professionals) private newsgroups announcing a new "Special of the Day" type website. It was to be called Bits du Jour - BDJ for short. BDJ would work along similar lines to Woot!, but would only feature software products. I thought “Wow, great idea... that's a fantastic way to promote a software product.”

Of course, the software vendor has to discount the product and provide a cut for BDJ, so the total revenue for each license would be much smaller than usual, but there is potential to reach a new crowd of people. It provides a way to promote the product at a lower price point, as a loss leader.

The Wait

I contacted Ellen Craw from BDJ and we exchanged a few emails. That was back in March 2006, and Automise 1.0 was still a month away from release. When you release a brand new product, how do you get the word out? Bits du Jour sounded like a great way to make a splash and build up a user base.

Automise retails for $195 US, and Ellen suggested that products priced over $20 don't sell so well on BDJ. It's all about impulse buys, and it sounds like twenty bucks is about the threshold. At the time we thought that $20 was just too cheap for a $200 product… no sale!

Time passed. Automise generated some sales and some interest, including some positive reviews, but we still didn’t have the widespread market penetration that we wanted.

So, in early November 2006, I thought we'd approach BDJ again. 90% discount off any product is sure to generate a lot of new sales. We also figured that BDJ should have gained in popularity since it's launch earlier in the year, and there should be a reasonable number of people now subscribed to it's RSS feeds and emails.

[As a side note, I bought Bar Genie through BDJ a few months back... it was a good deal and a nice reference for mixing cocktails!]

Preparation

We set a date - Wednesday 29th November 2006. Nothing special about it, but we chose a day in the middle of the week so that it wouldn’t overlap with a weekend or public holiday in any timezone.

Recently, Paul has done a considerable amount of work on our website store. This made it easy for us to set up a new coupon code that would last 24 hours. A few simple tests and we were ready.

Ellen drafted the BDJ article on Automise, and she also ran through the whole process to verify that everything held together.

D-Day

The special went live at midnight in the US (Central Standard Time). It was 5 in the afternoon here. I checked the BDJ site and Automise was on the home page. 90% discount was highlighted with red stars on either side - there's no question that this was a big discount. :)

I sent out some emails to some of our existing customers, users that we maintain a good relationship with. The email notified them of the special on BDJ for Automise, and encouraged them to spread the news. :)

The first sale came through 17 minutes after the special went live. Bloody Great! :)

The next sale came in at 22 minutes past, then another at 31, and another at 38. “Wow... this is awesome.” In the first hour we made seven sales. Seven new customers. Excellent!

Then it went a bit quiet. Over the next six or seven hours there were between about two and six sales an hour. Still great though, and by this time it was late evening in Australia.

Now, I want to give you some background on our order process. To place an order for Automise or FinalBuilder, you need to be a registered user on our website. New registrations need to have their email addresses confirmed (via a link in an email.) After you’re registered, you can add items to your shopping cart and go through the checkout process. During checkout, there is a coupon field. This is where the BitsDuJour coupon needed to be added in order to grant the 90% discount.

After checkout, our store redirects to the WorldPay payment gateway. WorldPay handles all of the credit card processing. We receive a Web Services callback with the status of the order, and send an automated email to the customer. The order then goes into a “pending” state so that we can review the order (eg. to check for fraud) and then we click a button to process it. FinalBuilder and Automise aren't high turnover products, so this process works great and we catch 99.9% of fraud before the license key is sent out.

Anyhow...I woke up the next morning and checked the pending orders. “Wow...” over 80 orders had come in during the night! Now someone had to process them. And guess what, that someone was me… It was a case of mixed emotions: heaps of sales, but a boring job manually checking and processing each one!

Sales continued to come in for the rest of the day. All up, the final count was 226 sales. We were all stoked, and a bit tired too. The sale had generated quite a bit of extra support work, and also there were also some bugs that showed up in the order process.

I emailed Ellen to let her know how we went, and got the following reply:

"That's GREAT - you just broke all my records. Thank YOU!"

Also, traffic on the BDJ site was about 40% higher than usual. We tried to promote the special as much as we could. Some fairly high profile bloggers mentioned the deal, eg. Roy Osherove (ISerializable) and Troy Magennis (LINQed IN). I'm sure a lot of traffic came to the site because of this.

Here's a graph of our sales volume over the 24 hour period:

And here's our daily website traffic. Because of our timezone the traffic is spread over both the Wednesday and Thursday. There's a pretty obvious spike!

So, there you have it. Overall it's been a great opportunity to feature Automise on Bits du Jour. If you're thinking about featuring your product on BDJ, and the software has a fairly general audience, then I reckon you should go for it! Thanks heaps to Ellen and Bits du Jour, the people who helped us promote the special, and especially to all our new customers. :)

Problems

Over the course of the sale, we experience a few minor problems that we hadn’t noticed before.

1. One of the main problems was that the store would allow you to enter the coupon code (and validate it) with an extra space character "BitsDuJour ". But then when the Process Order button was pressed, the coupon would be rejected. Many people reported that they couldn't get the coupon code to work, and it wasn't until about 18 hours into the special that we figured out why and fixed the bug. We lost sales because of this - people emailed us and told us so.

2. Another weird problem was that some people (normally from Germany) had problems with the store redirected to WorldPay. This was caused by the regional settings using a comma in the total amount instead of a decimal point. We fixed the bug but also had to process some of these orders manually before we had figured out the reason why.

3. We accidentally had heaps of references to FinalBuilder in the automated emails sent out for the store. This was more of an embarrassment than a problem, and we fixed it during the day as well.

What we've learnt

1. Bits du Jour was great idea. The customer base for Automise has grown, and there are a lot of happy people. The price was low enough to create impulse purchases, and will hopefully act as a loss leader to make Automise better known.

2. There were some bugs in the store that we should have known about. More testing required!

3. The order process is too difficult. A lot of people got a bit peeved at the entire process, and I'm sure some people gave up. There was a short thread on the Joel on Software forums with some criticism of the process:

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.421152.9

4. Promotion is very important. See below for mentions of the Automise special which appeared on various blogs. I posted the deal on a couple of mailing lists as well. This made a huge difference.

Links from the Blogosphere, and other coverage of the BDJ Automise special

http://wesnerm.blogs.com/net_undocumented/2006/11/components.html

"Coincidentally, his post today is offering Automise for $19 (down from $199) for 24 hours in Bits du Jour, a site, much like Woot, offering new discounted software daily."

http://aspiring-technology.com/blogs/troym/archive/2006/11/29/63.aspx

"Todays deal caught my eye - its 90% off. Automise - a general purpose automation tool (think GUI based scripting and debugging)."

http://weblogs.asp.net/rosherove/archive/2006/11/28/cool-promotion-automise-for-20-for-24h-window.aspx

"A little bird tells me that in a few hours you'll be able to get Automise (that's the system admin's version of FinalBuilder - my favorite build automation tool) over here for a 90% discount - less than $20 instead of $195 for a 24 hour window."

http://mortonfox.livejournal.com/465710.html

"Got a copy of Automise at a 90% discount, thanks to Bits du Jour. When I have more time, I'll dig deeper into the software to see if it's really that much better than AutoHotkey. I have Bits du Jour in my del.icio.us bookmarks, but I'd forgotten all about it until IanH. mentioned the deal on the Joel on Software discussion forum."

http://midspot.wordpress.com/2006/11/29/automise-at-a-great-deal/

"Automise does it for you. I downloaded the trial last night and it is pretty slick and powerful. Try it for free, and today only you can get a huge discount on the product."

Some other user comments

"Holy discount, Batman! I almost feel duty bound to buy this 'cos of the 90% off! Nice job BDJ and Automise!"

"Thank you very much for this generous rebate!"

"Very cool tool!
I have tested many automation tools and Automise is one of the best.
When I saw this promotion this morning I just bought it - thank you!"

"I've heard good things about it, and at 90% off, you can't really go wrong, can you?"

Automise on Bits du Jour

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 14:00:00 GMT

If you're thinking about buying Automise, or you need an automation tool for Windows... today is your lucky day!

Yep, Automise is being featured on Bits du Jour today (Wednesday 29th November 2006).

http://www.bitsdujour.com/

MVP offers!

Tue, 21 Nov 2006 14:00:00 GMT

If you're an MVP (Microsoft Valued Professionals), please contact me directly (tate at finalbuilder dot com, or tate at automise dot com) for a very special offer :)

Finally there is a law and suitable punishment for breaking the build!

Fri, 17 Nov 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Good on you Plip!

Who Broke the Build?

David Hayden is now a self confessed Build Junkie :)

Thu, 16 Nov 2006 14:00:00 GMT

"I am officially a build junkie. I love the automation. I love how quickly I can check-in new code and have the build process get me a fresh, working copy of everything in seconds. Yes, seconds. FinalBuilder makes it easy - really easy."

From: FinalBuilder - Leverage the Software Delivery / Automated Build Process in .NET, blog post by David Hayden.

FinalBuilder 5 reviewed at Larkware

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Mike Gunderloy over at Larkware has just reviewed FinalBuilder 5! :)

Here's a couple of quotes:

"FinalBuilder, which just released its fifth major version, offers a full-featured IDE for managing complex software build and deployment processes."

"I've been using FinalBuilder myself for several years now, and I'm quite happy with it. VSoft continues to add new features, while preserving the ease of use that attracted me to the product in the first place. If visual tools appeal to you more than XML ones, and you need a powerful build and management utility, you ought to check it out for yourself."

Thanks Mike!

A dead GUID

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Yeah, we all know the jokes about killing GUIDs (ie. creating them for no reason), and I just happened to need another GUID a few minutes ago, so I went and generated one a new one, but it was already DEAD... check it out:

{3B795CB4-DEAD-4064-B5E1-6174B7414563}

Windows Powershell

Tue, 31 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Was just reading Arno Nel's blog, and he reminded me about Windows Powershell.

All of us here had a look at Powershell a few weeks back and were really impressed - and we're going to be investigating adding support into FinalBuilder and Automise for Powershell soonish hopefully :)

Here's a few links:

Daily Grind 1000

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Congratulations to Mike Gunderloy over at Larkware... he's up to the 1000th Daily Grind - an essential read every morning to get the important news and other stuff going on in the Windows and .NET development world.

Impressive mate, keep it up!

FinalBuilder 5 is out!

Mon, 23 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

It's been almost a year in the making, but today is the day - FinalBuilder 5 is released (download trial).

We've now got over 600 actions (see what's new), which is a pretty decent improvement on the 440 in FinalBuilder 4.
There's also heaps of really cool new stuff in the IDE.
We've even made the logo a nice blue with beveled edges :) [geez, the old logo sucked!]
Prices remain the same too.

FinalBuilder 5 Release Candidate 2

Fri, 20 Oct 2006 05:00:00 GMT

http://www.finalbuilder.com/downloads/finalbuilder/500/FB500_44.exe
[it seems that links I post on my blog get screwed up in the rss feed... sorry... :( ]

This is the last build before release...

But seriously, please report any bugs ASAP to support if you can afford a little time to give it a test, thanks!

.t8

New in FinalBuilder 5 - more actions now support FileSets

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 05:00:00 GMT

FileSets are cool. We introduced them in FinalBuilder 4 but in FinalBuilder 5 we've made them natively supported by more actions, plus some other brand new actions also natively support FileSets.

So, firstly, just a quick lesson on FileSets:

A FileSet is a collection of files. The collection of files is defined by using the "FileSet Define" action, where you specify the base directory and then various selections and exclusions to get exactly which files you want. For example, you might include *.txt and *.pdf files modified after yesterday, but exclude files that have "temp" in their name. The Include Patterns, Exclude Patterns and Filters in the FileSet Define action are really quite powerful.
Some of the other FileSet actions are: FileSet Delete Files (deletes all physical files listed in the FileSet), FileSet Copy/Move (copy of move the files to another location), FileSet log files (record what files are in the FileSet in the FinalBuilder log). There's a few more too, but you get the idea.

And here's the what's new bit in FinalBuilder 5 - we've extended the following actions to natively support FileSets: Burn CD/DVD, Create ISO File, FTP Upload, and File Exists.
Other new actions in FinalBuilder 5 that support FileSets: Spell Checking, Image Manipulation, and JPEG Lossless Rotate.

I reckon the best news is for people using the Burn CD/DVD and Create ISO actions, as the selection dialog for files is not the best in the world, and nowhere near as flexible as using FileSets. Plus we've had plenty of requests for the FTP Upload action to support FileSets too.

Here's a couple of screenshots showing how to define a FileSet and using it in the Burn CD/DVD action:

Defining the FileSet - give it a name and a base directory

Include *.cs and *.sln files (recursive too)

Don't include any files that have "TEMP" in their name

Only get files that have been modified after 1st October 2006, and they're not System or Hidden files (why source files would be hidden or system I don't know.... but this is just an example :)

Now the Burn CD/DVD action. Select the burner to use and give the disc a name.

And then select the FileSet just created as the source of the files. Too easy!

New in FinalBuilder 5 - Image Manipulation Actions

Sun, 15 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

We've added two actions to FinalBuilder 5 to manipulate image files (ie. JPEG, GIF, etc):

Image Manipulation
JPEG Lossless Transform

So, what can these do?

Well, firstly, JPEG Lossless Transform can be used to rotate, flip, transpose, mirror, or transverse transpose a JPEG image without loss of any information. Normally, if you rotate a JPEG it has to be recompressed, and this causes information loss. So this action can do these basic operations without recompressing the JPEG. But what's cooler is that it can perform a rotation if required automatically based on Exif information stored in the JPEG.

Let me explain further - most digital cameras store certain information about the photo inside the JPEG file (called Exif). This information can be the size of the photo, exposure time, if the flash was on or not, the make/model of the camera, etc. Some cameras also detect the orientation of the camera when the photo was taken, and also record this information. This is great when taking portrait shots as the photos can be automatically rotated using this orientation information in the Exif to rotate the photo so that it appears correctly on your monitor. I know most Canon and Nikon cameras store the orientation, but not sure about others. So, basically, you could use FinalBuilder to scan your entire hard disk and automatically rotate any photos that need rotating!

The other action is the Image Manipulation. Here are some of the things it can do:

Convert image to: BMP, JPEG, GIF, PDF, TIFF, and PNG
Rotate Image
Mirror Image
Flip Image
Resize (to specific pixels, or percentage, and with choice of resize algorithm)

And you can combine functions - for example you can resize an image to a thumbnail of 100x75 and then convert to PNG. Both the Image Manipulation and JPEG Lossless Transform actions also accept a FileSet, so you can easily do bulk operations.

So, a couple of practical examples - just say you want to convert all your .bmp screenshots in your help file to .png, or create thumbnails sized images for your screenshots on your website - very easy with these new actions. And I already use the auto rotate using Exif information to automatically rotate my own photos :)

Some screenshots of the Image Manipulation action:

FinalBuilder 5 - Stack and Queue Actions

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

For FinalBuilder 5 we've added a new set of actions for storing and retrieving data in stacks and queues. These actions allow you to build up a list of items and then access them them in either a first in, first out (Queue) or first in, last out (Stack) manner. Create a new Stack or Queue using the Define action, and then to add items, use the Push or Insert actions. To use the items in the list, either use the Pop action to access them one at a time, or use the Iterator to perform the same action on each item until the list is empty. The new actions are:

Stack/Queue define - define a stack or a queue
Stack/Queue Log Items - write to the log all items
Stack/Queue Push Items - add a new item or set of items to the list
Stack/Queue Pop - get an item from the top
Stack/Queue Peek - get an item without removing it
Stack/Queue get Count - get the count of how many items are in the list
Stack/Queue Insert Item - add an item in a particular location in the list
Stack/Queue is Empty - check if list is empty or not
Stack/Queue Clear - remove all items from the list
Stack/Queue Iterator - run child actions for each item in the list

These actions are interesting because it opens up interesting possibilities with recursion and processing lists of data. For example, you may have some process at the start of your build to build up a list, lets say a list of filenames, and maybe this list comes from calling an external process like your version control system. Then you might want to run a set of actions for each of those files, but it's possible that while processing a file you might need to add extra files onto the list. So, you might end up with the following:

Define Stack
Push Items on Stack (from external process)
Is Stack Empty (set variable IsEmpty)
While Action (controlled by IsEmpty)
   Pop Stack (into varible CurrentFile)
   Do some processing on the CurrentFile
   maybe push more items on the stack
   Is Stack Empty (set variable IsEmpty)
End While

This "PsudoActionCode" shows that you can control a loop by the amount of data you need to process which may change during the course of processing the data. We haven't found a use for it yet in our build process, but we have had customers ask for these types of data structures. I'd be very interested in seeing how these actions are used in a real build process.

New in FinalBuilder 5 - Configure Packages Wizard

Mon, 09 Oct 2006 05:00:00 GMT

FinalBuilder has a plugin architecture, and almost all actions in FinalBuilder are loaded via a plugin (we call them Action Packages, or just Packages). Each package contains one or more related actions. For example, the FB50PDF package contains the "PDF Merge Files", "Convert to PDF", "PDF Insert Text" and "Convert PDF" actions. All up there is 105 packages loaded by default when FinalBuilder starts. That's quite a lot of packages!

Now having a lot of packages does slow the startup time for FinalBuilder. Each package takes around 0.02 of a second to load, so without any packages the IDE would start about 2 seconds quicker. On my machine FinalBuilder 5 takes about 4 seconds to load, so half of that are the plugins loading. It's not a drastic slowdown, but quicker is better, so the less plugins you need to load the better :)

The other disadvantage with so many packages, is that there's sooooo many actions to choose from in the IDE. All up there's just over 600 actions. But, I'd say that most people would only use a very small percentage of them. For example, if you use Microsoft TeamFoundation version control, you don't need the Perforce actions, Subversion actions, AccuRev, MKS, Surround, ClearCase, TeamCoherence, etc, etc.

So, we've introduced a new wizard that runs the first time you start FinalBuilder 5 (and it's in the Tools menu). The Configure Wizard is designed to make it easy for you to turn off packages that you'll never need. They're still installed, and can be easily turned on if you need them later, but it's a good way to encouraging people to turn off some packages.

The Configure Wizard contains the following page: Version Control Systems, Compilers, Help Compilers, Installers, Licensing Tools, and Other Packages. It also has a page which allows you to configure the default script language, the maximum number of builds to store in the log file, and the key bindings (either Microsoft Style, or Borland Style).

FinalBuilder 5 in now in beta testing. Read the Press Release. See What's New in FB5.

FinalBuilder 5 Release Candidate 1

Sun, 08 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

We're getting close now :)

http://www.finalbuilder.com/downloads/finalbuilder/500/FB500_37.exe

Please email support at finalbuilder dot com if you find a bug/issue or would like to make any comments.

USB Hamster Wheel

Thu, 05 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

I can't wait until I can buy one of these (I'm not sure if that's sarcasm or the truth...)

http://www.crazyaboutgadgets.com/related.asp?product_extra=USB%20Hamster%20Wheel

It's designed to run whenever you type... but I'm sure that could be changed! How cool would it be if the hamster would run whenever we have a FinalBuilder build going? :)

FinalBuilder 5 - Build Statistics

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Here's one of my favourite new features of FinalBuilder 5:

The Build Stats tab gives you a whole bunch of ways to graphically view (and print and export) the historical statistics of your build project. All the graphs here are actually our FinalBuilder 5 build machine. There's quite a downward trend in the amount of builds per day thankfully, and we've only had two days without a failed build for some reason or another...

Here's some other cool graphs you can get out of the build stats:

The above graph shows that you can turn on the legend if you want, view either successful or failed or both, and turn off the 3D view also. Thankfully there's no builds done on Saturday or Sunday! And if you don't want the build to fail, try not to do it on a Thursday ;)

Also a Success Ratio pie chart can display at a glance the ratio of successful to failed builds of the selected date range.
We also do all our builds during business hours.

One important change we had to make for FinalBuilder 5 to enable this, was that we need to maintain a record of all historic builds in the log file. The detailed log information is deleted the same way as in FB4 (ie. a user configurable number of the most recent detailed logs are kept, older ones are deleted), but an extra table in the database has a permanent record of all past builds.

(please email us if you would like to participate in the FinalBuilder 5 beta)

What we drink...

Thu, 28 Sep 2006 14:00:00 GMT

A couple of weeks ago we got a small bar fridge for the office... and it's stocked with a variety of drinks (non-alcoholic unfortunately...). And what do you do with empties before you recycle them? Well, you build a pyramid, right?

I'm responsible for the Lemonade and some of the Solo
Vincent drinks Solo and some Coke
Angus goes for Coke and sometimes Solo
And Paul drinks Diet Coke

Anyway, it's time to recycle now, and begin the rebuild ;)

Squidoo

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 14:00:00 GMT

I'm an avid reader of Seth Godin's blog. I don't hang on every word he says, but it's nice to read his opinions, comments and advice.

One of his latest blog entries, was "The 8 Free Things Every Site Should Do", which includes building a Lens on Squidoo. Squidoo is Seth's fairly new site - it's sort-of like a more commercially oriented wikipedia where a "lens master" can write about their subject of passion.

So, that's what I did - here's the FinalBuilder Lens.

FinalBuilder 5 feature list

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:00:00 GMT

FinalBuilder 5 beta - yep, it's official now.

Here's what's new:
http://www.finalbuilder.com/new-in-finalbuilder-5.aspx

Josh McFarlane and Implementing the Joel Test

Mon, 25 Sep 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Interesting story by Josh McFarlane who describes the way he's taken his company from a score of 1 out of 12 on the Joel Test, to about 7 or 8 and still working on it.

But, what really caught my interest was that it sounds like he's fully taking advantage of the ASync actions in FinalBuilder which lets you run multiple steps in parallel:

"Asynchronous building: My development machine has 2 dual core processors. Invoking one build command only uses 1 of the 4 logical CPUs. With asynchronous tasks, I can run up to 4 builds at once, shortening our build time."

"Overall, I'm happy with FinalBuilder. The only complaint I have about it is that I have not been able to create "local" action list variables, but thats more than likely my fault for not looking hard enough rather."

Thanks Josh. And yes, you can create ActionList variables - have a look in the project menu for "Action List Parameters..."

FinalBuilder 5 in beta

Sun, 24 Sep 2006 14:00:00 GMT

FinalBuilder 5 has just gone into beta testing. There a heap of cool new features and plenty of new actions - but more on that when we make an official announcement :)

If you would like to help test the new version, please send us an email at support [at] finalbuilder dot com.

We're aiming to release FinalBuilder 5 at around the end of October, but all depends on how the beta goes... (ie. we won't release it if it's not ready). This means FB5 will be almost exactly a year after FB4 was released, which seems about the right sort of time between major releases. I know some will complain, but others will be very happy (especially those who have Software Assurance).

Hopefully I'll get a bit of time to start blogging about some of the new features in FB5 - so stay tuned!

FinalBuilder Ratings

Wed, 20 Sep 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Here's the next installment of some of the statistics we got from the customer survey.

There you have it. We're very happy with the rating people have given us, and it's an improvement on last year. And obviously our customers are pretty happy with FinalBuilder - that's the main thing! The website rating has improved a lot over last years results, so the choice to go with DotNetNuke has been a good one (plus there is now more content, like articles and the Community Downloads section).

So, where to from here?

Well, the worst of the ratings was the Help files and other Documentation. This has always been the worst part of FinalBuilder (and we have always freely admitted this), mainly because the documentation is written by us (the programmers) and not dedicated technical writers. I am pleased to say though, that we are taking the documentation a lot more seriously now. For example, we have recently generated a report on which actions don't have a quick help file or a help topic and after a few weeks work every action now has a help topic and a quick help file. Plus we're more conscious of writing better quality help and we make sure that an action is properly documented before it's released to the public.

Other than that, we obviously want more dark green (excellent) than light green (good and average) - it's hard work making people happy with a product, but that's our ultimate goal. FinalBuilder certainly isn't one of those products that you write and let it rot while a new product is being developed. Our todo list seems to get longer every day instead of shorter. The next major version is in the pipeline with some very cool new features. Stay tuned :)

Go Karting!

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Go Karting?

What's that got to do with FinalBuilder, Automise, programming, Version Control Systems, Microsoft, or any of the other products and stuff I normally talk about? Well, not much, but a little. Let me explain.

We live in Canberra. Well, more correctly, the VSoft Technologies office is in Canberra. I actually live in Queanbeyan which is very close to Canberra; commuting takes about 15mins from home to work. But anyway, Canberra is a fairly small city and there really aren't many ISV's based in Canberra, mainly because most developers here work for Government departments because it's the capital of Australia.

One of the other ISV's in Canberra is PRD Software. Great bunch of guys. And they make a bloody good Help Desk product - HelpMaster Pro. We know them because they're FinalBuilder customers [see the connection now?]

So, today, we all knocked off early and headed out to one of the local Go-Kart tracks.

It was a race: PRD vs. VSoft, Delphi vs. VB, Kart with no brakes vs. Kart with no grip.

Who knows who won. But it didn't matter - we all had such a great time and there weren't too many "racing incidents" :)

Anyway, great way to end a hard working week and get to know some local developers. Thanks Rod and gang - looking forward to next time! Paintball eh? hmmm.....

Vista Screenshots

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 14:00:00 GMT

We finally got Vista up and running last week. I had a play with Vista way back at PDC '05, but wanted to wait for at least an RC build (Release Candidate) before bothering to muck about and get it running. The Vista build I installed was "pre-RC1". These guys certainly have imagination ;)

Anyway, installing it went find after convincing Vista that it could read the PATA 40GB HDD. It's weird, because the installer couldn't see it even after doing a Shift-F10 to a command prompt and then use DISKPART to partition it (the prompt could see the C: drive, but not the installer). I gave up at this point but Angus used the WindowsXP installer disk to re-format the drive and then Vista could see it.

It was during this process that I came across the single best new feature of Vista - you can now load 3rd party drivers during install using not just a floppy disk, but also CDs and USB drives! About bloody time too...

So, obviously the reason for installing Vista was to see if FinalBuilder runs OK. And I'm very happy to report it does, but with one small exception. FinalBuilder hosts the .NET CLR, and with Vista you get v3 of the CLR which for some reason doesn't yet work with FB (we're looking into it now, especially since the RC of .NET v3 is now available for download). Luckily all you need to do is tell FB to host the v2 of the CLR and it all works perfectly!

Here's a couple of screenshots:

Eric Sink on how to get people talking about your product

Thu, 24 Aug 2006 14:00:00 GMT

[here's my small comment on Eric Sink's latest post]

Eric - as always, a great post :)

Yes, FinalBuilder is written in Delphi (well, most if it, some is now in C# and JScript...), and up until a couple of years ago we certainly had been concentrating on marketing to the Delphi crowd. Which is where the TeamCoherence users come from, obviously.

I would like to make the point that in the last few years we've been spreading our wings so-to-speak and are now making most of our sales to the Microsoft development mob (and, yes, there certainly are a lot of them!). We've been adding features to the product that appeal to this different group, and we have also spent money marketing to them. So, in a sense, it's good to start small, capture a niche, and then when you out grow it, move up to a bigger group of people when you have the resources, features, respect, and experience to help you succeed in that new marketplace.

Another case study

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 14:00:00 GMT

The latest case study is an excellent example of how FinalBuilder can really reduce the workload of doing builds - "FinalBuilder reduces our build time for a product line from around 3 days to less than 3 hours." Impressive!

Boian Mitov (of Mitov Software) develops Visual C++ libraries, and Delphi, C++ Builder and .NET component packages for very fast Digital Signal Processing (DSP): "As part of our process we perform 138 package builds, 322 Delphi and C++ Builder demo projects, 3 Visual C++ libraries, 1 Delphi, 1 C++ Builder and 2 Visual C++ DLLs, 1 .NET library, and 138 Visual C++ examples, 15 Installs, 18 Help files." Imagine doing all that by hand!

Read the full case study here.

Downloading and email addresses

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:00:00 GMT

As an ISV, you have to decide how people will evaluate your product before they make a purchasing decision.

Can they directly download it from your website?
Do they have to sign up and get sent a url and/or a license key?
Do they have to contact sales and someone will give you a call on the 'phone before you can get your hands on the trial (if at all)?

Ever since FinalBuilder was released, it was a direct download. Anyone can download it, and can do so completely anonymously. This has a few advantages, but the main one is that it doesn't p*ss anyone off - it's a single click to download. Easy and simple!

But, what happens if we want to ask these people how they went on the trial? Answer - you can't. As is the case with all shareware, trialware, demoware, etc, you get a huge amount of downloads, and you get a fairly small conversion rate. We don't track this very accurately, but it's in the order of 5% probably. That means for every 100 downloads, we get about 5 sales. I'd say it's a pretty good conversion rate, but why didn't the other 95% of people buy? Maybe they bought a competing product, maybe they found a bug, maybe they downloaded FinalBuilder just to take a look? The point is, we just don't know.

So, obviously the answer is to ask people for their contact details before they download. That way you can email them or call them and ask them how they go with the trial. Put your hand up if you would rather not give your email address just so you can download a trial of a piece of software. Yep, I'm sure there's a significant percentage of people who would not download in this case - so maybe the answer isn't so simple. It's a big risk to change from one model (ie. direct downloads) to another (ie. contact details before download), and that's certainly not a risk we're prepared to take. But we would still like to be able to contact people to ask them how they went.

So - our answer has been to make it optional. That is, if you don't want to give us your details, don't, but if you don't mind us contacting you then you can provide your email address. I implemented this change on our website yesterday, so no real results yet, but so far it's been about 50/50. 50% are happy to give their email address, and the other 50% take the direct download link. Now - granted, the direct download link is not exactly obvious, but it's not hidden and hard to find. We're not in the business of spamming people, but we will send people an email at the end of their trial asking for their thoughts; hopefully we might get some useful information.

We're going to monitor this over the next couple of weeks to see how it goes.

What are your thoughts on this issue?

Version Control Systems... again.

Sun, 13 Aug 2006 14:00:00 GMT

This is now becoming an anuual event. We did a quick customer survey a couple of weeks ago, and not breaking tradition, we again asked what Version Control Systems people are using. It's a very important question for us because it's such an integral part of the build process. If FinalBuilder doesn't natively support the VCS you use, then it's possible, but harder, to use FinalBuilder to do your builds.

Here's the graph:

So, out of all that the only VCS's we currently don't have native support for are MKS SourceIntegrity, Code Coop, Continuus, and Accurev. We're currently in the process of adding MKS SourceIntegrity and Accurev actions.

What's interesting about this graph is that it's showing some trends over the past year and a bit. Microsoft TeamSystem is really jumping in popularity, as is Subversion. The popularity of SourceSafe is dropping off, but not as fast as I would have thought.

It's suprising to see less usage of JediVCS/FreeVCS - I wonder what these people are using now? And it's also good to see that the percentage of people using no version control system has halved since last year.

Case Studies

Tue, 08 Aug 2006 14:00:00 GMT

One thing has really been missing from our website - Case Studies on FinalBuilder.

Case Studies (I reckon) can really help sell a product to some people. I personally don't normally bother reading them, but they can be a great thing to dump on a manager's desk and say "Read this... look how benefitial this product was for them - that's why we need it too!"

So, now we have some case studies for FinalBuilder - and they were pretty easy to get as we had plenty of customers who were more than happy to write them (and a big thanks to those people!).

Here's the first four, a couple more are in the works and will be ready in a couple of weeks time.

Case Study: Codix and FinalBuilder [as an article] [download the pdf]
Case Study: TOWER Software and FinalBuilder [as an article] [download the pdf]
Case Study: Alter Ego Services and FinalBuilder [as an article] [download the pdf]
Case Study: Platespin and FinalBuilder [as an article] [download the pdf]

ps. long time no blog... yeah, yeah, I know...

Regulazy

Sun, 09 Jul 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Regulazy is a visual Regular Expression builder - looks like Roy has been busy :)

"Regulazy is an attempt to build a small "Expert System" for creating .NET Regular Expressions.

It lets the user create an expression based on a real life example of text they would like to parse.

As the user interacts with Regulazy using the mouse, Regulazy offers the user possible expressions that would fit the currently selected text. As the user selects "rules" to apply on various parts of the text,

a regular expression is built automatically in the lower application pane."

Looks very cool to me!

5 days left

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 05:00:00 GMT

5 days left for special Automise introductory offer... never to be repeated... it's a bargain - go get it now! :)

sudoWn - superuser do for Windows

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 14:00:00 GMT

"The sudoWn project can execute individual programs (or even a whole Windows shell) with temporary Administrator privileges under your user profile."

The difference between sudoWn and "Run As..." is that sudoWn launches programs under your account profile - not an Admin account. This means that the launched programs see your Documents & Settings folders, Desktop, Start menu, etc. sudoWn also caches the password so you don't have to keep entering it as you would with Run As...

So, pretty cool tool [and it's GPL]... more info at: http://sudown.mine.nu/

Coupon Codes

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Eric Sink() has just concluded his Coupon Code experiment for Vault. The results are very interesting, and well worth a read.

We are doing something a little similar - there is currently a huge discount as a special introductory offer for Automise - which we will never repeat. The coupon code is not well hidden, and the promotion ends in a couple of weeks.

Programmer or Serial Killer

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Take this quiz to see if you can tell which ones are Serial Killers, and which are Programming Language inventors...

http://www.malevole.com/mv/misc/killerquiz/

I didn't do so well - got 5/10. Scary!

The other weird thing was that one of the people reminded me of one of my University lecturers, although he'd be closer to a programming language inventor than a serial killer, I think..., but maybe that's just bad judgement considering my score.... :|

Our website as a graph

Tue, 30 May 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Isn't it pretty :)

Probably too many tables in there, but we've got our hands tied because of the combination of the skin we chose and DotNetNuke.

Draw your own graph here.

That new Wii controller? What's it good for?

Tue, 30 May 2006 14:00:00 GMT

I suppose that when I heard about the new Wii controller I thought that was cool.... but probably quite limited, ie. just a few games, and probably not for everyone - if your thoughts are like that, you better watch this video as I reckon it'll change your mind:

http://www.wimp.com/controller/

cool, huh?!

Flash Solid State Laptop

Thu, 25 May 2006 14:00:00 GMT

This is what I've been waiting for.... and looks like it's finally going to happen:
http://www.laptoplogic.com/news/detail.php?id=921

Yes, it is expensive and underspec'ed, and is only 32GB of storage... but it's a good start.

Five things you need to know before buying an Automated Build Tool

Tue, 23 May 2006 14:00:00 GMT

There are many Automated Build Tools available, some are free, some are very expensive and there are lots of others in between. Each tool is different: different architecture, different features, different user interface, etc. Before you decide on a tool to help you with your software builds, there are many things you need to consider; I have listed five of the most important ones below:

1. Choose a tool you can trust and is well supported.

Your build tool is going to be building the software which will be sent to your customers, you simply have to be able to trust it. Make sure the build tool has been around for some time and that there are high profile customers using the software; this is your assurance that the build engine is robust. When something does go wrong, either a bug or a usability issue, how and where do you get support? Does the tool vendor offer free support for the life of the product? Is there a community forum where you can discuss ideas, offer suggestions and report bugs? How quickly does the vendor respond to bug reports?

2. The tool should support most or all of the tools you currently use and may use in the future.

Let's face it, you're not looking for a tool that is as basic as a batch file. The build tool needs to hide the complexity of the tools which you need to automate; for example your compilers, install builders, version control systems, etc. Do you really care what command line parameters you need to use for your compiler? Of course not, it's much easier to fill in a field called "Project File" and click a checkbox called "Include version information in project". Also, consider what tools you'll be using in the future. Maybe you're thinking of moving to a .NET compiler, maybe to TeamSystem or some other Version Control System. Also, how easy is it to pass information from one step in your build process to another? Does it make it easy to store, load, manipulate and apply version information? Can you download a 30 day fully functional evaluation version?

3. Free will not necessarily be cheaper over the long term.

We hear from lots of users of NAnt and ANT that are ready to move on. Yes, they are open source products (ie. free) but they typically take a lot longer to get to grips with - remember that your time isn't free. If you're sick of paying the angle bracket tax, look for a tool which makes it easy for you to create, modify, debug and run your builds. Also consider that someone in the future may take over the builds; how easy will it be for a new person to learn the software?

4. The user interface is easy to use and very powerful.

This has already been touched on in some of the other points - but the user interface is very important. Look for a UI which is fast, rich, easy to use and modern. Does the UI support Drag&Drop? Does the UI provide custom editors for each of the steps in the build process? Are there debugging aids like variable watches, hierarchial logging, pause, run current action, etc? Is it easy to find information in the log (eg. find all steps in error), and can you do a find and replace in your build steps? For example, you may want change all references to C:\Projects to C:\Build\Projects in all steps in your entire build process. Can you easily break up your build into smaller, easier to manage parts? And is there an easy way to see the progress of the build process while the build is running?

5. The essential feature set of any build tool.

We have been doing builds for quite some time, and with constant feedback from our customers we have a pretty good idea what features are essential in a build tool:

A great user interface (see point 4)
Logging to a database engine - the only reliable way to store and retrieve log information
Running build steps in parallel - essential for reducing the time taken to run your builds
Support for most tools used by software developers (see point 2)
An easy way to add new functionality to the build engine (especially if custom inhouse tools need to be automated)
Flexible flow control, for example if/then/else, switch/case, for/while loops
Error handling steps like try/except/finally and a global catchall for any unhandled errors

So, there you have it.... my list of essentials. Of course FinalBuilder 4 fulfills all these criteria and a lot more. Please download the 30-day trial now, and see for yourself!

First Automise review

Tue, 23 May 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Automise: Automate almost anything

"Automise aims to fill that gap between batch hell and “not so much hell if I can automate it”, and does it beautifully."

"it is one of the best tools around for automating tasks"

ISerializable - Roy Osherove's Blog

Thanks Roy!

Agile Vs. Formal Methodologies

Mon, 15 May 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Roy Osherove [ISerializable] has an interesting few questions and answers about Agile Vs. Formal Methodologies.

"99% of the projects I've seen come from a formal background and implement Agile practices incrementally. For example, doing daily builds, then adding unit tests, then adding TDD, then adding Rolling Wave Planning etc.."

Windows Vista Icons

Sun, 07 May 2006 14:00:00 GMT

There's a short article about a change to .ico files for Windows Vista on The Code Project.

Basically, .ico files will allow use of the PNG format, and sizes up to 256x256. It's great that PNG is now supported, but imagine how high the resolution of your screen has to be to have a 256x256 "icon" be a reasonable size... or maybe MS are planning on putting 256x256 icons in the Start menu or something even more crazy?!?

Microsoft Authenticode and the Micro-ISV

Thu, 04 May 2006 14:00:00 GMT

Abstract:
"Microsoft introduced their Authenticode code signing mechanism in 1996, in answer to an increasing number of malicious web (ActiveX) controls and executable programs on the Internet. Code signing attempts to authenticate authorship by applying a digital certificate to the control or program.

Internet downloads have become the preferred delivery mechanism for small Independent Software Vendors (Micro-ISVs). Authenticode should help to verify that these products are genuine and have not been tampered with, but some Micro-ISVs are reluctant to purchase or use Authenticode certificates.

This paper analyzes Authenticode from the point of view of the Micro-ISV, including both the positive aspects and the perceived flaws. Micro-ISV attitudes and experiences with Authenticode are surveyed."

Interesting read, from Winwaed Software Technology. Full article here.

Automise for 50% off! WOW!

Wed, 03 May 2006 14:00:00 GMT

We've decided to have a never-to-be-repeated special introductory special for Automise of 50% off!

That means you can grab Automise now for only $97.50

Bargain.... go get it now!

Tao of the Windows Installer

Wed, 03 May 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Here's an interesting blog entry from the Windows Installer Team:

http://blogs.msdn.com/windows_installer_team/archive/2006/05/01/587990.aspx

If you ever do any Windows Installer stuff, probably a good read... and you have my sympathies ;)

.t8

Virtual Build Machine

Thu, 27 Apr 2006 14:00:00 GMT

This blog entry inspired by Build Machine Virtualization by Obishawn.

We also use virtual machines for our build environment. We have a pretty beefy server - Dual Xeon with 6GB RAM and RAID 5, running Server 2003 64 bit edition and can run quite a few VM's simultaneously (we also use VM's to run other Version Control Systems and other software which FinalBuilder supports).

We have a few build machines; firstly there is the mainline build machine which uses the mainline branch to build the latest and greatest. Each time we have a minor or major release, we clone the build machine. So, for example, when we released FinalBuilder 4.1, we cloned the mainline build and called it FB41Maint. Sometimes we fix a bug and have to back-port it to FinalBuilder 3... easy, fire up the FB3 build machine and run the build :)

For all this VM business, we're actually using VMWare Professional. It works great. We did try VMWare Server (when it was in Beta) and it didn't want to open our existing vm's for some reason?... so we went back to VMWare pro.

We did it. We did it! :)

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Significant day for us today... the release date of our second product, Automise! :)

(sorry, nothing to do with Dory's and Marlin's victory song...)

Now granted... Automise is largely based on FinalBuilder (ie. same actions, same engine, same UI, etc), but it has taken the best part of four months full time - which was a lot longer than we anticipated.

It's amazing how "FinalBuildery" a lot of the code was.... for example, the error messages, captions in the UI, system variables visible in the user interface, help file, file extensions, etc. So all this had to be made generic and driven by constants and defines - which is certainly easy to do, but when you've got to go over hundreds of thousands of lines of code it gets a little tedious after a while. We've also had some good beta testers help with all this... so big thanks to them! :)

The help file still needs some work; we're using the same Help&Manual file to generate both the FinalBuilder and Automise help files - each with slightly different content. There are a few hundred screen pictures which still need updating, but not much point holding up the release for that.

And one of the pre-requisites was to update the website. The new website was finished last week and is a vast improvement over the old FinalBuilder one - all based on DotNetNuke which has proved to be quite a good experience (especially for people like us who are a little graphically challenged).

Now we've just got to wait for that first sale!

New aggregate RSS feed

Wed, 19 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Here's our new VSoft Technologies aggregate RSS feed:
http://www.vsoft-tech.com.au/blogs.aspx?rssid=0

New website, new blogs

Fri, 14 Apr 2006 02:59:00 GMT

New website, check it out: http://www.finalbuilder.com/

Based on DotNetNuke - some pretty awesome things you can get happening with DNN, not perfect, but overall the experience has been quite good.

And our blogs have moved too... here's the new links:

www: http://www.finalbuilder.com/blogs.aspx

Vincent's feed: http://www.finalbuilder.com/Default.aspx?tabid=77&rssid=1

Tate's feed: http://www.finalbuilder.com/Default.aspx?tabid=77&rssid=2

FinalBuilder blogs have moved.

Tue, 04 Apr 2006 00:00:00 GMT

Our blogs have moved. Please update your reader.

We have just converted our entire website over to DotNetNuke, and with it our blogs. The old .Text based blog will continue to be available for now, but new content will only appear here.

FinalBuilder 4.1 is released.

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 03:59:00 GMT

Yay!

Press release here: http://www.finalbuilder.com/pr/FB4.1.html

Download here: http://www.finalbuilder.com/downloads/finalbuilder/Trial/FB4EvalSetup.exe

Detailed version info: http://www.finalbuilder.com/finalbuilder/versionhistory.html

Go get it! :)

AdwordsReporter

Fri, 24 Mar 2006 20:10:00 GMT

Here's a cool piece of software - AdwordsReporter.

I've just started using it, as seeing trends for our Adwords advertising is pretty hard to do in the Google Adwords website. With AdwordsReporter you have to create an Adwords report and then import the .xml file into the program. From here you automatically get a graph of the date range you specify, and it's easy to change which data values it graphs. It's great to be able to see what effect changes you make has on the clicks, impressions and so-on. For example, we increased our Adwords budget in mid January and this lets us see very easily what effect this has on impressions, clicks, daily spend, position, etc.

Automise

Thu, 23 Mar 2006 23:50:00 GMT

Today we are finally making public the beta of Automise.

What is Automise you ask?

Well... Automise is an automation tool for System Admins, Network Admins and other IT Professionals. Whereas FinalBuilder is targetted and very much focused on developers, Automise is a more general purpose automation tool. Both are build off the same code base, but there are subtle differences especially when it comes to editions - eg. for FinalBuilder we have two editions: Standard and Professional, whereas Automise will not have different editions and the mix of actions shipped will be slightly different too. Automise will not include compiler support, version control system support and many of the other tools developers use, but will include ASync action groups, FileSet, File operations, XML Actions, Database actions, CD/DVD burning, etc.

So - please, if you have time, why not download Automise and give it a go and spread the word!? :)

Discussion forums here.

Who broke the build?!

Tue, 14 Mar 2006 21:06:00 GMT

This is a novel use of a TV connected to a continuous integration build machine.

“There are actually three different failed screens, depending on what failed (compilation failures, code analysis failures and test failures). All screens are red and the text is blinking. In addition, the errormessage is displayed to see what went wrong, and best of all, the face of the developer who last checked in the code is displayed (kind of a pillory :)).”

how cool is that? :)

Diagnose WMI problems

Tue, 07 Mar 2006 02:12:00 GMT

Microsoft have just released WMIDiag.

“A new utility to help system administrators diagnose and repair problems with the WMI service”

Visual Regular Expression evaluator

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 21:50:00 GMT

Wow... this very cool! It's a visual regular expression evaluator called “Reanimator”.

Actually it's very cool in many ways:

You can type in any regular expression
You can type in any text to test against the regexpr
It draws a deterministic and non-deterministic state diagram of the reg expr
As you type in text, it shows which state the regexpr is in by highlighting the relevant state in the diagram
It also underlines the relevant character on the regular expression itself which is expected next

[via ISerializable]

Check a website for dead links.

Tue, 28 Feb 2006 20:18:00 GMT

Thomas Huijer has just released an action “WebSiteCheck”:

“Here's an FinalBuilder Action we use internally for our website. It (recursively) checks pages of a given website. It can check the repsonse code or the contents of the response for a given text or the absense of the given text. We found it very useful to find dead links on a site.

Extract the contents of the zip to the FinalBuilder 4\ActionDefs directory. The Action is called WebsiteCheck. Source is available on demand.”

Grab it from the attachements newsgroup, or the forum.

Code generation with FinalBuilder?!?

Thu, 16 Feb 2006 21:19:00 GMT

We market FinalBuilder as a tool for software developers to automate their build process. So we support compilers, version control systems, installation tools, etc, etc - we try to cover a very broad range of tools so people new to FinalBuilder have coverage of pretty much everything they use.

But really, FinalBuilder is just a platform with a whole bunch of plugins - it's a very general purpose tool which can do pretty much anything you want to. In many ways it's as flexible as programming languages (it supports loops, error handling, conditions, sub-procedures, etc) but on the other hand it is easy to learn and can be easily used by non-developers. The whole “development environment” is visual - you simply find an icon which represents what you want to do (eg. read a text file) and plonk it in the right place. Using FinalBuilder for things other than building software is not a new idea, we have many customers who use FB for all sorts of different stuff like backing up files, creating development environments for new team members, and the list goes on.

Anyway - I found this very interesting blog [Mikester's Blog] this morning which describes how FinalBuilder was used as a Code Generator (that's gotta be a first!). Here's the first post about it which describes how he gets the idea, and the second post goes on to describe the enormous benefits which were realised by using FinalBuilder to do the code generation.

Yahoo's Javascript Library

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 21:03:00 GMT

Not very FinalBuilder related, but Yahoo have released their JavaScript library (under the BSD license). Very cool stuff indeed... and plenty of examples of how to use it. I wish I had this about 5 years ago when I was doing lots of web development!

[From Nick's Delphi Blog]

Subversion on Windows

Wed, 15 Feb 2006 20:50:00 GMT

Subversion is a bit of a learning curve for most people (except those who use CVS probably!), but is a very popular and capable Version Control System which happens to be opensource. FinalBuilder has a whole bunch of built in actions for Subversion: Add, Checkout, Cleanup, Commit, Copy, Export, Import, Mkdir, Revert, Status, Switch, Update, and a Generic action so you can use other Subversion functions which don't have a specific FB action.

“The aim of this series, is to bring everything together in one place from a Windows perspective. Hopefully this will be of use to people other than just me.”

From: James Higgs's Blog

You dont need to be Part of an Agile team to be Agile.

Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:50:00 GMT

You dont need to be Part of an Agile team to be Agile - You just need the tools.

“Nightly Builds.
Build Scripts are a thing of the past! FinalBuilder is the Visual Studio IDE for scripts. It does it all and reduces maintenance, debugging and sneaky undetectable errors.”

From The Digital Matrix

Extracting stuff out of MSI files

Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:21:00 GMT

I know this little utility will be useful for a lot of those people out there using MSI - It allows you to extract the contents of a .msi file. And it's command line based so shouldn't be a problem to integrate with FinalBuilder... maybe someone will write an ActionStudio based plugin for it? :)

Grab it here: Less MSIérables: A tool to Extract the contents of an .msi File

Sending SMS's via FinalBuilder

Wed, 08 Feb 2006 20:20:00 GMT

We've recently added the ability to send SMS's in FinalBuilder using the ICQ network. Unfortunately it's quite limited because the ICQ network only supports a handful of networks.

Another way to send SMS's is via SMS gateways... there's literally hundreds of them and they are all different (ie. different pricing models, different way to send SMS's etc, etc.). The “Intellectual mollusc” on his FinalBuilder blog has just released an FB action to send SMS's via the Clickatell gateway. Worth checking out if you need to send SMS's via FB and your cell phone network is not supported by ICQ.

Using CodeSmith and the .Net XSD tool with FinalBuilder

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 22:07:00 GMT

Miha Markic, an MVP for C#, has written a couple of FinalBuilder actions:

CodeSmith generator action
.NET XSD tool (XML Schema Definition Tool )

You can find the download of the actions on this page.

FinalBuilder Tips and Tricks

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 00:08:00 GMT

Here's a new interesting site: Working with FinalBuilder (by Intellectual mollusc [atom]), that promises Tips and Tricks with FinalBuilder.

The first tip shows you how to include an external script in an action event, and he also has an FB project file which can be used to convert between the different project formats (ie. to and from .fbz4 and .fbp4).

Certainly a site to keep an eye on.

Some recent mention of FinalBuilder on the net

Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:37:00 GMT

Just a few recent mentions of FinalBuilder... :)

“one of my favorite tools has released a new version, chalk full of features...”
Tim Heuer

“I've been using FinalBuilder myself for several years now, and I'm quite happy with it.”
Review of FinalBuilder 4 by Mike Gunderloy

“FinalBuilder a great automated build tool ... TMH uses it regularly and thinks it's excellent”
New link on The March Hare

“Simplesmente indispensável.” [Simply indispensable - translated from Portuguese]
Blog entry by Erick Sasse [English translation]

“Setting up a new build process (without my prior knowledge of FB) was very easy and fast and all the actions I need were already there.”
On Righthand blogs by Miha Markic [MVP C#]

“If you are looking for a build and release managment tool for your application development process, you may want to check out the latest release of FinalBuilder“
On David Hayden's blog

“One of the best products I've used for build management, and it gets better every release.”
On Roy Osherove's Blog

“This is by far the best build tool I’ve used.”
On Kenny Kerr's Blog

Aardvark DVD

Thu, 15 Dec 2005 23:05:00 GMT

Today we received our Aardvark DVD. It arrived amazingly quickly, in less than a week, and we're in Australia. I suppose the amazing speed is thanks to Joel's streamlined shipping production line :)

Now just gotta find time to watch it!

Search Engine Optimization

Sat, 10 Dec 2005 03:58:00 GMT

Came across this Search Engine Optimization article yesterday (by Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz.org), and it's quite good. There's a few tips I learnt which I'll be adding to the FinalBuilder web pages when I get the time. There's some quite interesting information, for example “it's also important to keep URLs limited to as few dynamic parameters as possible ... In an ideal site, there should never be more than two.” (By dynamic parameters, they're talking about things like this: ?param1=a¶m2=1 that goes after the URL). We don't use any dynamic parameters on the FinalBuilder webpage, but certainly something to keep in mind.

Anyway, it's worth the read if you maintain any websites.

Now that the dust has settled...

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 03:09:00 GMT

Yesterday was a pretty big day... luckily you don't have to get a major release out the door more than about once a year! It's amazing all the extra crap you have to do - it's not about writing software getting the release out, it's all the press releases, downloads, website content, new graphics, newsgroup posts, database updates, generating keys for Software Assurance customers, sending out emails, etc, etc. We still have a pretty long list of stuff to do... but the majority is done.

Anyway, I took some time to do a few images which people can use on their website to show others that they use an automated build process and to help us promote FB :)

So, feel free to make use of them.... and I'd appreciate it if you could email me if you've put one up on your website, thanks!

FinalBuilder 4 is out!

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 06:38:00 GMT

Here's the press release: http://www.finalbuilder.com/pr/FB4.html

But for the nice technical stuff, here's the list of what's new: http://www.finalbuilder.com/finalbuilder/WhatsNew.html

And the eval download: http://www.finalbuilder.com/downloads/finalbuilder/Trial/FB4EvalSetup.exe

ENJOY!

FinalBuilder 4 release candidate 1 is out....

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 02:10:00 GMT

*phew* - we're almost there.

Here's the download url for RC1:

http://www.finalbuilder.com/downloads/finalbuilder/beta/400/FB400_61.exe

If all goes well we'll release mid next week - so let us know if you find any bugs!

Great news everyone!

Sat, 26 Nov 2005 01:42:00 GMT

(sorry, this has nothing to do with Futurama!)

Probably the biggest new feature of FinalBuilder 4 is the ASync action group. It opens massive possibilities in your build process - in short, it allows you to run multiple actions simultaneously with sync points.

Unfortunately, we had to impose a limitation with this, namely that you couldn't run other actions lists or include other FinalBuilder projects under the ASync action group. The reason behind this was that Actions are not re-entrant, this means that if Action A was running (say compiling a VS.Net solution) then if that same action was also called by another thread then it would cause major problems. So, this needed to be prevented and hence the limitation as allowing run action list and including FB projects is the only way that you could get the situation where FB would be able to run the same instance of an action multiple times. Sorry if I lost you, the good news is almost here :)

The limitation for a lot of people made ASync action groups not very useful, as the majority of their actions are split up into separate action groups... so it'd be like one step forwards, two steps back. We were planning to revisit this for a 4.1 release... but because of so many people asking us about it, and because it's pretty much the only thing people were critical of in FB4, it was decided to fix it!

Well, as you could probably guess - the limitation is now gone! Now ASync Action Groups can contain both Run Action list actions and Include FinalBuilder project actions!

A small new limitation needed to be added... (that's Professor Hubert Farnsworth bad news :)... but the limitation is a lot less limiting. The limitation is that a single action can not be run at the same time. So, for example if you have a Compile action in an action list and your ASync action group contains two Run Action List actions both calling the same action list with the Compile action, then if the compile action is actually running and the second thread wants to run the compile action, then it must wait until the first one is finished. In other words, running the same FB actions at the same time is serialised.

FinalBuilder 4 beta Quality Survey results & analysis

Thu, 17 Nov 2005 22:07:00 GMT

First of all, a big thankyou to all who have tried the FB4 beta and also to those people who completed our quality survey!

Here are some of the results from the survey:

Have you tried the FinalBuilder 4 beta yet?

83% Yes, 17% No

[Wow... that's awesome! Out of that, probably about 70% of people were using the latest build at the time.]

How do you rate the overall quality of the beta so far?

91% High/Very High, 9% Moderate/Low/Very Low

[Not too bad - especially considering that quite a lot of people aren't on the latest beta build]

Please rate the stability of FinalBuilder 4 beta.

91% High/Very High, 9% Moderate/Low/Very Low

[Very similar to the overall quality, with the exception that the spread between High and Very High was different, the percentage of Very High was higher]

Have you tried running any production builds with FinalBuilder 4 yet?

69% Yes

[This was very surprising to us, and is really excellent news. It means that the FB4 beta is getting a very good workout, not just a quick look]

Did FinalBuilder 4 successfully import your projects from previous versions?

We're aiming for 100% here, but there were 4 projects which weren't imported from earlier versions. The JediVCS support was missing from an earlier beta version so this probably accounts for a couple at least. One customer reported that an FB2 project containing SourceSafe didn't work correctly, but that has now been resolved. If anyone has any backwards compatibility issues, please let us know.

Do you think FinalBuilder 4 is a compelling upgrade over previous versions?

80% was Definitely Yes or Cautiously Yes. Only one person answered Definitely Not and only one person answered Probably Not. So, this is pretty encouraging. It was very interesting what people answered for the “best new feature in FB4“; the answers were very mixed, but if I had to pick a winner it would be the ASync group. But, pretty much all the new features got at least one mention - great news.

What area or areas is the quality lacking?

Did we have to ask this question? Documentation comes out on top... and yes, we are adressing this. Many of the other problems that were reported had already been fixed in a later build, and some of the answers were slightly too vague for us to do anything about, eg. “UI“ and “some actions could be improved“.

We're planning to conduct another survey just before we release FB4 - and hopefully we'll see some kind of improvement :)

Overall, this has been quite a useful exercise for us. It's really good to get feedback on the quality of the beta, and we get lots of feature requests, bug reports, and just very honest comments and opinions in these surveys.

FinalBuilder 4 beta quality survey

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 02:42:00 GMT

We have just put together a very quick survey (which should take only a minute or two to fill out) regarding the quality of the FinalBuilder 4 beta.

http://survey.finalbuilder.com/survey.php?sid=29

We're very interested in any feedback you can provide - we're aiming to release at the end of November, and want FB4 to be a quality release. Even if you haven't yet tried the beta we're also interested in that as it would be very interesting to know just how many people do try the beta, and the reasons why people don't try it. The survey also asks what you think is missing, as well as what you think the best new feature of FinalBuilder 4 is!

So, what you waiting for - let us know what you think!

FinalBuilder 4 public beta

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 03:13:00 GMT

FB4 is now ready for a public beta, yay!

We're actually very happy with the way the beta has gone so-far; of course there have been a lot of bugs, but the feedback has been really, really great! Thanks to all who have helped!

One thing about beta testing a build tool is that people don't want to risk breaking their builds with a beta product, so in the past it has been very hard to get much feedback. Most of the feedback (and bug reports) normally come in the following two weeks or so after the release, but with FB4 I reckon (and hope) that this won't be the case! It seems that we're reached some sort of point now that we're actually getting enough people to help test most of the new stuff.

So - if you haven't done so already, we'd love you to give FB4 a test: load up your FB1, FB2, or FB3 projects, make sure everything works, and try out some of the new features (we'll have the complete new features list soon hopefully...), and let us know how you went whether it went well, or not so well!

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Build Engine changes

Wed, 02 Nov 2005 01:22:00 GMT

We did a lot of work on the build engine for FinalBuilder 4, mainly in the area of performance. It's not like the performance of the FB3 build engine is slow, but there is always room for improvement! The basic architecture of FinalBuilder is that there is a build engine (produces messages), a message queuing system, the user interface (subscribes to the messages), and the logging sub-system (which also subscribes to the build messages). All of these run in their own thread. The build engine and messaging systems have code in them to force context switches to other threads and also to sleep for a while to allow the other threads to breathe. One of the problems with this is that sometimes the sleeps are too long, and sometimes they're too short - and these depend on many factors, eg. CPU speed, number of CPUs, the volume and type of messages coming from the build engine, the overhead of other tools which the build engine is calling, etc.

When the sleeps are too long the build time suffers; when the sleeps are too short it's possible for the build engine to be ahead of the UI and the logging. We have done some experiments where the UI would take over 30 mins to catch up to the build engine because of the enourmous volume of messages still left in the message queues.

One technique we experimented with was to dynamically change the sleep time depending on the CPU load. We query the CPU and get it's load and then calculate a sleep time depending on the load and the last sleep time - the target was about 95% CPU load. We tested it on a variety of machines, all of different speeds and it worked reasonably well - was generally faster than FB3 in most situations, but was still not optimal.

The technique we ended up with is very simple - calculate the total amount of messages in all the internal messages queues and sleep until the total amount of messages is below 10. (almost too simple, eh). This change has the effect that we never sleep for too long (ie. don't waste CPU cycles), and the build engine waits until almost all messages are processed, meaning the build engine will never get a long way ahead of the UI and Logging. The net effect is that build times in FB4 are shorter, and the UI and Logging is never behind the build engine.

Whats new in FinalBuilder 4 - More on logging

Tue, 01 Nov 2005 01:37:00 GMT

In FinalBuilder 3, when a build runs you have two options as far as live logging goes: on or off. The default is off (to reduce memory overhead and to reduce the CPU usage of FinalBuilder), but it's pretty annoying when a build fails as you have to double click on the row in the build history, and then expand nodes to find the one which is in error.

I've already discussed the new database logging architecture in FinalBuilder 4 here - one of the things this allows us to do is to instantly find actions with an error status in the log file. We've also spend quite a bit of time enhancing the general usability experience in the area also... so this is how it all works in FB4:

Firstly you get to choose how/when the live logging is turned on/off:

Disable Live Logging by Default
Enable Live Logging by Default
Remember last Live Logging state

These are the global settings; there is still the “Live Logging” checkbox on the log tab which allows you to turn live logging on/off instantly.

When a build runs, the bottom set of tabs automatically changes to the Build History tab (the top part of the screen is different). But you can also choose to “Switch to live logging tab if live logging enabled” (Tools menu->Option->FinalBuilder->General Options category->GUI Options).

Now, the bit we worked on quite a bit was what happens when a build completes. If a build completes successfully, then generally you don't care about what's in the log - probably more about overall build statistics, but when a build fails you want to see what action caused the failure and see the error messages. When a build completes successfully, the log is loaded in the Build Log tab but the tab stays on the Build History so you can compare the overall build statistics. When a build falls over, the bottom tab changes to the Build Log and loads just the action which caused the error (the action output and error messages are expanded in the tree), so you get an instant view of the action that caused the build to fail (notice the Show all Error Actions and Show Ignored Errors buttons too):

This is a big improvement over FinalBuilder 3 - the logging does as you'd expect; it focuses on errors if the build fails, or shows you build statistics if the build succeeds.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Project Tab

Thu, 27 Oct 2005 00:03:00 GMT

We've added yet another cool usability enhancment for FinalBuilder 4 - the Project tab. The project tab uses a tree control to display the various action lists, scripts and variables in the current project, as you can see here:

The main reason this tab was introduced was that if you have more than a few extra action lists (in this case there are four extra ones: Do Compiles, Installer, Help Files and Doco, and Deployment Stuff), then it's a real pita to reorder them - you have to right click on the tab you want to reorder, and then select “Move Left“ or “Move Right“ and the tab will move along to the left or right by one. Now, just imagine you have 50 or 100 action lists and you want to move a tab from one end to the other! (yes, I know some of you don't have to imagine because you do actually have this many...).

So, we needed an alternate view of the action lists in your project, including a much better way to reorder and select them. Double-clicking on an action list in the tree will select it, you can drag and drop action lists around to reorder them, or use the Ctrl-Up or Ctrl-Down keys, or even use the right-click context menu, or even use the Up and Down arrows! Hopefully we've covered all bases here :)

Other functions on the project tab include:

Easy way to bring up the Global Script editor dialog
Easy way to bring up the Variables Editor dialog
Easy way to view project, user, environment and system variables (including their default values)
Easy way to add a new variable, or edit an existing one

It's one of those features that once you start using it, you wonder how you lived without it...

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Console version now in Standard edition

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 21:39:00 GMT

The FinalBuilder console (FBCMD) is now available in both the Standard and Professional edtions of FinalBuilder 4 - I know this will make a lot of people very happy! :)

We've also done a log of work on the logging output of the console verion. The output is has been improved for readability including colorised output. The build result and build time are now displayed when the build completes also. Here's some screenshots so you can see the difference.

FB3CMD Output:

And this is the same build (look at the file in the command line parameters) under FBCMD version 4:

So - significantly more readable and also brings FB in line with other command line build tools like MSBuild and NAnt.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Property Sets

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 04:19:00 GMT

Property Sets is a huge new feature in FinalBuilder 4. It's a real time saver and greatly improves the readability and maintainability of your build process! The rationale behind property sets was that probably our most frequently asked question was along the lines of:

“How do I set the version information of all the modules in my product to be the same, including sycronisation and incrementing of version numbers”

Our answer for this has been to use script in the BeforeAction events of the compiler actions, and we even have an article explaining how to do it. But that is so old-skool in FinalBuilder 4, as we've introduced PropertySets which do all the hard work for you! :)

Here are the available PropertySet actions:

Here's how they work - you use a PropertySet define action, which allows you to give a property set a name and you get to choose the type. A property set is basically a whole bunch of values which are held together by this PropertySet, an example is the Win32 Version Numbers type which contains: MajorVersion, MinorVersion, ReleaseVersion, BuildVersion integer values. Then you can load that property set from somewhere, for example an INI file, the registry, the FinalBuilder project version number file (FBD) or you can assign the values using other FinalBuilder variables. After you load the property set you may also want to increment a value in it using the PropertySet increment value action.

Then you can use this property set in other actions, for example the Build VC6 action:

Notice all the greyed out fields - these will be automatically set using the Property Set “MyVersionInfo“. And you can use this property set in all your other compiler actions, and elsewhere too. For example you might want to generate a filename based on version numbers - easy, use the PropertySet to Variable action which allows you to combine property set values in any order with other text to create the filename.

When you're done with the property set you'll probably want to persist it somehow - save to INI, FBD, registry or directly access the items of the property sets like variables and save them using some other means.

So, there you have it - a very brief overview of PropertySets. PropertySets really do save a lot of time and it gets rid of heaps of script code all throughout your project, at the same time making it easy to load and persist version information and applying a common set of version information to all the various modules during the build process.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Persistent Project Variables

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 00:08:00 GMT

FinalBuilder 4 can now automatically load and store the value of a variable. To enable a variable to be automatically persistent simply flag the variable as persistent in the Edit Variables dialog (see below). Persistent variables are stored in the .fbv file.

In the past this had to be done manually; for example you might read a bunch of variables from a INI file, the registry or an XML file at the beginning of a build, and then write the value back again at the end of a build - so now it's a simple matter of setting the persistent checkbox when creating a variable and it's all done automatically!

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Project Edit Password

Sat, 15 Oct 2005 02:11:00 GMT

FinalBuilder 4 now allows the owner of the project to set an Edit Password. This password is required for the project to be viewed in design mode and before any changes can be made to the project. When you open a project that has an edit password, it will open on the Build Summary screen - clicking the Design tab will prompt for the password. The project can be run without the Password.

To set an edit password, choose “Set Edit Password” from the project menu:

This will bring up the Project Edit Password dialog - type in the password required to edit the project. To set no password for the project, simply leave the new password fields blank.

Now that the project password is set, if you click on the Design tab you get the following prompt:

One of the limitations with project edit passwords is that the project file must be saved as a compressed project file (.fbz3) - if we stored the password in the xml version of the project file it would be too easy to remove manually!

Calculating Estimated Progress in FinalBuilder 4

Thu, 13 Oct 2005 21:41:00 GMT

FinalBuilder 4 introduces a new feature: Estimated Progress. It's a progress bar that increments by one every time an action completes while your build runs, and the total is dynamically calculated (see it in context here). It's the total, and more specifically the calculation of the total that I'm going to shed some light on in this post. But first, here's a quick screenie of what the progress bar looks like during a build:

Estimated Progress was a bit of a controversial issue for us. On one hand it'd be great to see how your build is going as a percentage, but on the other, it's something that is almost impossible to predict accurately due to the very dynamic ways people can set up their build process (eg. loops, conditions, case statements, etc). So, we needed a way to predict the total progress somehow.

When a build first starts, the progress is set to zero and the progress bar total is calculated.
First the log archive is queried to find the last successful build. If there was a last successful build, then the amount of actions that executed in that build is used to set the total (this was a cinch to get a count of the last actions, as the log files are now a relational database).
If there was no last successful build, then FinalBuilder calculates how many actions are in your build process and uses that as the total.

Now, we realise that the above two methods will not be adequate for some build processes. For example, a build process may have two modes (eg. Full and BugFix). The two different modes may have very different progress totals, and using the last successful build action count method will only work some of the time. Thanks to the beta testers, we've introduced a new script method “SetEstimatedProgressTotal” which takes a single integer parameter which allows the progress total to be set to any value at any time during the build process.

So, how can you use this?

Well, lets use the same example above - your build process has Full and BugFix modes. You know (because you've run a Full build enough times) that a Full build will run 469 actions, and that a BugFix build runs only 210 actions. Your build process will have some logic at the start which figures out if a Full build or BugFix build is required, and using that same logic it can call the script function for the full build (in JScript):

if (FullBuild){
SetEstimatedProgressTotal(469)
} else {
SetEstimatedProgressTotal(210)
}

This gives you complete control over the estimated progress, and it can be set at any time during your build. Of course, you could also use a persistent project variables (ooh, better blog about this soon) to set the total progress... so you can make it as complicated as you want! For the FinalBuilder build process, we rely on the default behaviour as the last successful build is a very good indication for how many actions will execute in the next build.

The Build Master book has shipped.

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 23:58:00 GMT

Vincent Maraia's (vincem) book “The Build Master - Microsoft's Software Configuration Management Best Practices” has just shipped.

I'm about half way through a draft copy he gave me at PDC this year - so far it's been a very interesting insight into the build practices at Microsoft and other enormous organisations. There's a lot of good ideas in there; it's a worthwhile read especially if you're in a large organisation.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Restart build if build fails

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 00:15:00 GMT

This is a great new little feature: if a build fails, you can fix the problem and then continue the build without resetting the log.

The screen pic above shows that a build has just failed, and the Restart build from selected action button becomes enabled. At this point you would normally switch over to the design view, fix whatever needs to be fixed, select the action to restart from and then restart the build. This is particularly useful if you have a long build process and you don't have time to start from the beginning again, or maybe you have a sequence of actions at the start of the build that you really don't want to rerun (maybe they're incrementing version numbers or something). Don't confuse this with the “Run from here” function - Run from here starts a new log file, resets all the build status and starts the build from the selected action.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Build Summary

Mon, 10 Oct 2005 23:45:00 GMT

For FinalBuilder 4 we wanted to add a new view of the build process as it runs. This new view was designed with the following ideas in mind:

Provide an “at a glance” status of the build (eg. running, completed, error, etc).
Provide an estimated progress of current build.
Provide action statistics (eg. how many actions completed, in error, skipped, etc).
Have a better way of showing multiple actions running in parallel
Have a better way of showing the status of an action while it's running (eg. progress, progress messages etc.)

To achieve this, we added a new top level tab for the IDE:

The Design tab is where you have to be when you're adding, deleting and editing actions in your build process or when you're debugging the build process - the Build Summary tab is where you can be when you run the build. There are plenty of options that can be set to decide when this view is automatically switched to, for example you can decide to only switch to this view when a build starts running, or maybe you want to start with this view when you open FinalBuilder.

This is a screen pic of the Build Summary tab:

So, lets dissect what's going on here. Starting with the left hand side we have:

1. The Running Man in action - when the build completes you get a big X or a big Tick; easy to see at a glance.

2. “Build Running” - this text changes depending on the status of the build

3. The Start Time and Run Time of the build

4. “Run” and “Stop” buttons - duplicated on this screen for convenience

5. Estimated Progress bar. We're 40% through the build.

6. Action Statistics - an at-a-glance look at how many actions are done, broken up by completed status

7. Recent actions - this is a list of recent actions that have completed in descending order.

Quite a bit of information about the build state. A lot of this information is not easily accessible in FinalBuilder 3 and it's certainly easier to see what the build process is up to at a quick glance.

Now for the right hand side. This side shows the current status of the current action list, as well as each action which is currently running (remember, FinalBuilder 4 now supports running multiple actions in parallel). This screen pic is showing that we're currently on the Main action list, and that two actions are currently running: a Compile Delphi project action and a Compile VS.Net action. The Delphi action is showing that it's 20% complete and that it's up to the “Running Delphi Compiler...” stage. The raw output of the action is not shown by default, but clicking on the “Show action output” will display any live while the action runs.

There you have it - this is by far the biggest UI change we've done to FinalBuilder for a while. The Build Summary tab displays running statistics, the current state of all running actions, as well as an at-a-glance view of the build status.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Logging to a database

Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:19:00 GMT

Ready for another installment of what's new? There's plenty more we've got up our sleeve, so keep tuned :)

Logging to a database

FinalBuilder versions 1, 2 and 3 record all the log information in memory during a build (this includes when an action starts, finishes, it's status, action lists, errors, output from the tools called, etc - basically everything that FinalBuilder does during a build is logged). When the build ends (in FB1-3) the log information is written out to an xml file and then stored in a SingleFileSystem with the previous logs.

This approach has the following disadvantages:

There is a memory overhead, as the log information cannot be written out until the end of the build
Writing the log file at the end of the build can take a considerable time for very big builds
The SingleFileSystem used occasionally gets corrupted, and there is no cure except to delete the log file
Searching and/or filtering the log is almost impossible and would be very slow
Supporting running actions in parallel would be a big job
There is significant overhead dealing with large xml files (eg. loading them up to view in Build Log pane)

So, we had to come up with a different approach for FinalBuilder 4 that was extremely fast, very robust and also negated all the disadvantages of the previous FinalBuilder logging architecture. The logging changes also had to be completely transparent to the user - FinalBuilder 4 has to work in exactly the same way and provide at least the same functionality. The solution we came up with was to use an embedded database known for it's high performance and it's feature set - NexusDB. We initially ran some performance tests to make sure it could cope with the type of abuse FinalBuilder could throw at it, and it passed with flying colours, the big challenge was replacing the current logging architecture with the embedded database. I won't go into gory details, but suffice to say the integration went fairly well mainly due to the decoupled internal architecture of the build engine in FinalBuilder.

The end result is that FinalBuilder 4 now uses an embedded database to handle all the logging, which is written to disk during the build. The database has very little memory overhead, is able to store and retrieve data very quickly, and will eventually include sorting and filtering of build logs. Also, logging actions run in parallel was a no-brainer, and loading previous builds in the Build Log has been improved for very large builds. I won't post a screen pic of FinalBuilder 4 showing off the new database logging in this case, because the UI has stayed exactly the same, except for an extra button “Pack log file“ which is used to reclaim space in the log database.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Text Find Action

Thu, 06 Oct 2005 00:27:00 GMT

FinalBuilder 4 adds a new action which makes it easier to find text in either a file or a FinalBuilder variable. Some build processes need to search for error strings in files, or maybe certain text from the output of a version control system action. In the past this would be achieved by either using a file iterator with some script, or completely in VBScript/JScript. Our build process uses this method to search for error strings in the output of the help file generator we use. We also answer questions about how to search for a text string quite often, so we know this action is going to get a good workout!

Here's how we use the new action:

The Text Find Action can automatically search for a text string or a regular expression and cause the action to fail if the occurrences is less or more than a predefined amount.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Async action group

Tue, 04 Oct 2005 21:45:00 GMT

This is one of the best new features in FinalBuilder 4, and here is the action that represents it:

I know it doesn't look like much, but it represents a significant new way of structuring your build process which can result in huge time savings when you run your build.

Here's how it works - every immediate child action of the action group is run in it's own thread and started simultaneously. The next sibling of the Async Action Group waits until all it's children complete processing before the next action runs (equivalent to a sync point).

This is a flow diagram of the process:

And here is the FinalBuilder representation of this flow diagram:

Of course, the “Do Something“, Task A, B, C, and “Do something else” can be any actions in your build process. This new action makes it very easy for you to execute certain actions in your build process in parallel. Don't be deceived by it's simplicity - the ASync Action Group is extremely powerful. For example, it is possible to nest ASync Action Groups inside other ASync Action Groups; it's also possible to represent any combination of sync points and parallel execution using this single action.

The benefit of the ASync Action Group is that you can run IO bound actions in parallel with CPU bound actions, which should result in significant overall time savings in your build process. Also, if you have a dual core machine or multi-CPU machine, then FinalBuilder can take advantage of the other CPUs to run multiple actions simultaneously which can result in a dramatic performance improvement of your build process.

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Project Global Script

Fri, 30 Sep 2005 21:16:00 GMT

This is one of those features we'd planned to do for ages, and customers kept asking us to make script code reuse easier (if FB3 you can include an external script file, but this is less than ideal). FinalBuilder 4 now allows you to have global VBScript and JScript stored in your project file and the script code is available to all actions in the project.

For example, define some global VBScript (access this dialog from the Project menu):

This dialog supports syntax highlighting, code completion, parameter hints and also will display subs, functions, constants, etc in the right hand side section to make it easy to see an overview of your code at a glance as well as easy navigation within the script (double-click an item and it scrolls the code to the right spot).

And then you can use the script as you would a normal function, sub, etc.

(also of note in the above screen shot is that the Run Status tab has been removed and a new Action Information tab...)

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Automatic Action Retry

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 20:38:00 GMT

Yesterday we announced FinalBuilder 4.

I'll be trying to blog about a new feature in FB4 every day or so... this is the first in the series :)

What's new in FinalBuilder 4 - Automatic Action Retry

FinalBuilder 4 now includes the option to allow actions to retry automatically if they fail. A maximum retry limit can be set as well as the wait time between retries. This can be useful if a particular action has a tendency to fail but might succeed if it is re-run. An example of this might be a network resource failing the first time, but the second time the network resource might be available. The retry option is available for every action in FinalBuilder 4.

Here is a screen pic of the property dialog showing the new retry options:

Obviously, after the 3rd retry and the action still fails, then it will stop retrying and fail the action as per usual. If a retry is successful, then the build continues on as the action does finally report success.

FinalBuilder 4 coming soon...

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 01:22:00 GMT

Yes, it's true, FinalBuilder 4 is about to go into beta testing, with a scheduled release near the end of November 2005.

I've been pretty quiet on the blog scene lately, mainly because all of the things I wanted to blog about were cool new FinalBuilder 4 features, but we didn't want to announce FB4 too early (for lots of reasons). So, now I'm free to tell you about the cool new stuff in FB4 - hopefully I'll cover something new every day or every second day. Also, PDC05 and Tech.Ed were pretty busy for us... when you don't have a dedicated marketing & sales team everything is up to the developers...

Initially all our existing customers will receive an email for the FB4 beta download (in the next few days), and once we're happy with the stability we'll open it up to the general public. TeamFB members have already had FB4 for a few days and it's looking pretty solid already. There have been some mammoth changes to the core, so this is pretty encouraging :)

One thing we weren't planning on spending much time on during the development of FB4 was ActionStudio (AS), but we have recently been using AS a lot ourselves as heaps of the new actions are written with AS (ie. dogfooding...). I'm pleased to say that AS is now even easier to use, supports some cool new features such as common property pages, global script, common images control; and we've fixed up lots of minor usability issues and bugs.

Anyway, gotta update the website now... stay tuned for more FB4 new stuff.

Microsoft PDC05

Mon, 19 Sep 2005 21:46:00 GMT

Wow, it's been a hectic couple of weeks. First was Tech.Ed in Australia, then a week back at the office, and then last week we were exhibiting at the Microsoft PDC05 in LA. It was a massive event - apparently almost 8,000 developers were there. Bill Gates opened the keynote and throughout the conference there were literally hundreds of Microsoft employees everywhere you looked. We got a lot out of the conference: meeting existing customers, demoing FinalBuilder to potential customers, and networking with other vendors and Microsoft employees (and, of course, the special event at Universal Studios).

And a big thankyou to Raoul Molenkamp who helped us out at the booth!

We're at Tech.Ed at the Gold Coast

Wed, 31 Aug 2005 19:43:00 GMT

We're exhibiting at Microsoft Tech.Ed at the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia this week. So if you're up here for the show, stop by our booth and say hello! :)

Tech.Ed Australia is much bigger this year (which is a great thing for an exhibitor) - it feels two or three times bigger than last year in terms of how many delegates are attending.

We have a new set of marketing material including:

New Logo
New Colours
New Brochures
New Banners

So... keep your eye on the website, as we'll be updating it with the new logo and colours soon.

JediVCS - you asked for it...

Mon, 15 Aug 2005 21:40:00 GMT

A big thankyou goes out to Mathias Burbach of Maranatha Consulting for developing the FinalBuilder integration for JediVCS!

The actions are currently in Beta testing - please contact me at “tate @ finalbuilder dot com” if you would like to help test them.

Here is the list of actions:

Synchronize Project
Label Project
Check Out
Undo Check Out
Check In
List Projects
List Project Modules
List Locks
Synchronise Project for Label

PDC and Tech.Ed

Tue, 02 Aug 2005 21:52:00 GMT

Just put some info up on our webpage for upcoming events - we'll be exhibiting at Tech.Ed Australia and PDC in LA this year. And thanks to Brendan Tompkins for the cool PDC image :)

ClearCase integration for FinalBuilder

Wed, 27 Jul 2005 00:44:00 GMT

Check it out (pun intended...):

FinalBuilder now has very comprehensive integration for IBM/Rational ClearCase. The actions support both ClearCase Base and UCM to do anything you'll need to do in an automated build process! And if there happens to be some particular ClearCase operation which isn't covered, you can use the “ClearCase Run Cleartool (Generic)” action which allows you to specify the exact command line parameters to use with cleartool.

So, this really starts to round out the support for version control systems in FinalBuilder. Currently in development is integration with Microsoft TeamSystem and JediVCS (hang in there if you're waiting for this!)

We've moved!

Sat, 16 Jul 2005 00:19:00 GMT

The SourceGear guys are just about to move, but we beat them to it :)

We finished moving into the new office yesterday - today we're getting stuck into some real work. The new office is a lot bigger; actually I think it's about 4 or 5 times bigger! The company is expanding and we need to fit the extra people in somewhere. There's even space for a big round table for meetings and eating our lunch at.

We've even got a server room now (wow!). We've wired the whole place up with CAT6, got a big switch and patch panel to make all the connections a breeze. The last thing we're waiting for is the phone system - next week sometime hopefully :)

Another interesting article

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 21:58:00 GMT

hmm... I didn't realise that the “The Importance of Building Earnestly“ article was published in Feb this year, so it's sortof old news - but a good read nontheless.

And here's another article by the same guys:

Building for success by Brad Appleton, Robert Cowham and Steve Berczuk

“Since builds are so fundamental to the development of software, it is vital that they be done well“

The Importance of Building Earnestly

Mon, 04 Jul 2005 21:45:00 GMT

Quite an interesting article on CM Crossroads titled: The Importance of Building Earnestly

“ The Build is an essential link in the development process. Improving this link will make your life easier, whatever your role is. Take small steps towards making your process better and your work will be more enjoyable. Even if your build process seems to work, consider how you might improve it further, perhaps keeping in mind the words of Laurie Anderson: “Paradise is exactly like where you are right now, only much, much better.” [Anderson]”

Hiring and Interview Questions

Thu, 23 Jun 2005 21:58:00 GMT

*phew*

We've just finished interviewing for the Junior Programmer position at VSoft Technologies. The position was geared towards a current university student in their final year, or a recent graduate and they will be working on the future development of FinalBuilder.

We advertised the job on SEEK - we have had quite a lot of responses and the advertising experience was quite good, I think we'll use SEEK again. But the disappointing thing has been the quality of the applicants. Unfortunately we've had to automatically exclude all candidates from interstate (or overseas), as it's just too hard and too risky for us to bring people to Canberra. Also, Canberra has a fairly small population - so finding talented people is always going to be challenging. There are two universities in Canberra - the Australian National University (ANU) and the University of Canberra (UC). Both offer B.E. in software and UC also offers Bachelor of Information Technology and a few other IT related qualifications. There are also other learning institutions here too, the Canberra Institute of Technology springs to mind.... there's probably others too.

So, we decided to interview seven people - one person got another job before we interviewed them, so we ended up with six... a pretty good number actually.

The interview questions.

Everyone seems to go fairly well with verbal questions - eg. what experience have you had, what is your favourite programming language, etc. What really sorts the men-from-the-boys are the little practicals we gave the candidates:

1. Read some code

We gave the candidate a print out of a very simple routine. I'm not going to tell you what it is, but suffice to say it was only about five lines long. We specifically chose some Delphi code as we wanted to assess the skills of the candidate to be able to read code in a different programming language than they were used to. The results were a little surprising (if not disturbing)... Vincent and I started thinking that maybe the routine was a bit difficult (maybe it should only be 2 lines long?!?!).

2. Write some code

We gave the candidates a very simple class diagram. It contained two classes, one derived from the other and a couple of methods and attributes. We asked them to write the code based on the class diagram in Notepad. This was a good question, actually a very good question :)

3. Customer liaison

We deal with a lot of customers. We have newsgroups as well as handling support and pre-sales issues via email. We need to know how someone would handle this task - we gave the candidates a real email which we received from a customer and asked them to write their response. This question was generally handled fairly well as we were able to judge their liaison skills, politeness, and just how they handle this type of thing in general.

4. Research skills

The candidates were asked some questions that they wouldn't know the answer to, and they had to use a web browser to find the answers. I think we'll probably refine the research question a little next time we interview, but it was certainly a good question to ask. Some candidates took a minute or two, others were asked to stop after about 10 minutes. At least with the people who took longer I was able to read a few pages of Crossing the Chasm - so the time was not wasted :)

5. Using FinalBuilder

This test was designed to assess the both the candidates' problem solving skills, as well as assess whether they had downloaded FinalBuilder in their own time to study the product before the interview. It also allowed us to do a bit of usability testing - we watched as the candidates' followed a list of instructions to create a very simple build process in FinalBuilder :) It was very interesting, to say the least. A side effect was that we were also able to assess the candidates ability to follow instructions - this was a good question indeed.

The result.

There was one candidate who generally stood out above the rest - we have asked him to join the FinalBuilder development team, and he is starting tomorrow. Keep an eye out for his blog. Of the other candidates, there were two who were very high on the list. We wish all the candidates who applied for this job success for their future.

Some closing notes.

Some candidates took the time to read our website before they arrived for the interview. Some even had downloaded FinalBuilder and had a play with it. This does count for a lot in our books - why someone wouldn't spend a little time finding out about the company they might be working for is a little surprising. Also, the technical skills of the candidates did seem a little lacking - we do understand that the job is for a Junior developer, but a good understanding of basic OO principles and the ability to write simple code shouldn't be too much to ask for, is it?

Junior Developer

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 02:16:00 GMT

We're looking for another person to join the FinalBuilder team...

Job description is here.

A job posting that lists FinalBuilder as a desired aptitude

Mon, 06 Jun 2005 23:52:00 GMT

This is interesting... Voxco, on their careers page, are currently looking for an Programmer Analyst : Specialist in software rollout (Montreal) and they list FinalBuilder as a desired aptitude. So, if you're a FinalBuilder user looking to move to Canada, this just might be your chance :)

Dilbert does FinalBuilder :)

Mon, 30 May 2005 22:35:00 GMT

This is very cool.... Dilbert discovers FinalBuilder :)

List of bug tracking software

Sat, 28 May 2005 06:03:00 GMT

Fabrice has compiled a nice list of bug tracking software. We have recently started using FogBugz here for FinalBuilder, and it really works well. Probably the best feature is that it acts as an email client for our support system.

The sound of my own voice!

Sat, 28 May 2005 04:15:00 GMT

This was not in my job description.... recording my voice... it's horrible listening to yourself speak!

Today we've created an “Introduction to FinalBuilder” video with Camtasia Studio. It's the first in a series of videos we're creating to help people get started using the product. This first video creates a very simple project and runs it. The other movies we've got planned will cover more advanced topics like Action Lists, Variables, ActionStudio, etc.

So, you wanna listen to my voice? The movie is here.

Version Control Systems

Thu, 19 May 2005 01:01:00 GMT

In our recent FinalBuilder customer survey, one question we asked was “What Version Control System do you currently use, or plan to use in the next 12 months”. The question allowed mulitple answers, so the bars aren't a percentage. I've removed the actual numbers because the relative widths of the bars is what is important.

So, here are the results:

So, interesting results, eh? Obviously Microsoft Team System is high on the agenda for us, and looks like a lot of people will be taking a serious look at the new verison control system.

We'd expect the Subversion bar to continue to grow at a very high rate - last year when we ran a similar survey only 3% of people were using Subversion. SourceGear Vault has also grown a lot, Vault was down the bottom last year, and this year it's really moved up the rankings to just behind CVS. Most of the other VCS's have been pretty steady.

Comments welcome.

Make your build process Famous!

Tue, 17 May 2005 21:46:00 GMT

Would you like part of your build process to be famous?

FinalBuilder advertises in the MSDN magazine which has a readership of over 70,000 people.

Every month we create a new "mini build" which appears in the advertisment. Our past ads are here: http://www.finalbuilder.com/finalbuilder/advertising.html

So - send us your mini-build and the August edition of MSDN can feature your build process! Vincent and I will choose the most interesting set of FinalBuilder actions to include on the ad.

The conditions are:
1. 15 to 20 actions (we must be able to fit it in the available space)
2. Any actions are allowed, including custom actions
3. Submissions must be a .fbz3 or .fbp3 file
4. Email all submissions to tate at finalbuilder.com
5. Dealine: 1 June 2005
6. Judges decision is Final :)

Good luck!

Wow... gotta be happy with that!

Sat, 14 May 2005 04:20:00 GMT

Here's the result of one of the questions in the recent FinalBuilder customer survey we ran.

Need I say more??? Yeah... while I'm at it here are some of the comments that people left:

“Friends don't let friends build with anything else.“ (this is my favourite one...)

“I think FinalBuilder is an excellent product and it has revolutionised the way I handle builds. Congratulations on a superb product!“

“Well done to the developers, FB saves me a great deal of time & ensures that builds are done consistently every time.”

“FB team has spoiled us. I find I now get frustrated at other vendors when they don't respond in such timely fashion as your goodselves. Keep up the good work!“

“A brilliant product which I use simply because it saves me hours of time and makes it easy to use as a backup tool as well. As a one person business my time is everything. Well done.“

“This is fantastic software, you can tell the developers really believe in their product. I cannot rate it high enough, well done.“

“Great system! Keep up the good work!”

“FB has helped us very much to organize and optimize the build process. Now, everyone can build, even if the "build master" is out of office!”

“FinalBuilder is great.”

“I love your product. Thank you.”

“We rely on FinalBuilder pretty heavily - it's a great product. Keep up the good work!”

“Awesome interface and tons of functionality. Great tool”

“Great product, great price. It has saved me many hours.“

And that's just the tip of the iceberg :)

FinalBuilder Customer Survey

Wed, 11 May 2005 20:05:00 GMT

We're currently conducting a survey of existing FinalBuilder customers. If you have not received a direct email with a link to the survey and would like to participate then please email me directly.

The preliminary results are very interesting, and it's going to have a very real infulence on the further direction of FinalBuilder.

We'll be blogging about particular results in the coming weeks, so keep tuned.

Thanks to all who have responded already!

Ada for .Net

Fri, 06 May 2005 19:41:00 GMT

Well, this is mildly interesting.... there is now Ada for .Net, and they're calling it A#

Ada was the first programming language I learnt - that was back in 1993 at the University of Canberra. Ada does have some very interesting and cool features, but can be a bit verbose... and I seem to remember the compiler error messages were sometimes a bit too cryptic!

FinalBuilder integrates with Perforce better

Thu, 05 May 2005 18:55:00 GMT

FinalBuilder has had pretty basic Perforce integration for quite a long time. But since we offer excellent integration with Visual SourceSafe, Team Coherence, CVS, Subversion, Surround SCM, Vault, QVCS, and StarTeam, we thought it was about time to upgrade the Perforce support. (Oh, and ComponentSoftware RCS is supported using the plugin written by Martin Rothschink, which is available here.)

So, here's a nice screen pic of the upgraded Perforce integration:

The actions are still being tweaked and documented, but will be available very soon.

Fun and games with HTML email

Tue, 03 May 2005 21:39:00 GMT

FinalBuilder has been able to send HTML emails for some time, but it's not as flexible as some users required. We've recently added the ability to specify a separate “Plain Body” to the “HTML Body”.

Unfortunately we've encounted a few problems - mainly the way that different email clients handle the HTML and Plain Text parts, especially in conjunction with an attachment. To add to that, some email clients don't even display, or allow display of the text part of an HTML email (eg. PocoMail).

Anyway, some R&D was required to figure out how all the different parts fit together to form a email message which can be correctly read by the majortity of email clients. Here what I ended up with:

Plain Body only         -> ContentType = ''
Plain Body + Attachment -> ContentType = 'multipart/mixed'
HTML Body only          -> ContentType = ''
HTML Body + Attachment  -> ContentType = 'multipart/mixed'
Plain Body + HTML Body  -> ContentType = 'multipart/alternative'
Plain, HTML, Attachment -> Part1 = 'multipart/mixed' (consists of Part2 and Attachments)
                           Part2 = 'multipart/alternative' (consists of Plain and HTML parts)

Hmmm... doesn't look too complicated when it's layed out nicely like that, does it? The problems was finding a nice readable guide on how to get the correct ContentTypes. Unfortunately the Indy documentation didn't help much at all, and the example email client in Indy didn't deal with HTML email. This is the best article I found which did help quite a lot: http://bdn.borland.com/article/0,1410,32075,00.html

So, at the end of all this, the HTML email support in FinalBuilder is now more compatible and better featured than before.

XenoCode and FinalBuilder

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 21:19:00 GMT

Kenji Obata from XenoCode has just moved his build process to FinalBuilder -

“In just a few hours, I had the entire Xenocode build process running under FB. The IDE and scripting model is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn (it earned a perfect score on my key usability measure, number of queries required into the manual -- zero).“

At the time FB only supported XenoCode 2004, but FB3.1 now supports XenoCode 2005 as well.

FinalBuilder 3.1 out

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 06:09:00 GMT

FinalBuilder 3.1 is out, major features include:

Integration for Seapine Surround SCM
FinalBuilder console application - run FB from the command line without the GUI

More info here

New server makes the build go fast.

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 02:40:00 GMT

We've finally got our new server up-and-running, YAY!

Hardware specs:

Dual Xeon 2.8Ghz with EMT64
Areca PCI-X Raid Controller with 4x120GB SATA disks in RAID5
2GB RAM
Nice black case...and other bits and pieces

The main thing is that our builds for FinalBuilder (using FinalBuilder of course) runs soooo much quicker. The build server is a Virtual Machine (using VMWare 5) so moving it to the new server was very easy.

The build time of FinalBuilder has gone from about 25mins on the old server, to about 9mins on the new server!

Pretty awsome speedup.... and our version control system is on the new server too, and it's also shown a major improvement in speed :)

Office Re-org

Wed, 06 Apr 2005 02:17:00 GMT

We've spend most of today re-organising the office. The office isn't too big, and we're getting ready to expand (ie. more developers) and so need to squeeze more desks in. The desks are the easy bit... it's the cabling that can drive sane people up the wall :)

A new server is arriving tomorrow which will run our version control system, build VM, and our other virtual machines (we need a quite a few since we support so many 3rd party tools). The hardware is going to be a dual-Xeon with 2GB RAM... so will be a big improvement!

FinalBuilder free for MVPs

Wed, 23 Mar 2005 03:56:00 GMT

Wow! This is exciting news....! FinalBuilder 3 Professional is now available for free for current MVP (Microsoft Valued Professionals).

More info here.

Roy Osherove praises FB3 :)

Tue, 15 Mar 2005 18:35:00 GMT

Roy Osherove (of ISerializable) praises FinalBuilder 3 on his blog...

“One of the coolest things about it is that you can also add your own custom tasks to [FinalBuilder] - using .NET. they integrate fully into the "IDE" and that means you can pretty much do anything you like. That's why, while I like them as a concept, I don't use tools such as Nant or MSBuild today - the configuration is not as easy and seamless as it should be. To me that's one of the most important things - if you can't manage the build process easily you're wasting a lot of time and effort needlessly.”

Mike Gunderloy reviews FinalBuilder 3

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:09:00 GMT

The review is at: http://www.larkware.com/Reviews/FinalBuilder3.html

FinalBuilder will probably never have this "feature" of ANT

Thu, 03 Mar 2005 00:02:00 GMT

Hmmm, someones certainly has too much time on their hands, they've written a video game in ANT.

FinalBuilder does now have a console mode... but, hey, I think we'll put our efforts into supporting more 3rd party tools instead :)

Resize Firefox search bar

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 23:24:00 GMT

I've always wanted to resize the search bar in Firefox. By default it's a bit small and I didn't want to waste any more space by having the google toolbar - finally found out how to do it via Darrell Norton's blog.

Nice (mini) review of FinalBuilder

Mon, 28 Feb 2005 03:03:00 GMT

Check out what Tim Heuer has to say about FinalBuilder.

Agile Development Process

Wed, 23 Feb 2005 00:12:00 GMT

Jake Lawlor mentions on his blog a whole bunch of Agile patterns and practices to choose from when crafting your development processes.

"F. Establishing an Automated Build, Test, Source Control, Stage and Deploy Process

Automated builds refer to the automation of the many tedious steps involved in building the application components, managing source control, running unit tests and packaging and deploying the application components to the development, test and production environments. This traditionally can be an entire job description all by itself. By automating this process we eliminate a lot of manual work and potential errors due to human error. Our automated build additionally applies a source control label and creates a new versioned directory to a network location containing all files that will be applied for whatever environment is being deployed to (development, test or production). This staging directory provides for a natural rollback code base in addition to an easy location for future reference or trouble shooting!"

So, sounds like pretty good advice! Of course FinalBuilder would be the best tool to use :)

Where am I?

Thu, 10 Feb 2005 09:32:00 GMT

Check out the BlogMap! Interesting idea, wish I could zoom my map out a bit so it doesn't look like I live in the middle of no-where!

What's been going on?

Tue, 08 Feb 2005 01:45:00 GMT

Well, Vincent and I have been very quiet for the last month-and-a-half (on our blogs at least...)

Appart from the xmas break, we've been polishing and polishing and polishing FinalBuilder 3. It's been feature complete for quite some time now and it's certainly shaping up to be the most stable release yet! The major holdup for the release of FB3 is not FB3 itself, but the reimplementation of the backend customer systems. With the amount of customers who have bought FB1, FB2 Developer (with or without Software Assurance) and FB3 Enterprise (with or without Software Assurance) there are quite a few permutations of possible upgrades to FB3 Std (with or without Software Assurance) or FB3 Pro (with or without Software Assurance).

Also, there was a requirement to fully automate the order system as well as provide a better means for customers to view and download their keys. So, the new backend system deals with upgrades of existing customers automatically as well as a much better way for us to handle orders. T

here has also been some company changes... as you may have noticed FinalBuilder is no longer part of AtoZed Software. I won't go into the reasons etc, but we still have a very close relationship with AtoZed Software and we're still friends with the guys over there too :)

FinalBuilder 3 Release Date update

Wed, 22 Dec 2004 03:35:00 GMT

Ok, things have been very quiet from me lately (well, at least on this blog).

We have just undergone some company restructuring (more on this later), and the timing for releasing a new product is not ideal.

From Vincent's post on the public FB newsgroups:

"We had planned to ship FinalBuilder 3 a few weeks ago, but sadly our intended shipdate has come & gone. While the beta is very stable (and can be installed alongside FB2 BTW) we have not yet finished the documentation and are still fixing a few minor bugs. With the holiday season approaching we have decided to delay the release of FB3 until mid January 2005."

But, we have decided to make FB3 beta public :) YAY!

So, please download, test it all you want, and let us know what you think!

Installers...

Thu, 02 Dec 2004 19:49:00 GMT

Well, we've added more installer to FinalBuilder 3:

Hopefully whatever you use we've got it covered :)

The new ones added for FB3 are:

Vault 3.0 support in FinalBuilder 3.0

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 21:21:00 GMT

Just beefed up the Vault support in FinalBuilder 3.0.

FB3 adds support the Diff command and GetDiffLabel commands from Vault 3.0 to the already fairly comprehensive coverage of SourceGear Vault.

Variables enhancements in FB3

Wed, 01 Dec 2004 19:33:00 GMT

We've made a lot of cool changes in FinalBuilder 3 with variables.

This particular enhancement makes it easier to edit expressions in the action properties dialog.

When you're editing any field in the action properties dialog, you can press Ctrl-Space to display a hint of what the expression evaluates to. Also, when you type “%“ the hint shows automatically.

This next screen pic shows what happens if the expression is invalid:

And hitting F3 allows you to add a new FB variable without closing the action properties dialog :)

The Delphi Magazine reviews FinalBuilder

Sun, 28 Nov 2004 22:25:00 GMT

Coming up in the January 2005 (Issue 113) of The Delphi Magazine - Craig Murphy reviews Automated Build Studio (from AutomatedQA) and FinalBuilder (from AToZed Software): which is the best tool to help you make your software builds as painless as possible?

This one will be worth a read :)

FB makes it into the list of cool Tools Every .Net Developer should be aware of

Sat, 27 Nov 2004 18:22:00 GMT

Roy Osherove has demo'ed a list of “Cool Tools Every .Net Developer should be aware of” at the .Net Deep Dive event; FinalBuilder is listed, very cool! :)

Sending MSN messages

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 21:36:00 GMT

Here's a cool utility to send MSN messages as part of your build scripts.

I haven't tried it myself, but FinalBuilder should be able to call it fine using the execute program action.

FinalBuilder 3 gets new database actions

Fri, 26 Nov 2004 08:20:00 GMT

I've been working on adding database actions for FB3. One action is to run a stored procedure using ADO. The property page (ie. the design time editor) is worth having a look at.

Connection String - enter an ADO connection string or let the wizard build it for you.

Refresh - will load the available stored procedures of the specified database.

When a stored procedure is selected, the parameters are retrieved and allows you to set the parameter input value (which also accepts variables) and set output value to a variable.

If the stored procedure returns a result set, then this can be saved as an xml file to disk as well as output to the FinalBuilder log.

FinalBuilder 3 sneak peek (7Zip)

Thu, 25 Nov 2004 01:28:00 GMT

One of the new set of actions in FinalBuilder 3 is the support for 7Zip

7Zip is a file archiver with a very high compression ratio (30-70% better than Zip), and it also supports many other popular compression formats.

New 7Zip actions in FinalBuilder 3:

Create Archive (supports Zip, 7z, GZip, BZip2, TAR)
Test Archive (supports Zip, 7z, GZip, BZip2, TAR)
List files in Archive (supports Zip, 7z, GZip, BZip2, TAR, RAR, ARJ, CAB, CPIO, RPM, DEB, SPLIT)
Extract Archive (supports Zip, 7z, GZip, BZip2, TAR, RAR, ARJ, CAB, CPIO, RPM, DEB, SPLIT)
Update Archive (supports Zip, 7z, GZip, BZip2, TAR)
Delete file from Archive (supports Zip, 7z, GZip, BZip2, TAR)

FinalBuilder 3 is currently in Beta; the beta is open to existing customers.

FinalBuilder vs. WANT

Tue, 23 Nov 2004 08:11:00 GMT

Came across this interesting comparison between FinalBuilder and WANT, it's so interesting that it needs to be translated from Chinese to English.... yeouch! The link will translate the original using google... I spose it does a reasonable job, but it's still damn difficult to figure out what it all means.

An interesting bit:

Usability - Contact surface whether simple Yi Yong?

FinalBuilder: Yes, completely GUI Contact surface, also supports the order line
WANT: Is not too convenient, control bench procedure, when disposition must compile XML Document

So, I suppose the translation meant: FinalBuilder has a good user interface and supports the command line, but WANT is not easy to use as you must manually edit an XML document.

A couple of things they didn't seem to pick up on was that FinalBuilder can be extended through the development of plugins, and that it has an XML file format like WANT does.

And does this means they chose FB over WANT?

“Therefore, compares from the sexual price above looks, FB2 Thinks through the implementation to one every day constructs constructs improves the software mass sum management quality the company says, should be the quite good choice”

FinalBuilder 3 in Beta

Sat, 20 Nov 2004 22:43:00 GMT

FinalBuilder version 3.0 is currently in Beta.

The beta is curretly open to existing FB2 customers. And, the big news is that if you buy FinalBuilder 2 now, you'll automatically get FB3 when it ships (new purchases only, doesn't include upgrades from 1.x).

FB3 is going to be quite a big release. A huge amount of work has gone into the core, the IDE, new and updated plugins, and also a brand new plugin architecture which supports ActiveScript, COM, and native .Net plugins.

Stay tuned to Vincent's and my blog for more juicy bits-and-pieces on FB3.

Search Engine for Source Code

Thu, 18 Nov 2004 06:59:00 GMT

This is cool... it's a search engine where you specify the language (eg. c#, vb, delphi, etc.) and a search term and it searches for hits confined to files of the programming language specified. Seems that most hits come from source code stored on SourceForge.

http://www.koders.com

Yet another yet another blogger blogging about Google Desktop Search

Sun, 31 Oct 2004 02:01:00 GMT

Yeah, yeah, you've heard it all before... Google Desktop Search is cool, except it needs to also search . When the desktop search first came it, it did sound cool... but was so lacking in what it can search, I never bothered.

Well, today I finally installed Google Desktop Search, but only because I read Dan Miser's blog about it -> there's a hack to allow searching for *.pas, *.dpr, and *.cs files (instead of .cgi, .py and .pl files).

And, I do like it. Searching is instantaneous, results looks nice and familiar, and it just works :) It's also very cool how when you're searching the web (using Google) it also lists any desktop search hits on the top of the search page too.

Of course, a post about Google Desktop Search wouldn't be complete without the list of things I wished it searched, so here we go:

PocoMail .mbx mail files (plain text, and I think are in a standard RFC format?)
Miranda IM conversations

See, I'm not too demanding, am I?!

FeedDemon/Topstyle

Tue, 26 Oct 2004 19:46:00 GMT

Nick Bradbury, who created the most excellent TopStyle and FeedDemon, uses FinalBuilder for his builds.

TeamFB

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 00:20:00 GMT

Introducting TeamFB (Team FinalBuilder).

TeamFB members are FinalBuilder users who have demonstrated their excellent knowledge of FinalBuilder & configuration management in general, and a willingness to help others.

TeamFB Members:

Jon Robertson
Steve Forbes
Matthew Jones
Peter Thörnqvist
Paul Spain

TeamFB members have a close relationship with AtoZed Software, have access to private alphas & betas, and have the opportunity to influence the future direction of FinalBuilder. Please note that TeamFB members are not paid support staff, please do not send them email with support questions.

Get to know theyse guys on the FinalBuilder newsgroup: news://news.atozedsoftware.com/atozedsoftware.finalbuilder

Creating a self-signed SSL certificate for IIS

Sat, 16 Oct 2004 07:15:00 GMT

We recently had a bug report in the Vault support of FinalBuilder. The bug was that if SSL encrypted client to server communication was enabled, the Vault actions in FinalBuilder would fail. When I re-familiarised myself with the Vault command line options, I found the following:

-ssl

Enables SSL for server connection

Now, this is not the hardest of command line parameters to pass to the vault client, and indeed, the FinalBuilder code was doing exactly that... so, further investigation as to why the FB action was failing had to be done.

So, after updating our vault client and server to the latest version, the next thing was to enable SSL. This quickly turned into a larger task than I was hoping for - SSL requires a certificate in IIS; you have to generate a certificate request file, sign up to a certificate provider (instantSSL, Comodo, Thawte, etc, etc), get a trial certificate, and then install the certificate in IIS. One of the problems with this series of steps is that the certificate provider has to verify your identity (via faxing your details to them or some other low-tech stuff....) and this can take some time, time that we didn't have to solve this seemingly simple problem.

So, getting the the point, you can self-sign your certificate files. Of course, if this was for an ecommerce website for customers, it wouldn't be a great idea to have a non-trustworthy certificate provider... but for a development box, it's perfect.

Here's the link to the tutorial I used to get IIS working in SSL including creating a self signed SSL certificate:

http://www.dylanbeattie.net/docs/openssl_iis_ssl_howto.html

This turned out to be exactly what was required. We got SSL working, Vault was happy, and the problem was diagnosed and fixed. It turned out that the vault client was outputting ssl information to stdout before the xml tag, and that caused FinalBuilder to fail parsing the xml output, and hence the action was reported as failed (even though it probably succeeded).

a small conversation negotiating with a colleague over a file in a version control system

Tue, 28 Sep 2004 02:28:00 GMT

Ok, this is pretty off-topic.... but is quite funny. This conversation just took place at one of the places where I do a bit of consulting work. The person's name has been changed to Joe... to protect their identity (and it's not Vincent or any of the AtoZed team). Enjoy.

4:11:56 PM tate: Joe, do you still need the tlb stuff checked out?
4:12:07 PM Joe.: yes
4:12:12 PM tate: how long?
4:13:36 PM Joe.: 5 mins to longer, I thought I knew what I wanted, to add, but upon closer inspection, I am not sure, so, if you need it, I can check it back in
4:13:52 PM tate: i can wait 5 minutes.
4:13:58 PM Joe.: to longer?
4:14:13 PM tate: to longer?
4:14:41 PM Joe.: ok 5 mins
4:15:08 PM tate: Google: No definitions were found for "to longer"
4:15:29 PM Joe.: checked in.
4:15:32 PM tate: ta :)

Heading home

Fri, 17 Sep 2004 23:16:00 GMT

We're all heading home after a pretty busy conference. Vincent and I are waiting in San Francisco airport trying to catch up with email, newsgroups etc. We appologise to everyone if our newsgroup and email support has been a bit slow over the last week. Today was spent doing the tourist thing around SF, I managed to take 101 photos over a 5 hour period - not bad eh?

Skype. Awesome product. Vincent blogged about it before. Pretty much the whole AtoZed team use it, and we all love it. I've been able to talk to my family at home (in Australia) at length and not have to worry about how much it's going to cost. 30 minute skype calls are the norm and don't cost a cent (it's pc to pc of course). Last year was a different story, we'd make very quick phone calls using mobile (cell) phones with global roaming - each call would cost way too much.

Programs Roy Osherove can't live without.

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 02:47:00 GMT

Roy mentions a bunch of programs that he can't live without - and FinalBuilder gets a mention!

Check it out here.

BorCon 2004 - Day... ummm, three, maybe?

Thu, 16 Sep 2004 02:30:00 GMT

Ok, it's all starting to blur a bit now - and it's not because last night was a bit of a heavy one... well maybe that is the reason. Anyway, good day to meet and greet people today and we're getting a lot of interest for both FinalBuilder and Intraweb.

Some of the big news is that Intraweb 7.2 will be bundled with the next version of Delphi (codenamed “DiamondBack”). So congratulations to the Intraweb team on that one.

Numbers for BorCon were a bit down from last year, so dissapointing for everyone there - apparently there were around 1,500 delegates. Anyway, last day tomorrow and we'll all be heading home.

The AtoZed Booth

Tue, 14 Sep 2004 13:45:00 GMT

So, it's BorCon Day 2 now. Day 1 was a bit of a non-event really (as far as an exhibitor goes)... just the opening ceremony in the evening. The only traffic through the exhibitor hall were either other exhibitors or people doing pre-conference tutorials.

Anyway, we got the booth set up and got into the swing of things:

From the left we have: Leena, Olaf, Jason (from Arcana Technology), Chad, Vincent.

Also notice that the lolly bowl is full... even though we didn't have many visitors, the lolly supply was quite depleted at the end of the day.

Danny on .Net 2.0 through the eyes of Nick

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 00:27:00 GMT

http://www.lemanix.com/nick/archive/2004/09/11/1261.aspx

well worth the read....

BorCon 2004 - Day 0

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 00:10:00 GMT

Vincent and I flew in from Australia today to San Fransisco... it was a rather long flight, especially being cramped in “toilet class” (ie. the very back of the plane). I managed to get a little sleep, and Vincent a bit less than that!

Here is the entrance (well, exit for us) of the airpot:

And then we stood back and admired the wonderful view:

I'm not sure how I managed to take a photo without a car, pickup, or taxi getting in the way... pure luck I spose.

So, after taking a shuttle bus from San Fransisco to San Jose (about an hour south) we checked into the hotel and went and found the conference centre:

It is setting up day today (and tomorrow) for the vendor area - and this is how it starts out:

That's all for today, too tired... must sleep.

Automating Code Signing

Fri, 03 Sep 2004 19:04:00 GMT

Matthew Jones has a great article on the basics of Code Signing.

And, of course, “To actually sign the code, I used FinalBuilder to make sure it is done each time and every time reliably”

Code Signing is much more relevant to your downloadable files now that WinXP SP2 checks for it when downloading a file with IE.

Longhorn FAQ

Mon, 30 Aug 2004 19:52:00 GMT

With Microsofts recent announcements of Longhorn in 2006, WinFS, Avalon, etc, I found this FAQ quite informative.

Future Development Platform.

Mon, 16 Aug 2004 23:25:00 GMT

We recently surveyed the existing FinalBuilder customers, and one of the questions was “What do you see as your future development platform?” - here are the results.

So, not many surprises here.

Without giving too much away, the future of FinalBuilder development will also be a combination of the Windows32 and .Net platforms. Maybe we'll have something to show at Borcon in September :)

More Tech.Ed thoughts.

Fri, 06 Aug 2004 04:00:00 GMT

It's damn boring when the sessions are on. Blah, blah, blah.... no one to talk to, and there's only so many business cards I can type into Excel before my brain tries to switch off. Oh, and the wireless network is shocking today (provided by Telstra - oh gee, we love Telstra in Australia), it drops out almost too often to be useful.

One thing we have noticed is that that a lot of the attendees are “System Admin” types - probably at a rough guess it'd be something like 50% developers, 40% Sys Admins, and 10% of other types. I'd be nice if we could talk about what we've got planned in the Sys Admin space - maybe in a few months... ;)

Tech.Ed Aussie style day 1

Thu, 05 Aug 2004 22:27:00 GMT

Well, the amount of people here is amazing. We thought there was a lot on Day 0.... but geez.... multiply that by about 3...! The booth has been pretty busy in the morning, but cooled off a lot in the afternoon - we need some sort of attraction to bring people here (I'm thinking maybe a free XBox or a couple of boothbabes :)

The layout of Tech.Ed is fantastic - all the vendors are around the outside of a pretty big hall, and it's in this hall that people eat, drink, and chat. There are lounge chairs, and normal tables and chairs all though the hall, so it's great for both the delegates and the exhibitors.

Tech.Ed Australia Day 0

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 19:56:00 GMT

The exhibition might have only been open for half a day (3pm to 8pm) but I'm stuffed already. The croud was pretty good - especially since Day 0 is free for anyone! The (primarily) Microsoft crowd was very receptive to hear about FinalBuilder, so hopefully the event will be a big success.

The booth:

The best build tool by far!

Wed, 04 Aug 2004 17:18:00 GMT

“Best Build Tool

No competition. This is a brand new category, so no one knew what to expect. What happened was a blowout, with Atozed Software's FinalBuilder taking 79% of the vote.”

source: http://delphizine.com/newsletterarticle/2004/08/di200408jc_l/di200408jc_l.asp

Awards (again)

Sun, 01 Aug 2004 21:56:00 GMT

Patric just blogged about the three Delphi Informant Magazine awards which AtoZed won- here they are as images :)

Version Control System.

Sat, 31 Jul 2004 01:52:00 GMT

We recently surveyed the existing FinalBuilder customers, and one of the questions was “Which Version Control System do you use?”.

So, a few interesting things from these results:

a. I forgot to include Perforce (doh!) and almost all of the “Other” people specified Perforce.

b. A very high percentage are using VSS - higher than we thought. During development of FB2 we started rewriting the VSS actions to use the VSS command line interface instead of COM - but we abandoned that because we couldn't make it backwards compatible. We may resurect this project though, as the COM based interface to VSS can be unreliable - but any new actions would be in addition to what already exists.

c. We also have more users than we expected using FreeVCS.

d. It's interesting that nobody who answered the survey uses Accurev or Surround SCM - the nature of FB means that it's very important to support as many VCS's as possible... maybe the Accurev and Surround SCM users haven't bought FB because we don't have native support?

e. FB currently has native support for Perforce, VSS, StarTeam, CVS, QVCS, Team Coherence, and Vault - which accounts for 68% of our users. So not too bad, but we will improve that soon :)

Your thoughts?

Some people don't automate.

Mon, 26 Jul 2004 20:04:00 GMT

As well as being a 3-day-a-week programmer for FinalBuilder, I also do the odd bit of consulting. One company I have been consulting to for a while now has a huge FinalBuilder project to build their software products. The build script was a bit out of date (!!!) and so I was asked to spend a few hours modifying it to make it easier to maintain and add support for new parts of their build process.

This was all fine, and I especially like working on real FB build scripts so that I can actually use the software I help write (and it's amazing what things I'd like to change - but maybe that's a topic for another blog entry...).

Anyway... what I came up against was, to me, a little strange. There is one employee (lets call him Fred) who seems to be just fine with things the way they are. For example, one step in the build process is to burn a master CD for distributing to customers; the build script copies all the relevant files to a directory on a particular machine which has a burner, then someone has to physically go to the machine, open up Nero, create a new project, add the files, name the CD, burn it, verify it, and wait for it to pop out. I get tired just typing it, but Fred prefers to do it this way instead of setting up a “Create ISO” action in FinalBuilder to build an ISO image on the build machine which anyone can then use to burn the master CD.

Of course, we could also do the burn on the build machine automatically - but one step at a time, eh? I am a little lost as to why people are like this - the investment of their time to automate the task will pay off after doing the task manually once or twice (not a bad ROI...). I suppose it's an education and trust thing, Fred does trust the rest of the build process in FB, so why not trust one extra step? And, before I told Fred about the CD burning and ISO creation capability he didn't know they existed - but now he does.... SO NO EXCUSES!

Anyway, I feel better I have it off my chest now, and I can get back to some more coding :)

Microsoft Tech.Ed Australia

Tue, 20 Jul 2004 19:58:00 GMT

It's time for Microsofts developer conference in Australia.

Tech.Ed 2004 | National Convention and Exhibition Centre | Canberra - 3 - 6 August 2004

AtoZed Software will be exhibiting - with Vincent & I manning the booth. If you're attending the conference and you're an existing FinalBuilder customer (or not!), we'd love to catch up with you - make sure you drop by and say hello!

If you're not attending the full conference, then you can visit the Exhibit area between 3:00pm and 8:00pm, Tuesday 3rd August for FREE, but you must register (it also includes the Microsoft Tech.Ed Welcome Reception).

WebDAV is a pain in the...

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 19:58:00 GMT

FinalBuilder now uses WebDAV as an optional way to update a VisualStudio.NET web projects' Assembly Info. Sounds rather simple, huh? Not as simple at it should be IMHO... The most annoying part of WebDAV is all the IIS security around it - it takes hours to figure out why certain files can't be uploaded or downloaded. Most of the doco out there regarding WebDAV and IIS security is how to lock it all down to prevent unauthorised access; there's virtually nothing which tells you how to open things up a bit so it's easier for developers to update their files (from a non-Microsoft tool at least).

Which brings me to my next (rambling) point - it seems that when MS uses WebDAV (and it seems they use it quite a bit with things like Exchange and VS.Net) it all just works perfectly and without the user even knowing it's WebDAV under the covers... MS-2-MS stuff works quite nicely thankyou. But it's when a 3rd parties want to speak WebDAV to MS that things get a bit hairy.... I'll leave it at that, I feel better now ;)

Icons

Fri, 11 Jun 2004 07:17:00 GMT

Icons are a real pain for us developers - so why do we use them so much?

Click here for article.

Testing the UI

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 01:31:00 GMT

How does one test the usability of the magnificient UI you've just created?

I presume that most times, the UI is created with the developers personal tastes in mind and then during a beta cycle, feedback from a few testers may finetune it a bit. Then, when the real users get to it, they may or may not be able to figure out how to use it.

What would be fantastic, though, if we could watch people using the software to see how they actually use it (or how they actually can't use it...).

Jon Udell briefly discusses this same thing is his blog, and points to TechSmith's Morae and UsersFirst's VisualMark (still in beta) as two software packages which “use live video and screen video, in combination, to observe and analyze how people really use (or fail to use) software”

BorCon 2003 (a Lino blast from the past).

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 03:39:00 GMT

Thinking about Lino and his gang, how could I forget Lino at his best from BorCon 2003 ?

Click here for the full sized image.

Here is the Photo Gallery of BorCon 2003 through Olaf's camera.

ADUG FalafelCon....

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 03:36:00 GMT

The Australian Delphi User's Group recently had a “Mini BorCon” - The Delphi .NET Conference. - Hosted by ADUG, by special arrangement with Falafel Software, and in association with Borland

The speakers were:

The hugely successfull event was run over two days in Sydney, and then the presenters repeated the feat in Melbourne. It was a really great event packed with heaps of info and American accents - well, except Glenn of course. It was even funnier that when Lino told the same jokes that he told before, we all still laughed at them - must be the way he tells them :)

Snap!

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 01:11:00 GMT

Was just having a look at Corbin Dunn's new blog and noticed all the WRX's that park at the Borland offices...

This is my ride - geez, I just love it when it rains :)

Also, Petter Solberg (Subaru World Rally Team) just won the Acropolis Rally.

Late Introduction

Sat, 05 Jun 2004 07:44:00 GMT

Ok, I better introduce myself....

My name is Tate Needham, and I am employed by AtoZed Software as a developer of FinalBuilder (the best build automation tool available!). I also do odd bits of contracting work, as well as computer parts and systems retail. Life is pretty busy, work wise, and also because of my two kids and wife! I'm also in the process of putting together a Home Theatre PC (HTPC) based on MythTV - which is proving to be quite a challenging learning experience, but that's another story...

How do you read blogs?

Fri, 28 May 2004 22:00:00 GMT

I've just started to use FeedDemon from Bradbury Software to read blogs... very nice piece of software I must say.

You can set up channel groups and watches, it's very easy to add new rss feeds (and it discovers them automatically), and it has a cool “Group Newspaper” feature that shows the latest posts of a group in a newspaper type layout.

Virtual Worlds

Fri, 28 May 2004 19:43:00 GMT

Came across this very interesting article this morning:

http://www.walrusmagazine.com/04/05/06/1929205.shtml

It talks about virtual worlds, and more specifically how they actually have real economies.

“[EverQuest] was the seventy-seventh richest country in the world. And it didn't even exist.”

Quite amazing actually; people trade virtual goods in the real world and some people actually make their living from it. I'm downloading There.com just to have a look what all the fuss is about - although, I know I don't have time to play the game properly... unless I get hooked of course ;)

1st post

Fri, 28 May 2004 02:19:00 GMT

Righto... here we go... ummm.. testing...