I am a programmer with C++ background. While working with our Final Builder project, I regularly would enter VBScript that had syntax errors. With the project taking about an hour to process (or at least a long time) iterating on these error ate a lot of time.
It seems some of the errors in script would even manifest when evaluating other scripts. We started with FB4 when I was making these changes.
Was there steps I was missing that would have smoothed this process or are there new features in the more current versions that would facilitate finding the problems faster?
We are moving forward and evaluating software solutions right now and would like to know as much as I can about this area of Final Builder Development.
There are no advances on this in the current version. Unfortunately the nature of VBScript is such that it is difficult to validate them. The active scripting engine does have the ability to syntax check scripts, however I have found that was completely unreliable so never implemented it in FinalBuilder. It would often show errors where there were none, and then miss obvious errors.
FWIW, if you are a C++ programmer then you might be better off using JavaScript, as the syntax is much closer.
Something we have planned for a future version is a new script editor, which will do semantic parsing of the scripts and highlight syntax errors. I was hoping we would have this done for FB6, but that didn’t happen due to time and manpower constraints. We did get the VBScript parser working quite nicely, but Javascript, Powershell and Iron Python still need to be implemented. The VBScript parser took about 2 months to implement and it was the simplest of the languages… the dynamic nature of the other languages will require much more effort. We’re recruiting at the moment, I’m hoping we can get someone on board soon who I can assign this task to.