A Boatload of Releases

Just a couple hours now, and it’s July 1, the target date for a huge number of releases scheduled here at RemObjects Software – some officially promised on the ROadmap, some simply targeted internally.

What can i say – we got impatient with all the waiting, and so the new bits are online now, available for everyone. The appropriate announements are in the works and coming in the next couple days – but as always, you hear it here, first.

So let’s see, what have Santa’s Dwarfs* brought you, this time around?

Let’s start with the big one, especially since he has seen so little (public) attention from us, compared to his brothers and sisters: Chrome 1.5.3. Once again, the version number is misleading, as Chrome 1.5.3 is an enourmous release. It’s hard to believe that over half a year has gone by since our last public release (and it’s even harder, for me, to wrap my mind around all the new stuff – mainly because we’ve been seeing all of it as small incremental changes accumulating over the half year), but the new interim release comes packed with a load of new features, from improved editing experience over the new MSBuild project format to new language enhancements and literally hundreds of small tweaks and fixes.

What’s more, the Chrome family has been increased by a new SKU that we’re very excited about (and i will probably talk about more in further posts): the all new Chrome with Visual Studio. That’s right. With Visual Studio.

Starting today, we have a new SKU of Chrome for sale which will make those of you happy that have been eyeing Chrome from a distance, but stayed away because they don’t own Visual Studio, yet. For the small price of EUR 249,- (EUR 199,- if you’re a Delphi user and using our competitive upgrade) you get not only the Chrome compiler and integration for Visual Studio – you get Visual Studio 2005 as well! All in one convenient package, an entire .NET development suite for Pascal fans.

I personally think that’s a pretty unbeatable price, wouldn’t you agree?

Ok, but moving on, what’s next? The RemObjects Framework, consisting of our original pair of products: RemObjects SDK and Data Abstract, both for Delphi and .NET.

The last (and for DA4/Delphi, initial) release is just two months past, but a lot has happened since then. We have majorly focused on improving documentation in this cycle (and i personally spent most of the past 2 months in doc-o-matic, cranking out the 500+ new help topics). We’re written entirely new reference help for the two Delphi SKUs, completey from scratch. We’ve also added some twenty-to-forty (i lost count, eventually) new general “concept” topics that explain and cover various aspects of the library, from architecture to information how to leverage certain features; most of these are shared between the Delphi and .NET edtions.

We’ve also vastly reworked our samples, cleaned them up, removed the ones that were no good (and i’ll openly admit there were a few of those), added new ones and generally made sure all of them present the products as well as they could and are intuitive and helpful to use. We’ve also added extensive “*.Sample.html” files to each of em, explaining the purpose of each sample. The bulk of the credit for this amazing accomplishment must go to Mike, as well as Evgeny and Alexander – the two newest additions to our team.

Finally, we’ve also (while we were at it, so to speak ;) addressed a huge number of issues, bugs and feature requests on the library and tools side of things, across all four products. It’s hard to imagine that any user of RO and DA will update to build .495 and not find something that positively affects him or her. Credit for that, mostly, must go to Carlo, who has been relentlessly cranking out fix after fix and ehancement after enhancement, putting all the rest of us to shame.

What’s next? Minor update releases have been made to Internet Pack, Hydra 2 and Pascal Script. These three prodcuts have gotten a handful of fixes here and there, mainly to keep them up with the new versions of RO and DA. Hydra, of course, will be seeing a major new verison later this year – we have exciting (very exciting) stuff planned for it, so be sure to stay tuned for more details on this – and trust me, there will be something for you even (or especially) if you’re not currently a Hydra user.

Last but not least, there’s of course our new DevStudio, which i blogged about more extensively, yesterday. It wraps together all out .NET products in one convenient installer and – together with the new Chrome for VisualStudio – forms a complete development suite for .NET developers.

All in all, i think this forms a pretty exciting set of releases for one day, and i sincerely hope that – whatever part of our products you personaly are using – there is something of interest for you in there!

Now if you’ll excuse me, i need to get back to work on the next set of releases…

Yours,
marc hoffman
Chief Architect
RemObjects Software

*if you pardon the bad movie reference