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ActionLists have been renamed to Targets. Targets can now also define dependencies, so you can for example define Clean, Build, Test, and have Test depend on Build. If you execute the Test target, and Build has not already been executed, it will be executed first before Test. Targets can be specified on the command line.
TODO: Insert image here once theme applied to grid control.
In FinalBuilder 7 and earlier, projects had a Main and an OnFailure (global error handler) actionlist. In FinalBuilder 8, projects just have a Default targetTarget. Older projects will be imported such that the Main and OnFailure Targets are called from the Default Target inside a try/catch block.
The execution behavior of imported projects remains the same. If OnFailure has no actions, it is still imported however the Run Target action generated for it will be disabled.
Run Target Action
You can now return values from Targets (ie out parameters) .
TODO : screenshot.
IDE Themes
New light and dark visual themes (a work in progress).
Non Visible Changes
Stepping Engine
The stepping engine was rewritten to enable stepping into included projects, and to enable target dependencies. This, work, together with the new variables architecture is where the bulk of effort/time was spent in the FinalBuilder 8 development cycle.
Variables Architecture
The variables architecture and the expression evaluator were rewritten to resolve several corner case issues that we were not able to resolve in FinalBuilder 7. The expression evaulator has a new parser that will allow us to more easily extend the syntax in the future.
IDE
Changes to the messaging has allowed us to improve the performance of the IDE, with much less thread switching.
CLR Hosting
The minimum CLR version is now .NET 4.0 (ie FinalBuilder requires .net 4.0 to be installed).
FBCmd
The command line parameters have changed to be more consistent and easier to specify. You can also specify one or more targets to execute (when not specified, the default target is executed).