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The IDE has two new themes, Dark and Light (yes, imaginatively named!). The IDE defaults to Dark on first run, however you can change the theme in the options quite easily. The themes are still a work in progress, we are waiting on an update from a third party control vendor to resolve some issues.
Debugger
One of the most asked for features now available in FinalBuilder 8, stepping into included projects. In FinalBuilder 7 and earlier, you could only step over included projects, and wait for them to return. In FinalBuilder 8, you can step into the included project, if it is not already opened the IDE will open the project and switch to it automatically. To make this possible, there are now "Step Into" and "Step Over" functions. The Step into/over now also applies to targets (see below).
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ActionLists renamed to Targets
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.
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In FinalBuilder 7 and earlier, projects had a Main and an OnFailure (global error handler) actionlist. In FinalBuilder 8, projects just have a Default Target. Older projects will be imported such that the Main and OnFailure Targets are called from the Default Target inside a try/catch block.
Run Target Action
You can now return values from Targets (ie out parameters) .
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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 evaluator has a new parser that will allow us to more easily extend the syntax in the future. The User variable namespace was removed, it caused too many problems with projects not running under other users, not running on the build server etc. Use Project variables instead.
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New Project File Formats
FinalBuilder has used an xml XML file format since version 1, however a common complaint over the years, has been that it is difficult to diff file versions. FinalBuilder 8 has tackled this in two ways.
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| Code Block | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
project
begin
projectid = {04710B72-066E-46E7-84C7-C04A0D8BFE18}
target
begin
name = Default
targetid = {E6DE94D6-5484-45E9-965A-DB69885AA5E2}
rootaction
begin
action.group
begin
id = {D860420B-DE46-4806-959F-8A92A0C86429}
end
end
end
end |
A new xml XML format (.fbx8), much less verbose than the old format.
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Compressed project files (.fbz8) use the dsl DSL format internally (compressed projects are just a zip file with a project.fbp8 inside it).
The default project file encoding is now UTF-8, which is more version control friendly (some version control systems treat utf-16 as binaries),.