ComponentSource News | VSoft Technologies

Automise 4 released

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 11:34:06 GMT

Editing a BeforeAction in VBScript.

Adds an improved IDE which allows multiple projects to be opened, plus new actions and full Unicode support.

Automise is a Windows automation tool for system administrators and IT professionals that reduces the need for writing script to empower anyone to automate Windows. Automate with Automise to free yourself from repetitive tasks and provide faster, more reliable and consistent results. With Automise it's easy to create and maintain an automation project with drag-and-drop in its graphical interface. Once finished, anyone can run a project with a single click, keystroke or automatically on a schedule and save time with the power to run tasks automatically.

Updates in 4.0

IDE Changes
The new IDE allows multiple projects to be opened for editing (as opposed to Automise 3 which only allows a single project to be opened at a time). To complement this feature the new IDE includes docking which will allow you to re-arrange the tabs to your taste. A number of other improvements have been made throughout the IDE to improve the experience of creating and maintaining your Automise projects. These improvements include:

Improvements To Variable Manipulation
Automise 4 allows you to cut, copy and paste variables. Multiple variables can be cut, copied or pasted in a single operation when using the Variable Editor Dialog. When editing variables from the Project Tree, you can only cut and copy single variables at a time, however you can copy a group (containing multiple variables from the tree) and paste multiple variables at once using the project tree.

Variable Renaming Support
In Automise 4 when you rename a variable, all references to the old variable name will be updated, to save you digging through your project in an attempt to find where you used your variable.

Remove Unused Project Variables
Automise 4 will allow you to remove any project variables that are not referenced throughout your project.

Core Changes
A number of changes went into the Automise Core for version 4. These changes will affect both the Automise IDE and ATCMD.

Unicode Support
Automise is now compiled with a Unicode aware compiler. This was a big change which now allows Automise to support Unicode formats. You may notice that some of the text file actions now include options to specify the encoding to be used when creating the file, this was previously not possible with Automise.

Variable Types
In previous versions of Automise all variables were implemented as variants, which are a flexible type that allow you to store value of various types. In most cases variants are sufficient, but in some cases they are not so practical. For instance if you wanted to store a string "03" in a variant, you need to wrap the value in quotes otherwise the value will be interpreted as a number and next time the value is retrieved, Automise will get 3 (rather than 03). In Automise 4 you can specify a type for a variable for those cases where you want a specific data type to be used.

When a typed variable is created, you also have the option to also provide a format string. This can be used to ensure that whenever a specific variable is retrieved it will be in the desired format. Say you had a variable of type integer that you always wanted to padded to 4 digits, setting the format string to %.4d would allow this.

Local Variables
Automise 4 introduces local variables which allow you to create a variable for temporary use. Local variables are ideal for situations where you only need a variable to store data for a small operation of a few actions. The Action Group action has an additional property page that allows you to define local variables. Any variables you define for a particular Action Group can only be referenced by the child actions of the action group. Local Variables are designed for temporary use only and cannot be persisted or used as environment variables.

New Actions
The following new actions are included for the initial release of Automise 4:

FTPS Actions - Perform FTPS operations
EC2 Actions - Manage EC2 instances from Automise
Secure ZIP Actions - Archive files using 256-bit AES encryption
Hyper V Actions - Manage your Hyper V virtual machines
SSH Actions - Run SSH Commands
WBAdmin Actions - Perform advanced backup and recovery operations
FTP Mirror Action - Mirror files and directory structure from local directory to FTP server or vice versa. Also provides the option to overwrite files that exist in both source and destination based on file size, file date and file CRC (where FTP server supports CRC)
Exit Loop Action - Exit out of a loop action before the loop condition is satisfied
XML Node Exists Action - Check whether a node exists in an XML document
Improvements to CD/Burning/Imaging Actions - Changes to CD Burning/ ISO actions to provide full Unicode support

About VSoft Technologies

VSoft Technologies is passionate about software - especially about creating something that is easy to use, very powerful, and which their customers just love. The company has been in business since 1996, and in that time has developed two great automation products based on the same proven technology. If you are a software developer, FinalBuilder will help you get that product onto the market by automating your build processes. For other IT Professionals, Automise can free you from repetitive tasks and make them faster and more reliable through the power of visual Windows automation.

FinalBuilder Server now available

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:17:00 GMT

Viewing the Server Overview with FinalBuilder Server.

Centralize build management through a Web interface enabling remote control over build projects.

FinalBuilder Server simplifies the implementation of sophisticated build, test and release systems and centralizes build management to provide you with complete control over your build system. With FinalBuilder Server, you'll always know the status of your build because important build information is made easily accessible. A central status page gives a quick overview of the health of all your latest builds. Digging deeper, you can access complete build logs, build history and metrics to get in-depth information about every aspect of your automated build processes.

Features

Graphical Interface
FinalBuilder presents a build process in a logically structured, graphical interface. Any software developer can define and maintain a build with FinalBuilder, without learning a new XML schema or scripting language.
600+ Built-in Actions
With over 600 built-in scripts, called actions, FinalBuilder has an action to automate every common task in a build process. It also integrates with your existing compiler, version control and testing tools.
Integrated Debugging
A debugging engine is fully integrated into the FinalBuilder IDE. You can step between actions, set break points and set variable watches to debug your build process.
Continuous Integration Server
FinalBuilder Professional includes a full featured Continuous Integration and Automated Build server to build and test your code the moment it is checked-in to version control.
Advanced Flow Control
FinalBuilder includes Try, Catch actions for localized error handling; as well as all the loops and conditional statements you get in a full programming language.
Scheduled Builds
FinalBuilder provides tight integration with the windows scheduling service, which allows builds to be scheduled to run daily, weekly or whenever you wish.
Detailed Logging
Output from all actions in the build process is directed to the build log. The log maintains the same tree structure as the action lists, which makes it easy to find your way in the log file. Logs can be exported in HTML, XML or text formats.
Email, MSN, FTP & SFTP Support
Your build process can email the results of the build to you, so for example if the build fails, it can export the log, attach it to an email and send it to you. Or it can send you an ICQ message. You can announce successful builds on nntp news servers.
Variables
Using variables is the key to making your build process dynamic. Use variables to pass information from one action to another, and also to enable actions to use user specific or machine specific values.
Version Control Integration
FinalBuilder supports more than a dozen version control systems out-of-the-box, so it can get, checkout, tag and perform other build related operations with your existing revision control system.
Rich Web Interface
FinalBuilder's Web interface has been carefully crafted to combine functionality with usability. Enjoy an accelerated web experience with AJAX status pages, logs, properties pages and flash based build metrics.
Build Metrics
More than just the numbers, FinalBuilder Server's build metrics provide an insight into the quality of your builds over the life of the software project. These interactive charts expose trends in compiler errors, unit test results and help compiler errors.
Web Accessible Build Logs
Comprehensive record keeping is built into FinalBuilder and so is a straightforward method to access this information remotely. Get remote access to the finer details of your build using the dynamic or static logs.
Team Management
FinalBuilder Server integrates seamlessly with your existing Active Directory accounts to make team management a breeze. The built-in team system also provides customizable security roles and permissions for interaction with projects, triggers, server configuration and more.
Triggers & Conditions
In addition to continuous integration triggers, FinalBuilder Server provides a triggers to execute a build at a specified time, interval, process output or file event. Conditions are also available to give you control over your build triggers.
Build Notifications
Continuous feedback is an important counterpart to continuous integration. With FinalBuilder Server, your automated build process can deliver continuous feedback about build results via email, RSS and tray notification.

About VSoft Technologies

VSoft Technologies is passionate about software - especially about creating something that is easy to use, very powerful, and which its customers love. The company has been in business since 1996, and in that time has developed two great automation products based on the same proven technology. If you are a software developer, FinalBuilder will help you get that product onto the market by automating your build processes. For other IT Professionals, Automise can free you from repetitive tasks and make them faster and more reliable through the power of visual Windows automation.

FinalBuilder 7.0 features new IDE

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 18:05:00 GMT

Running a build process in FinalBuilder.

FinalBuilder 7 features Unicode support and includes a new IDE capable of opening multiple projects.

FinalBuilder is an automated build and release management solution for Windows software developers and SCM (Software Change Management) professionals. Use FinalBuilder to define, debug, maintain, run and schedule reliable and repeatable build processes. Software projects are inherently complex, and creating a build process can be fraught with errors and oversights. FinalBuilder is an automated build and release management tool that makes it easy to define and maintain a reliable and repeatable build process.

Updates in 7.0

NEW IDE
FinalBuilder 7 sports a new IDE. The FinalBuilder 7 IDE is capable of opening multiple projects (whereas FB6 only allows 1 at a time). The new IDE includes docking, something that has been requested many times over the years, so you can lay out the IDE to suite your taste. There are many little enhancements and tweaks in the IDE. The most requested feature that has been implemented is the renaming of variables. In FB6, when you rename a variable it does not rename references to it in the project. FB7 will attempt to find and rename all references
Unicode Support
FinalBuilder is now compiled with a Unicode aware compiler. The native internal string type is UTF16, and VSoft Technologies have worked hard to ensure that all actions that work with files respect the original files encoding.
Variable Types
In FinalBuilder 6 and earlier, all FinalBuilder variables are implemented as Variants. Those of you who have done some COM programming, or used Visual Basic 6 or earlier, or Delphi might be familiar with Variants. A Variant is a type that can store values of various types. Variants are very useful in many cases, but are not without their problems. For example, if you want to store a string "03" in a variant, you will have to put the double quotes around the 03, otherwise it is not known if it's not a number. To circumvent this problem, in FinalBuilder 7 you can specify the variable type. When you specify a variable type, that is how the variable will be treated, so for example if you attempt to assign a string value to an integer variable it will fail. Typed variables also allow you to specify a format string, which will be used when the variable is evaluated in an expression. For example, if you have a build number variable, that you always want to use as 4 digits, with zeros padding out the left, setting the format string to %.4d will do this.
Local Variables
In addition to the existing variable scopes (environment, application,user, project) and action list parameters, FinalBuilder 7 includes a local variable scope. The Action Group Action has a new property page that allows you to define the local variables. These variables are only visible to child actions of the group. Since groups can be nested, this provides the ability to override variables locally, and define variables for temporary use. Local variables cannot be persisted and cannot be used as environment variables.
New Actions
As with every new release there are a number of additional actions: NDepend Action, Git Actions, Plastic SCM Actions, Check If Host Exists Action, SetupBuilder Actions, SecureZIP Actions, Signtool Actions, Hyper V Actions, Mercurial Actions, SSH Actions, XML Node Exists Action

About VSoft Technologies

VSoft Technologies is passionate about software - especially about creating something that is easy to use, very powerful, and which our customers just love. The company has been in business since 1996, and in that time has developed two great automation products based on the same proven technology. If you are a software developer, FinalBuilder will help you get that product onto the market by automating your build processes. For other IT Professionals, Automise can free you from repetitive tasks and make them faster and more reliable through the power of visual Windows automation.

VSoft releases Automise V3.0

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Editing a BeforeAction in VBScript.

Latest version includes new actions, better performance and IDE improvements.

Updates in V3.0

Core Improvements

Windows PowerShell & IronPython
PowerShell and IronPython are now supported alongside VBScript and JavaScript as Automise scripting languages. This means that any action can be extended with PowerShell or Python script events, and it is also possible to create PowerShell and Python based custom actions with ActionStudio.
Action Logging
Action log output is now tagged and color-coded according to Errors, Warnings, Success and Information. It is possible to filter the log display in the IDE according to these output tags (for example, to show only Error & Warning output.)
Hierarchical Logging
Actions now produce hierarchical log output, so related messages are grouped together in the log tree.
Performance
Automise is now faster to start up, and runtime performance has dramatically improved. Live logging performance has also increased markedly over previous versions.
Improved Output Quality
All frequently used actions have been visited and revamped, with a view to improving the quality and usefulness of log output.
Automatic Descriptions
Automatic descriptions for all commonly used actions have been revisited and improved. This make it easy to create a self-documenting project.
Action Output Monitors
The new Action Output Monitor feature allows you to watch for particular patterns of log output from an action. The action's behaviour can be modified depending on the output, or specific messages can be captured or suppressed from the action log.
Error Dialog Monitor
This new feature allows you to monitor a third party application for error dialogs popped up while running an action. Dialogs can be automatically dismissed, as appropriate. This is useful when working with poorly-written third party tools that display dialogs when running in an automated mode.
New user info file
The various user-specific .atd,.atw,.atp files used in previous versions have been converted into one common .atpinf file, with all user-specific data for the project. This file also contains information on the current layout of the project tree, which makes the project file more version-control friendly.

IDE Improvements

IDE Action Types and Options Filter
The IDE Action Types view has been heavily revamped with a new, smarter, search system. This makes it easier to find the action that you're looking for. The same new view has been added to the Options dialog.
IDE Welcome Page
The new Welcome Page provides quick and easy startup, introductory information, and quick navigation to commonly used starting points.
IDE Redesign
The layout of the Run Status and Run History tabs have been rearranged for improved usability and performance. It is now possible to watch the Run Status and the project layout at the same time.
Live Logging Improvements
Enabling live logging while the project is running now shows any existing output from the current running action.
Validation
Action validation errors are now hyperlinks to the source of the failure (action or option pages.)
Easy Scripting of Action Properties
Selecting any action property in the Properties tab (formerly called the Action Inspector) now automatically displays the fragment of script used to access that property from an action script event.
Project Author and Notes
The Project Tree has new fields for project author and any notes about the project. These fields are displayed in the Project Information node, as well as on the Welcome Page in the recent projects section.
Project Information in Project Tree
The Project Tree now includes a project information node that provides detailed information about the current project.
Variable Groups
Variables can now be grouped for easier management.
Variable Suggestion
Press F12 while editing any action property field to automatically see a list of suggested variables to substitute for hard-coded strings. This feature makes it much easier to create a robust and maintainable project.
Global Script Editor Enhancements
Find and Replace has been added to the Global Script Editor as well as many other usability enhancements like better resizing of the window, works with dual monitor setups better, and if no changes are made to the script then Escape and Cancel will close the window without prompting.
Batch Project Upgrade
For Automise users that have dozens or even hundreds of projects in older formats, the new batch project upgrade dialog will enable you to upgrade old projects automatically.

New Actions

SFTP actions
New actions are now available for transfering files securefly over SFTP.
CSV Field Iterator
Iterate the fields of a CSV (or similar) file.
IIS 7 Actions
New actions for managing Application Pools and websites on IIS 7 servers.
Simple Math Action
An action to perform simple maths as part of your project, including addition, subtraction, modulus, factorial, logarithm and sine etc.
VMWare
New actions for VMWare Server
Web Service Actions
New actions for querying and receiving data from Web Services.

Improved Actions

Run Action as User
All actions now have a "Run Action as User" field to allow you to run each action as a specific user.
Export Log Action
Can now export a log fragment instead of a whole log.

ActionStudio

Custom Action Property Sets
Custom actions defined in ActionStudio can now define their own Property Set types. It is also possible for custom actions to access built-in Property Set types.
Custom Action File Sets
Custom actions defined in ActionStudio can now access File Set information and file lists.
New .NET Custom Action API
Automise 3 ships with a new API for creating .NET custom actions. The new API makes it quicker and easier than ever to create custom actions with ActionStudio and .NET
Find & Replace
Find & Replace has been added to ActionStudio in the script editor to easily search for and replace text.
Windows PowerShell
PowerShell has been added to ActionStudio as a scripting language for developing custom actions.
IronPython
IronPython has also been added to ActionStudio as a scripting language for developing custom actions.
Search Keywords
Actions can now define extra search keywords which is used by the Automise IDE when a user searches for actions. For example, a action called "Delay" could define keywords "Wait" and "Pause" for easier searching.
Iterator Actions
A third type of action, Iterator has been added alongside Standard and Execute Program. The Iterator action type allows the development of Iterator actions that run multiple times (including their child actions) for each value in a list.

About VSoft Technologies

FinalBuilder V6.3 released

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 GMT

Running a build process in FinalBuilder.

Latest version adds pretty format XML support plus Delphi 2010 and InstallShield 2010 compatibility.

Updates in V6.3

FinalBuilder Core

Feature - Back ported improvements to pretty xml formatter from mainline branch
Bug - Fixed & escaping issue.
Bug - Fixed stepping bug with nested Try/Finally blocks where an exception occurs in the first block before the nested Try
Bug - Output captured from stdout was throwing away tabs
Bug - Stop messages posted by a monitor from being processed by the monitor. Also make AllMatchesToVariable, LastMatchToVariable and MatchCount to variable work as designed
Bug - Upgrading FB4 project file to FB6 would cause the global scripts to be lost.

FinalBuilder IDE

Bug - Fix for variable completion replacing text after variable
Bug - Fixed av when moving group nodes in Variables Dialog
Bug - Fixed crash with action running frame when running parallel actions
Bug - Fixed hang in Variables Dialog when editing group name
Bug - Save dialog will now default to the projects directory when saving a new project

Actions

Feature - Accurev - Added Login/Logout actions
Feature - Write To Text File Action - Added Expand Variables option
Feature - Added option to read 64 - bit registry keys
Feature - Added Pretty Format XML option to Save XML Document Action
Feature - Added Stack/Queue Contains Action
Feature - Added support for building RIDL files included in Delphi 2009 projects
Feature - Added support for Delphi 2010 to borland resource compiler action.
Feature - Added support for Help and Manual 5.3
Feature - Added support for InstallShield 2010
Feature - Added TriggerFiles Iterator Action
Feature - ADO Iterator - Added option of specify a value when the data value is null
Feature - Delete Registry Key/Valuie - Recursive option added to delete all child keys and values.
Feature - FxCop - Added Culture and Ignore Generated Code switch.
Feature - MSTest - Added support for publishing MSTest results to FinalBuilder Server
Feature - nUnit - Added the 'No Thread' switch
Feature - TFS Create Workspace - Added option to ignore failure when directory already exists
Feature - TFS Delete Workspace - Added option to ignore failure when directory does not exist
Feature - UPX - Added --brute and --ultra - brute command line options to action
Feature - VS.Net Solution - Added two script properties to get compiler warning and error count.
Feature - Read XML Action - Enhanced to allow using comment and attributes node types
Change - Create Website Action - Added additional error message when locating next free web site index
Change - MultiQuestion Action - Changed Variable Combo dropdown width
Change - Ping Example (Script) - Updated action to use the Execute Program action type
Change - Send Email - Added message - id email header.
Change - Subversion Info Action - Changed action to parse XML instead of plain text to allow for non - english locales
Change - Team Foundation Get - Workspace directory is automatically created if it doesn't already exist.
Change - Updated actions to be compatible with MKS 2007
Change - Windows Installer - Fixed error reporting of the Windows Installer actions.
Change - WinRAR - Changed option depending on which version of WinRAR is installed
Bug - Added dummy logger when verbosity is set to quiet to work around MSBuild NullReference bug.
Bug - ADO Dataset Iterator - Fixed numeric column types causing errors.
Bug - Beyond Compare - Action would fail if the files were the same and 'Fail if Similiar' was checked regardless of whether 'Fail if Match' was checked or not.
Bug - Create ISO - Show hidden files was always enabled when browsing for files
Bug - XML Iterator Action - Enhanced XPath generation for resulting nodes
Bug - Extract Version Info - Fixed Edit dialog not showing correct text when editing
Bug - Visual Studio .NET Action - Fixed assembly info issue with Delphi Prisim projects
Bug - Visual Studio .NET Action - Fixed AssemblyFileVersion Revision not auto incrementing correctly
Bug - Delphi Action - Fixed bug in ReloadPackageList script method
Bug - Send Email Action - Fixed bug where missing attachment would cause body to be encode incorrectly
Bug - FxCop Action - Fixed command line option /aXsl was missing forward slash
Bug - FXCop Action - Improved Error handling so that exceptions are handled properly
Bug - IniFile Iterator Action - Fixed not iterating all sections on large Ini Files
Bug - AssemblyInfoUpdater Action - Fixed issue with adding attributes in .cpp files
Bug - AssemblyInfoUpdater Action - Fixed issue with extra colon when adding missing attributes
Bug - AssemblyInfoUpdater Action - Fixed bug where colon was removed from attributes
Bug - AssemblyInfoUpdater Action - Fixed issue with missing ] when value quoted with single quotes
Bug - AssemblyInfoUpdater Action - Fixed issue with module attributes
Bug - Create XML Node Action - Fixed issue with empty namespace attributes
Bug - Fixed WinRAR Options script object registration breaks CVS Options script object
Bug - FTP Download File - Action no longer created the local file when the remote file does not exist.
Bug - Save XML Document - Application would crash when the XML Document did not exist.
Bug - SFTP List Files - Fixed Log Variables to Variable combo box not being persisted when closing action properties
Bug - Source Safe - User credentials were not being escaped
Bug - Vault Get - Removed trailing path delimiter on working directory argument
Bug - VMWare Server - Removed empty - H parameter when connecting to the localhost.
Bug - Windows Installer - Install - Fixed action so that it doesn't fail if the file doesn't exist locally when remotely installing on another machine
Bug - WinRAR - Added command argument to force encoding to be ANSI