Released: Nov 23, 2015

Updates in this release

Updates in 8

• IDE Themes - The IDE has two new themes, Dark and Light.
• Step 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.
• Debugger breakpoints now have conditions.
• Actionlists 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.
• Run Target Action - You can now return values from Targets (ie out parameters) .
• Core Messaging - Changes to the messaging has improved the performance of the stepping engine and logging, with much less thread switching. This also improved IDE performance.
• CLR Hosting - The minimum CLR version is now .NET 4.0 (ie FinalBuilder requires .net 4.0 to be installed). FinalBuilder 8 also requires Powershell 3.0 or later.
• Lower Runtime Memory - Reduced memory usage during a build compared to FB7.
• 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).
• New Project File Formats:
  • A new DSL style project file format (.fbp8) is now the default format, it is very easy to diff.
  • A new xml format (.fbx8), much less verbose than the old format.
  • Compressed project files (.fbz8) use the 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).
• New Actions - FinalBuilder 8 includes new actions for Chocolatey, Bower, NPM, Gulp, Grunt, Rake, Fake, Mocha, along with Redgate SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare actions.
• TFS 2015 XAML builds are also supported, a VSO task will be available soon.