If you want to save the recording, right click on the link above and select "Save target" or "Save Link As" in your browser's popup menu and save the wmv video file. The file size is about 284MB. If you click on the link above the content is streamed to your viwer.

Arnor Baldvinsson

You can download the new build from http://www.buildautomator.com/downloads.php

Note that you must have a valid Maintenance Plan to be able to install this build. This build is NOT available via the web update so you must download the full install. You do not need to uninstall previous version and your data will be preserved completely.

If you are currently using version 1.5 or the early 1.6 beta versions, I strongly suggest that you try this build.

Since version 1.5 we have added over 100 new features and fixes. See version history for more information

The fix list for Beta 7, 8 and 9 follows:

Fixes for Beta 7

• Redundant debug information was being sent to the log file from E_Search_and_Replace_in_Textfiles. Fixed.
• Clarion errors in log viewer were not color coded as errors. Fixed.
• Copying and pasting action items sometimes fails. Can no longer be reproduced despite numerous efforts. Will tackle it if it comes up again, but I'm calling it fixed.
• Main window sometimes appears outside of the visible area of the monitor(s). Fixed.

Fixes for Beta 8

• Copy Multiple Files action does not expand variables correctly. Fixed.
• Log File viewer had a one byte out of bounds memory problem. Fixed.

Fixes for Beta 9

June 10, 2011

• MS-Build action modified for more flexibility.
• MS-Build action can now handle both Clarion 7 and Clarion 8.

June 11, 2011

• MS-Build action can now handle code generation in Clarion 8. Note that this is only enabled for Clarion 8 if a solution is selected. If a Clarion project file (*.cwproj) is selected, then it is available for Clarion 7 also, but this will not work in the Clarion 7.0 - Clarion 7.2 builds.
• Added Copy, Paste and Duplicate to the pop up menu on the Action Items list.
• Implemented a Duplicate option for the Action Items list. It can be activated by using the popup menu or by using Ctrl-D.
• Implemented Alt-Enter on Action Items list to open the Action Items Properties window.
• Hotkeys are now visible on popup menu on the Action Items list.

June 12, 2011

• Added Windows 7 compatibility to "Generate XP/Vista/Win7 Manifests" action.
• Added option to exclude dependency to "Generate XP/Vista/Win7 Manifests" action.
• Implemented Ctrl-E on Action Items list to execute the selected action item(s).

Fixing the Copy/paste issue was huge. I have it verified fixed now! It was a rare and completely random problem that cropped up when pasting items into the action item list. After a lot of debugging I was able to isolate it and realized there was a vulnerability that had the potential of failing - it should never have failed, but some circumstances obviously made it fail. Essentially what happened was that in projects with multiple project items the last one would sometimes be act as it was selected even though it was not. I was able to put a Message() in the code to alert me if the mismatch happened and 3 months after I fixed it, the message popped up for the first time. I use Build Automator almost every day, so this shows how random and difficult to trace this problem was! When the message popped up and I saw that the selected project item was indicating the last, when in fact the first one was selected, and the pasting worked I knew I had caught that bug and fixed it

Please let me know as soon as possible if you run into any problem with this build! Note that you must have a valid Maintenance plan to be able to install it.

This also shows how we update source files with version information and write out Clarion version resource files (.version files) that can then be added to the Clarion project.

Just download the installer and run it and it will add the project to the "Build Automator | Examples" item in the Windows Start menu. Read more about it on our Example Download page.

Arnor Baldvinsson

This process was tedious even though I could use my editor to do a mass search/replace in files. Sometimes I would simply forget this step which added to support issues when customers reported problems in version X when they actually had version Y - because the source files said, incorrectly, that it was version X.

As I'm working on that same collection of classes that prompted my idea for the Build Automator, I remember that particular process so I decided to add an action to do a search and replace on text files. This action is now fully functional and is extremely fast. I let it do two search and replace operations on a folder with over 40 files in it and it took 0.89 seconds to complete on a moderate machine. It can be used on individual files or by using wildcards.

You can of course use variables in the string to search for and in the replacement string. This makes it easy to put in for example todays date formatted nice and neat by using the Set Variable action and set it to an evaluation expression. Use "Format(Today(),@d18)" as the expression, without the double quotes, to get todays formatted as "August 19, 2008" in standard windows long format.

This new action will be included in our September release and now I can get back to work on my class files

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

In addition to what I talked about in the last entry we fixed two minor things this morning: The picklist did not scroll horizontally and checking or unchecking the "Show Splash Screen at startup" did not work on the splash screen itself - it did work on the options window.

As always we appreciate the feedback we get from you and please let us know on our forum if you have any problems, comments or ideas

Our next release will be around September 15.

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

I described version 1.5 pretty thoroughly in my last blog and there were no further changes or updates made to the install after I posted that blog.

We will be releasing a new minor build tomorrow, Monday August 18. It includes two fixes for regressions that were introduced with fixes in last build and that cleans up couple of issues. The first problem was that under certain circumstances the Action item list could get corrupt. It didn't affect the data, just the list. The other one was that if the name of a Project Item was changed it would not trigget the "File | Save" option or the Save button to be enabled. However, when closing the project window it would correctly indicate that the data had changed and prompted for saving. Somehow one of the action files was accidentally removed from our source during a cleanup process - manual cleanup I might add - and we have included it in the new build tomorrow.

Tomorrow's build also has one additional action - Terminate Script Execution. This is a very handy action as it allows you to stop the script. It can use a condition so you can conditionally terminate the script, for example if a certain button is pressed when using the Message action. If no condition is specified, the script will simply terminate. This can also be handy when debugging scripts and you only want it to execute upto a certain action item.

We have also added a validation of the Maintenance Plan, which was causing confusion. When you enter the Maintenance Plan it will now be automatically and immediately validated and the expiration date shown. The Maintenance Plan is verified when the program starts if it hasn't been verified and also when you update the Maintenance Plan. We have tested this in all possible ways we can think of. If you run into any problems with this please post on our forum and we will fix it right away

Finally I want to add that on a personal note we are going to be moving to Port Angeles, Washington and in fact we signed papers last week to sell our house here in San Antonio. The buyer has until next weekend to decide but if everything goes according to plan we will be moving out on September 18 and heading to Port Angeles. It will take us about a week to get up there. I don't expect this to affect our schedule since I expect to have the September build ready before we move and then we will probably not release another build until early November. If we have to delay the September build, it should only be until the very beginning of October.

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

The FTP upload is complete and works great. It's fairly simple and only allows uploading of files to a single folder on the server. Later on we will add more powerful action that can upload subfolders as well. The server connection information is set up separately so when you create a new FTP action, you simply select the server from a dropdown list or click a button to view and update connections.

The FTP upload action is a bit different from other actions because it allows you to test the action right when you are setting it up. This way you can make sure that the connection is correct and you can optionally upload the files also to make sure that everything is put in it's place. You can optionally set the files to be uploaded as lowercase.

We added a very useful feature to the "Clarion compile" actions that allows us to grab any errors from the compiler window and automatically include them in the Build Automator log. This screenshot shows the results of compiling a Clarion app that resulted in 4 compiler errors. The Build Automator log now shows you what module is involved, what lines and what errors! This makes it so much easier to spot problems during unattended compiles. Big thank you to Clarion guru Larry Sand for helping me out with some screen scraping code that worked absolutely perfectly for this! And thanks to one of our Clarion users for suggesting this on the forum last week

The last thing we have worked on is a very powerful "Delete Files" action. It has several very powerful options which I'm going to discuss just a little bit.

You can select a single file or you can select a folder. If you select a file, then only that one file would be deleted, but you can always modify the selected file/folder to include any valid wildcards. For example C:\Temp\*.* would apply to all files in the C:\Temp\ folder and C:\Temp\*.txt would apply to all *.txt files.

You can Include Subfolder, which will then recursively delete files in all the subfolders under the selected folder. For example for C:\Temp\*.* it would delete all files in C:\Temp\ and any subfolders that might exist under the C:\Temp\ folder.

The Build Automator can prompt for confirming the delete process. Note that this will halt unattended builds and the program will wait until the question is either confirmed or declined. So if you are running unattended builds, we suggest that you uncheck the "Confirm Delete" when you are satisfied that it is correctly set up and it works correctly. The message will tell you how many items there are available to delete.

The deleted files can optionally be sent to the Recycle Bin or it can be skipped. Skipping the Recycle bin is considerably faster but then the delete process is premanent and cannot be reversed. Use at your own discretion.

During deleting process every error is logged into the Build Automator log. The log gives you extensive error information directly from the operating system. However you can optionally select to log every file that is deleted. This is a good option to have when you are checking things out and setting things up to make sure that the files that you expect to delete were deleted and nothing else.

Normally Read-Only and Hidden files are not included in the delete process, but you have an option to include Read Only and Hidden files. Doing that adds a small subprocess that changes the attributes on the files to normal/archive before the delete process runs. System files are never included in the delete process. If you have needs to delete system files, please let us know and we will add that as an option. Files that are locked or in use by other processes cannot be deleted. They are reported in use and skipped.

If you are using the *.* wildcard in your delete process you can also opt to remove all the subfolders. This option is only available when you use the *.* wildcard as that's the only way that all files are removed from all subfolders. If you need to completely remove a subfolder but can't use the *.* wildcard, we suggest that you set up a second "Delete Files" action that deletes the subfolder and all of it's files.

Similar to the FTP Upload action, you have an option on the "Delete Files" action window to click a button to bring up a view of all the files included in the file search and would be deleted by the process. This makes it easier to check what files are included with the different wildcards and also if there are files in subfolders etc. that match the wildcards.

Tomorrow, Monday, we will finish up the documentation and the install and the new version will be out Tuesday

-- Arnor Baldvinsson

As some of you may know we are moving to Washington State. So we have been working on getting our house ready to sell and we decided to take some time off to work on that. That meant that other things slowed down in the meantime. But the house is now on the market and that means we are back to work

For the past week I have been working very hard on a new version of the Build Automator. We have a lot of exciting stuff that we are including in this new build and I'm just going to mention the highlights of what I've been doing.

First of all we have completed an update to the "Call MS-Build" action so that it can now work with Delphi 2007/RAD Studio from CodeGear. For this we needed to do some research into setting environment variables as the RAD studio does that when it shells out to the command line console for manual calls to MS-Build.

We have also completed new actions for Setup Factory and MSI Factory from IndigoRose. Every thing looks good for both actions and we have not run into any problems at all with either product.

The Message action got a complete overhaul. You can now specify what buttons to show on the message box and also which one of those buttons (or none) should be a default button. The button value is stored in a variable that you can then use in conditions or whatever. Each button has it's own value in the system variables and you can use those to compare with in action conditions.

Today we completed a "Call DLL" action that is extremely powerful as it allows the Build Automator script to call function a dll and pass upto 6 parameters to the function. Currently the parameters are limited to char* parameters for C or CONST *CSTRING in Clarion since the Build Automator's data is entirely based on CSTRINGs. We may add support for multiple data types later on. The function must return an integer value which is passed on to the $ExitCode$ variable for you to use in later actions if needed. If you need to pass data from your dll to the Build Automator script that cannot be confined to an integer, you could use an INI file or the registry to pass data back to the Build Automator.

Just because the datatype is a string doesn't mean you can't use if for numbers, they are just passed as strings so you may need to run conversion functions on them to convert them to the proper datatype.

This action opens up all sorts of possibilities for extensions to the Build Automator scripts and makes it a very powerful tool. If the Build Automator doesn't have what you need, you can simply create a DLL to do it and call it from the Build Automator!

The last thing we are working on for this new release is FTP uploads. This will be a simple action to start with that will simply take a list of files and upload them to a folder on a specified server. We plan on having this working today and finished off by tomorrow morning.

We also have a couple of smaller actions that we are working on. We have also improved the logging quite a bit so that it now shows the project line numbers and action item line numbers and the same information as the project action list in the program shows.

We are very excited about this new release and hope you are too

-- Arnor Baldvinsson