Another year has passed without version 0.8 of SharpE getting released. As usual we where unable to follow our imaginary time plan for the past year. There are several reaons for this. One being that the development team once again shrank to the size of two active core developers. The other thing is that with getting ready for 0.8 we realized that we have to take care of some ugly things which have been pushed away ever since. Our goal for 0.8 is it to bring out an overall solid and stable shell. For this to happen we recently started to rewrite and improve some older core parts of the shell. We where also still not satisfied with how SharpCenter and the configs turned out, thus making it necessary to rework the configs.

But there is light at the end of the tunnel and hope for the upcoming 2009.
Most of the still ongoing rewrites are nearly complete and two users (Brum74 and Yay) are actively helping us out on several fronts. There has also finally been some development on the new website and we are hoping to bring it online during the next 3 months.

So what will happen next?
Before we can go for 0.8 RC1 another testing day (TD6) will be done. This is simply necessary to test all the recently made changes for stability on different computer and system configurations. After TD6 we will directly go for 0.8 RC1. It's really hard to estimate when TD6 will be done. I don't think that we can make it in january, so I would roughly estimate end of february or march.

stay tuned and
Happy New Year

Have been working on something very cool tonight and as we get closer to a date of TD6 I am going to share more of our development process with you

For a long time we have had a lot of configuration data within SharpE, and sometimes this xml data can go *pop*. I have had it happen a few times in the last year or so... So what do we do about it? Well as you may or may not know we made a huge deal about interfaces and what It could mean if we switch over. Well that's what we are doing now... right? So I have created a new interface that wraps up all of the loading and saving of configuration data. The benefit being that every single file that uses it, will now have a backup automatically created when you save something within the environment. So when the XmlBaseInterface loads, if it fails for any reason... it will now load the backup if there is one. Which in a nutshell should mean, no more lost xml configuration files! Hurrah!

I hope some of you are rejoicing over this :P It also allows us to make sure every error while loading is logged to SharpConsole, which makes it much easier for us to debug issues. This is one of many ways how interfaces are helping us improve SharpEnviro I can't stress enough how different SharpEnviro will seem when we kick out TD6 sometime next month!

Unfortunately it does not look like we will get 0.8 out for Christmas, never say never, but it's unlikely. We still plan to have another TD out sometime in December though, which I am sure will introduce some new bugs due to the massive changes we have made to the code structure. Although sometimes it might seem our release cycle is a little too optimistic, we do try our hardest to push out releases in a timely manner. We have been thinking about the future after v1 for quite some time these days, whether to keep the platform as Delphi or push to another development platform such as .Net C#. This is one thing im sure is open for debate, but SharpE running with hardware accelerated graphics and WPF really excites me.

Next year it will be 10 years since the development began. 10 years and we have not got out a v1 release... I think our versioning needs to change :P I have a feeling the road to v1 will not be very long, our plans for multi-language and online updating may be pushed back until after v1 so that we can concentrate on making it as compatible and stable as possible. I hope you all agree but TD5 for us, is one of our most stable releases to date, but it's not without issues. I also think our current system for reporting issues is over complex, and am debating whether a move from Trac would be a good move.

I have been assured that our new website will hopefully go live in less than two weeks. The current release of the site will be very basic, and then over time new functionality will be added including addons support. The site is very simple in functionality and is based on WP... and I personally think it looks really great. It's a shame our web dev likes to slack so much with real life work and play. Unfortunately we all have lives outside of SharpEnviro, and this does affect our performance sometimes. Personally though, I can see myself coding for this shell for a few more years yet

Please feel free to contribute your ideas and feelings about the shell, whether that be the fuure of SharpE, features, what you hate. We don't bite (much). It is this information though that we use to plan future releases of SharpE. See you at the next TD!

Oops! We did it again,
As usual we find ourselvs unable to stick to any imaginary road map or time plan. But this time we have a pretty neat reason!

Recently our user sx2008 has pointed out to us that we could improve the plugin systems used all over the shell by switching to another coding technique called interfaces. After some investigation and testing we came to the conclusion that using interfaces will enormously increase the capabilities of the plugin systems. Right now I'm completely rewriting the SharpBars plugin system while Pixol is doing the same for SharpCenter. Unfortunately this means that all modules (30% done) and configs (15% done) have to be converted too. Alltogether this will take about one month time to get everything working like it was before.

You might now want to ask what the advantage is if it's taking this much time to recode everything. That's actually not easy to answer without going into detail about how interfaces work and how the whole shell is written. The most important thing is that the whole source code beneath SharpBar and SharpCenter is a lot smaller and easier to maintain by using interfaces. We came up with a combinations of classes and interfaces which now makes it easily possible to extend the plugin systems at any later point. And this without having to change all previously created modules (or at worst with only minimal changes). Besides this all the previously existing restriction of using dll based plugins are completely gone. Dlls and host applications can now freely exchange any type of data without going through needlessly and slow messaging methods. The host applications can now fully control their plugins thus making the applications work a lot more efficient. In the end maybe even some bugs related to the previously madly used message sending between host and plugin will be fixed. And for SharpBar the memory usage should go down by about at least 20% (maybe even a lot more).

Due to these heavy changes the next release will be TD6 which will be held as a full 24hr testing day in IRC.
Right now it's sheduled for the end of october.

After way too much waiting it's time for another release. Due to lots of changes I made the decission to not continue with R5 of TD4. This new release holds TD5 as version and the next releases will go under R1/R2/etc. of this TD5 build. Another reason for this rather unexpected jump to TD5 is that I wanted to try out another default build with a different theme and bar setup.

This also means that the intended jump to 0.8 RC1 is delayed. But this is mostly due to Pixol and mc not having time to work on SharpE lately. The Problem is that two important parts of 0.8 RC1 (DDE Service and a few missing configs) are to be developed by Pix and mc. While we wait for this to eventually happen I'm going to continue fixing up the rest of the shell.

The Changelog for TD5 is pretty big and mostly contains a lot of bug fixes. Especially the taskbar module and exec service have improved a lot. But also some new features like dragging task items and volume control for Windows Vista managed to sneak in.

We received a lot of feedback for TD4 and this helped a lot to improved the shell furthermore. Please continue giving such amazing feedback for this release. The more feedback comes in the more I get an idea what to work on.

TD5 Download: http://trac.sharpe- shell.org/wiki/TDSetup
TD5 Changelog: http://trac.sharpe- shell.org/wiki/ TD5Changelog
Please post feedback and bug reports into this forum thread

Yes it's true... mostly due to tradition. Summer is a period when we are known to slack. With one month since the last commit were all uber busy getting sunstroke and drinking far too much!!! Oh but it gives us time to chill and prepare for... the new site maybe... 0.7 R5 and 0.8 RC1... and hopefully 0.8 this year!!! The team will be back in August! Kicking Ass!

Several weeks have passed since TD4R4 and it's time for a short update about what has been going on lately.

TD4R4 has proven much more solid than R3 and therefore we are currently waiting for new bug reports to come in via e-mail and forum. There are still one or two bug reports send via e-mail every day and we are checking those for debug logs and traces to find those last few remaing bugs. Two of those "regular" bug reports we get via e-mail have already been fixed for the next release!

Current internal road map says that we will do one more updated release of TD4, which means TD4R5 - if everything goes well then we will move on to 0.8 RC1 after R5.

Current Changelog for TD4R5

As usual it took a while longer than expected. But lots of stuff has been fixed and even new features sneaked it.

It should be save if you overwrite a previous TD4R3 release (after shutting down everything). However it is not possible to update from any SharpE release before TD4R3. Make sure to unzip this release into an empty directory then.

Download
(mostly) complete changelog: TD4R4 Changelog
Please post Feedback into this forum thread.

Short Update

We are working on the next TD4R4 release. So far a lot of things have been fixed already. The Media Controller Module is working much like the old version in TD4R2 again, but with a lot of improvements underneath. The list of players which can be controlled is now defined by a dynamic xml file. This makes it possible to easily add new players. Support for the iTunes and Media Monkey players has also been added. Some more rare but really annoying problems like the "A call to an OS function failed" are also fixed, and a fix for the "System Error. Code: 5. Access is denied." error on Vista is being worked on! Another simple thing with a big impact is that I finally managed to fix the problem that buttons all over the shell (Notes, Taskbar,...) had problems to detect fast clicks (Before if you clicked the buttons very fast every second click didn't work).

Complete Changelog (so far!): Changelog

The TD4R4 release should be out once the "SystemERror. Code: 5" bug is fixed...