DBDOC 10.5 is ready to go!

I'm happy to report that we are finally in the process of actually burning DBDOC 10.5 DVDs at the office, so if you're expecting one, it should be arriving soon.  This release has been a long haul, but it contains some very interesting new features (along with plenty of general improvements and bug fixes as usual).

If you need it RIGHT NOW, you can download DBDOC 10.5 here.

DBDOC 10.5 contains beta-level support for PGP, SPlus and 800xA PG2 systems.  These are in the final stages of testing and integration, and will be added to the official release version in November.  If you have one of these systems, and would like to test drive this support before then, let us know.  We implement the support for these systems substantially by reverse engineering example files from clients, so the more trial users we have, the sooner our support will become complete.

Another major new feature in 10.5 is the Error Browser.  For the first time, the configuration errors identified by DBDOC while compiling a project file can be presented interactively by the Hyperview browser.  Although this error information has always been generated during builds, previously the only way of getting at it was to manually search the error text files produced, or build them into the M14 directly with a second build pass, a somewhat unwieldy method. 

In any case, there was no particularly easy way for the uninitiated to identify errors of interest and hide the irrelevant ones.

All this has now changed.   The Error Browser not only makes it easy to organize errors in a variety of useful ways (by severity, by document, by subsystem, by module, just to name a few), but also to flag errors, explicitly mark them as having been reviewed, and hide errors or entire categories of errors when they are not of interest.  The errors presented in the Error Browser link to specific location in the main project file, and there is built in error documentation to make the task of sorting and evaluating errors as easy as possible.

With this initial version of the Error Browser, individual users will be able to mark off errors for themselves, but shared error review is planned for the next DBDOC release.  It will then be possible for multiple users to collectively review and hide errors.

Other new features in 10.5 will be explored in upcoming posts.  Check out the official "What's New" document for an overview.