REALbasic 2007r3

Ah, the much awaited REALbasic 2007 Release 3 is finally out. The reason why it's been much awaited for me is because it finally solves a complaint I've had for years -- file associations. I know this may seem like a minor thing, but it's one of those "best practices" issues that's bothered me since day one.

When I was first hired at REAL Software, my job was to port the Mac IDE to Windows (this was back when the IDE was written entirely in C++). During this process, it was decided that the IDE would automatically register all the REALbasic files every time the IDE launched. I didn't particularly like this approach, but as the new kid, whaddya do? Ever since then, I've wondered when the other shoe would drop and major issues would come of it. Well, 2007r2 did a great job of highlighting one of the reasons why you don't want to take this approach. And for 2007r3, I was able to rectify my previous issues. This release no longer automatically registers file associations on Windows. It just launches. Yay!

So how do the file associations work now? The installer associates the appropriate file types with the IDE. This has the extra, added bonus of the uninstaller removing the file associations (previously, they would be dead associations cluttering up your registry). But, older IDEs are still pigs and try to steal the associations. To combat this, in r3, you can go to the Preferences dialog to re-associate the file types with the IDE. But it's not an automatic process anymore.

Of course, there are other great things in r3 aside from file associations not being borked. One big one, which I'm sure everyone is talking about, is the namespace support. That's pretty cool, and I've already started doing some work with it for some open source code.

But there are other things still. A lot of them may seem esoteric, but are quite nice. For instance, objects which are static in nature (shared properties, or module properties) now have their destructors fired when the application exits. The linker on Windows is significantly faster. The debugger's string viewer is now significantly faster. The open recents menu is now a lot smarter about items which don't exist anymore (when you try to select one, it asks you if you'd like to remove it from the list).

One code-breaking change which I am very, very excited for is the fact that you can no longer use the "new" keyword in a multi-item dim statement. You used to be able to write code like this:

dim foo, bar as new Date

This never worked how people expected, and was a common source of confusion and errors. Now the compiler simply won't allow it. (note, you can still do multi-item dim statements, or the new statement. You just can't use them together).

So yeah, r3 was a very nice little release if you ask me.