The TSW Blog

...and Happy New Year to all of you and your families. This has truly been an exciting year for TSW, but I do expect next year to be even more exciting! In 2007 you will see the next version of TSW WebCoder, which will combine all the great features you find in WebCoder 2005 and WebPad.NET. I have already made good progress on "WebCoder.NET", and without trying to hype it too much, I think it's safe to say that you may start looking forward to it. I hope to do some more blogging about it really soon, followed by some early screenshots within a couple of months. Until then, Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!

When starting on a new version, I usually do a lot of "demos". Small applications, showing a specific new feature. I'm not doing this to show it off, but simply to write as much code as possible in a less complicated environment. So I make these small applications, with no concern about design or anything. It's usually a form with a couple of non-aligned controls, all sorts of test output and buttons with their default captions - "button1", "button2" etc. While I do my very best to make WebCoder and WebPad.NET start as fast as possible, the couple of seconds it will take each time is simply too much, when I go into heavy write-compile-run-test-repeat mode :). The very first WebCoder-feature application I made was to see whether I could create the same PHP IntelliSense features that WebCoder 2005 has on the .NET platform. This was extremely important to me, since I find it to be a very important feature of WebCoder. Luckily, it turned out to be way easier than the first time I did, and the demo got to be pretty functional before I went to work on other things. I jump from demo to demo to make sure that all the really important things, the features that I simply wouldn't allow myself to release a new version of WebCoder without, is possible to do on this new platform.

This is a very exciting time, since I get to work on a bunch of interesting things. Once they get to the point where they simply need the last bit of polishing, which is usually the less-exciting part of making software, I move on to the next thing. When I'm satisfied, I start implementing these features into WebCoder, which is the best part. I get to see the hard work melt into WebCoder and the next version starts to take shape. I love it :)

As I stated in the first post of this blog, I would like to use it for more than the usual front page news. I have already posted a tip for WebPad.NET, and I hope to do more stuff like that in the future. Another thing that I wanted to use this blog for, is a diary for the development of future products, so you can check in to see how it's going with the "next big thing" from TSW :). This post marks the beginning of a series of posts which will tell you a bit about what I'm doing on the next version of WebCoder. I'm sure that you're not surprised to see that a new version of WebCoder is the next project, and you may start looking forward to it, because I think it's going to be really, really cool! However, as you can probably imagine, this won't be ready for release within the next couple of months. Building an application like WebCoder takes a lot of time, so please don't expect to see it finished tomorrow :)

Oh, and by the way: "WebCoder.NET" will work as a temporary name, since I'm not entirely sure what the exact name will be. I will be posting whenever I have some interesting news, so stay tuned for more information :)