The TSW Blog

I'm very happy to announce that the first beta version of TSW phpCoder 2008 has just been released. You may download it by using the link in the end of this post. Seeing as this is the first beta version, I wish to remind you that the feature list is not necessarily complete yet. If you find something that you would like implemented, be sure to let me know already now. The longer we get into the beta process, the more reluctant I will be to implement new features :). And now, the download link:

Download TSW phpCoder 2008 beta 1 - please provide feedback in the beta forum

I'm really looking forward to hearing what you think of it!

Please notice that TSW phpCoder 2008 requires the .NET framework to run. The installer will try to install it for you, if you do not already have it. For more information about the .NET framework, please see our .NET info page. Also, please be aware that this is beta software. It's meant for testing only, and if you don't feel comfortable using software with known bugs and quirks, you should wait for the final version.

I'm happy to announce a new maintenance release of TSW WebCoder 2007. This release carries the following changes:

• Changes to Code Tidy settings would not always be saved
• The Ctrl+Tab shortcut would in some cases lead to an error message
• User buttons were not imported properly from the First time wizard
• A new file association dialog was added, allowing you to create file associations for WebCoder (see the Functions menu)
• A new & nifty icon for files associated with WebCoder has been included in the main application folder (used by the File association dialog, of course)

To upgrade, simply go to the WebCoder product page and download the application. Install it on top of the previous version, that should cause no problems. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us.

Whenever your project reaches a certain level of complexity, navigating the code can be a very time consuming task. For instance, you may using a function in one file, but it's actually declared in another file. This makes sense with PHP, because include files makes it easy to re-use your functions and classes in many files. But what do you do when you need to have a look at how this MagicStuffWillHappenWhenYouCallMe() function actually works? Remembering where it's declared, opening the file and searching for the function is painfully slow, and if your project is just a tad bit more complicated than 3 files using the same functions.php, you will soon be using more time navigating your code than writing it!

TSW phpCoder 2008 comes with two functions that should help you a lot when navigating code. "Navigate to" and "Find all references to". They are both based on the same parsing engine that brings you PHP IntelliSense, giving them the huge advantage of actually being context-sensitive. For instance, you may have two functions with the same name, but one of them belongs to a class - if you make a reference search for the class member, the stand-alone function won't show up in the results, because phpCoder knows the difference from looking at the parsed documents.

This functionality really took a long time to implement, with lots of little details needing attention, but I hope that you will think it was worth the extra wait, once you see the video of it in action :). Please remember that while the example code/files used in the video are very simple, this works just as well on big projects with many files!

Click to see a video of how code navigation works in TSW phpCoder 2008

Please let me know what you think of it. I really appreciate your feedback :)

I'm happy to announce a new release of TSW SiteSync, version 1.03. It comes with the following changes:

• The "Watch mode" now respect the sites exclusion rules, adding excluded items unchecked to the list
• The built-in FTP client now supports uploading external files when dragged & dropped from e.g. Windows Explorer.
• "Execute file" and "Browse current [local] folder" were added as options to the built-in FTP client
• A hack was implemented to allow seeing files hidden by ProFTPD servers, e.g. .htaccess files (Edit the site and click on the Test connection button to enable this)
• Minor GUI changes and a few minor bugs were fixed

To upgrade, simply go to the SiteSync product page and download the application. Install it on top of the previous version, that should cause no problems. If you have any questions or comments, please contact us.

I hope you've all had a wonderful Christmas. I've spent some of mine in the company with a new friend: phpCoder 2008 :). Most of the time was used correcting minor bugs and implementing new features, and my TODO list has decreased a lot over the last two weeks. One of the things I have worked quite a bit on, is support for code documentation. The most used system seems to be phpdoc, and phpCoder comes with some pretty cool support for this, as you will see in this video I have created for you. As usual, if you have any questions or comments, be sure to let me know :)

Click to see a video of the phpdoc features of TSW phpCoder 2008

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