VenomIDE2 Release Notes

Important: See here for how to use this document and known bugs in the current release.

2.2.0.20

New Features

• Web services updated: VenomIDE2 was updated to use services from the Venom Control Systems Ltd. website.

2.2.0.19

Bugs Fixed

• The parser generated false errors on encountering obj.[Class]Die, and other class-default messages.

2.2.0.18

Bugs Fixed

• Several exceptions that occured during syntax highlighting have been fixed, particularly when <<<:>>> and TextBlock were at the very end of a file.

2.2.0.17

New Features

• The terminal window now has a context menu providing easy access to useful terminal actions.
• Venom and VenomIDE release notes (on our website) are accessible from VenomIDE's Help menu.

Bugs Fixed

• Auto indentation doesn't now try to indent code in #If False regions.

2.2.0.16

Major Changes

New Features

• Auto indentation: has been improved so it is compatible with other indentation styles, such as:

  If x [
    statement
    statement
  ]
  
  If x 
  [ statement
    statement
  ]
  

  Also, typing a ']' immediately reformats the block it terminates.

Bugs Fixed

• An unballanced quote at the end of a file caused an exception.

2.2.0.15

New Features

• Email bug reports: VenomIDE can optionally email us with bug reports to help us improve it.

Bugs Fixed

• Bugs fixed in syntax highlighting and parser. Small improvements in syntax error indication.

2.2.0.14

Major Changes

• Menu reorganisation: The menu strip has been reorganised, including adding a new Target menu for items relating to the target controller.

New Features

• Printing: VenomIDE can now print documents again.

Bugs Fixed

• Minor bugs fixed in syntax highlighting and autoindentation.

2.2.0.13

Major Changes

• ScintillaNet: This version of VenomIDE2 is based on the live development branch of ScintillaNet: version 3.5.x
• Printing: there is no printing available in this version, as it has not been implemented in ScintillaNet 3.5.x. We may find a way to implement printing later.

New Features

• Breadcrumb trail allows direct access to a selected list of recent locations.
• Editor font can be selected from any installed mono-spaced font.

Bugs Fixed

• Serial file transfer: now works when handshaking is set to XON/XOFF.

2.2.0.12

New Features

• Venom Auto-indent, improved operation: Code-sensitive auto-indentation is applied as you type. You can also turn this feature off in 'Editor settings'.
• External changes to a project are detected, e.g. if revision control changes the project file.

2.2.0.11

New Features

• Venom Auto-indent: Code-sensitive auto-indentation is applied as you type. You can also turn this feature off in 'Editor settings'.
• Recent projects: A 'Recent projects' menu item has been added under the 'Projects' menu.

Bugs Fixed

• Target type: this wasn't carried forward correctly from the settings of previous versions, leaving the target set at 'VM1'.

2.2.0.10

Major Changes

• Venom project files are now in XML format. If you modify a project in the Project Manager and click OK, the project file will be saved in the new format.

New Features

• Revision control: VenomIDE now integrates with TortoiseGit to provide revision control for your Venom projects. See VenomIDE's new Git menu, which provides Help for how to install Git, etc.
• New Searches tab: The Find tab has changed: all the global searches you do, whether for text or symbol references, are stored in an unlimited search history, so you can use them again later, redo them if necessary, and remove them when they are no longer useful.
• Undo past Save point: You can now undo file edits beyound the last 'save point'. A warning dialog will tell you if this is about to happen.
• Single file view: There is now an option under the Window menu for VenomIDE to display just a single file edit window, if you don't need to see the Terminal and Navigation panels.
• Venom projects now allow you to set the target type (VM2, VM1) and the version of Venom2 to parse the project code with. (When the target is set to VM1, no parsing is performed).

Bugs Fixed

• Project file not found: this used to cause a fatal exception.

2.2.0.9

Major Changes

• Private, Protected, Public, Base and Derived are treated as keywords, matching the new release of Venom2.

New Features

• Code position: there is a new status indicator that shows the class, method or procedure the cursor is currently located within. Clicking on it brings up the project map.
• Comments and whitespace are now stripped from code to speed up download. You can turn off this option in the Terminal settings menu.

2.2.0.8

New Features

• Automatic detection of which project files need downloading (F5: Download changed...) now takes account of when a project file is modified by an external process, even if the file is not open for editing.
• Auxilary Flash programming: VenomIDE can now program a descrete segment of the VM2's internal Flash memory, over the terminal COM port, from an S-Record file.

Bugs Fixed

• Breadcrumb trail wasn't moving the breadcrumb points to take account of insertions and deletions in the text.

2.2.0.7

Bugs Fixed

• Reverse editor update: Scintilla 2.6 didn't support high bit ('extended ASCII') symbols correctly, such as the degrees symbol.
• Bad line endings when opening a project file caused fatal exception or bad text in Navigation panel.

2.2.0.6

New Features

• Editor update: VenomIDE now uses the latest version of the Scintilla text editor, Scintilla 2.6.
• Run and Reset commands can now break out of a running program.
• Screen shots of GraphicsLCD: a beta version of a conversion utility is available that converts an LCD display image to a Windows bitmap file, for use in your documentation. Please contact us if you wish to trial this.

Bugs Fixed

• Un-comment block commmand can now remove ; from any column position.
• Fixed some timing issues in communication between VenomIDE and Venom command line, for Run and Reset commands.

2.2.0.5

Bugs Fixed

• Close project: When closing a project with files open, VenomIDE crashed with an exception.

2.2.0.4

New Features

• File tabs have close boxes. You can now close a file by clicking on the close box in it's tab.

Bugs Fixed

• Visual Designer: When a page's base class had its own DesignerCode method, and the page class did not yet, the base class's DesignerCode method was opened for editing.
• Closing any file lost all other file's 'needs download' states.
• Helpers: The Visual Designer, Font Manager and Serial File Transfer rely on downloading helpers to the target VM2. The download process has been made more reliable.

2.2.0.3

Major Changes

• Visual Designer settings now defaults to a 'VGA' display.

New Features

• Serial File Transfer: You can transfer files to the VM2's Flash or RAM file systems very simply using the new Serial File Transfer. Alt+Q brings up the Serial File Transfer dialog box.
• Visual designer Snap gaps: Snap gaps may now be set by using two Items as an example of the required gap(s). See Edit menu.
• Reset before Download: An option in Terminal settings resets the VM2 before a download to reduce heap fragmentation. This is useful when working with a large diplay resolution (e.g. VGA) and limited RAM (e.g. 1M Byte). .
• Parser: improved detection of syntax errors.
• Pre-Download error check If there are syntax errors in your code then you will get a warning if you try to download the project. (Option in Terminal settings).

Bugs Fixed

• Undo sometimes got into a state where it would undo a very large amount of work.

2.2.0.2

New Features

• Template pages: The Visual Designer now lets you use any page in your design as a template page. See VenomIDE help for a full description.
• Base pages: The Visual Designer now also displays items from 'base pages' - i.e pages that the current page is based on, allowing you to layout the current page relative to these items.
• Terminal: The terminal will not allow data to be sent over the serial port if the hardware handshake signal is not asserted. A message box informs you of this.

2.2.0.1

Major Changes

• Visual Designer: Some changes to the Visual Designer configuration files may result in the designer complaining. The new GUI Framework has the new files needed.

New Features

• Font manager: the font manager allows you to manage and install the fonts used in each project. See VenomIDE help for details.

2.2.0.0

New Features

• Visual Designer: The new Visual Designer has been released. See VenomIDE Help for more details.

2.1.0.28

Bugs Fixed

• Many small bug fixes.

2.1.0.27

New Features

• Terminal focus: The terminal window is greyed out when it is loses focus, to make it easier to use when in docked view.

Bugs Fixed

• Projects: Creating a new project from an existing file added the full path of the file.
• Projects: Adding files with space characters in the file name failed.
• File dependency: Files in a project that weren't open were forever in a 'need download' state.
• Exception on unknown file types: when trying to find an icon for the file type, e.g. in Files>Recent files.

2.1.0.26

New Features

• Projects: Venom projects are no longer restricted to locating the source files in the same folder or directory as the project file. The project file lists relative paths to the source files. Source files may be located either 'above' or 'below' the project file's folder.
• Clear Screen: Typing Ctrl+Shift+C at the terminal will clear the terminal screen.
• Visual designer: This release includes a beta version of our new visual designer system for designing graphical user interfaces, similar to Microsoft's Visual Studio. Please contact our technical support team if you are interested in using it.

Bugs Fixed

• Parser: Various bugs fixed (parsing Is and Has operators; warning on bad line ending).
• Autocomplete: Various bugs fixed .

2.1.0.25

New Features

• Terminal clear screen: Sending the form feed character to the terminal (Say by printing CLS to a VM2 serial port) will clear the terminal screen.

Bugs Fixed

• Autocase was matching partial words within longer words.
• Float constants: Some bugs were fixed in parsing floating point constants.
• #If: Binary and Hex constant values were not being evaluated, which affected #If expressions.
• Parser: general operation improved.

2.1.0.24

New Features

• 'Autocase': Venom keywords and user symbols are automatically set to the correct case (i.e. that of their definition) when typing them in. This feature may be turned off in the Editor>Settings dialogue.
• Autocomplete: The number of symbol matches listed during autocomplete is usually limited to around ten items, so as not to present too much information. But now the full list of matches is also available on clicking a special item in the list.
• Unblocking Help files: CHM (help) files downloaded from the internet are automatically 'blocked' by Windows. VenomIDE now automatically unblocks CHM files as they are installed.
• Many small improvements to overall functionality.

Bugs Fixed

• Regex replacement: You can use escape codes, such as \n, in regular expression replacement strings.
• Parser: More small bugs fixed in the Venom parser.
• Autocomplete: When autocompleting a partial word that was also a Venom keyword, some user symbols failed to match.

2.1.0.23

New Features

• Navigation panel: improved highlight and focus operation when clicking on navigation points.

Bugs Fixed

• Adding a file to a project caused an exception.
• Log files: Any ASCII Nul character in the log file prevented the remainder of log file from displaying in Editor windows. Solution was to prevent Nul characters being recorded in the log file.
• Some syntax errors in #Define and #Undef caused exceptions in parser.

2.1.0.22

Bugs Fixed

• Find in files crashed in several situations.
• Find in files now works when there are no files open, but a project is open.
• Comment/Uncomment buttons now leave edit window focused.
• 'Save as' did not set new file name for downloads to VM2.
• Parser bugs around class-assertion fixed.

2.1.0.21

Bugs Fixed

• Find in files was not working, bug introduced in 2.1.0.20.
• Checksum errors on downloading some non-ASCII characters, due to checksumming files without applying text encoding, have been corrected.
• F8 (download procedure) was removing other procedures downloaded from the same file.
• Double clicking on a VNM or VPJ file to start VenomIDE: Previously open files or project were being re-opened.

2.1.0.20

Bugs Fixed

• Editing new or non-vnm files: editing non-project files that didn't have a vnm file extension caused VenomIDE to crash.
• Find in files crashed if there were non-project files open that hadn't been focused.

2.1.0.19

Major Changes

• Regular expressions are now based on the .NET framework regular expression language, which is similar to Perl's.

New Features

Bugs Fixed

• Checksum errors on download, due to reading not-open files without applying text encoding, have been corrected.

2.1.0.18

New Features

• Find in files will now do a global seach in all the files of the current project and all other files open in the IDE.
• Projects open the map only: Opening a Project will now not open all the project files, but will show the map of the project in the navigation panel. You can open any part of the project by clicking on the map.
• Check for updates: this now interacts with our website to give explicit information about the current version you are running and new versions that may be available.
• Maximised child windows: Edit windows open Maximised by default.

Bugs Fixed

• Parsing project files that aren't open: VenomIDE will correctly parse all files in a project, even if they are not open.
• COM port name unhandled exception: This bug has been fixed.

2.1.0.17

New Features

• Autocomplete always on: The Autocomplete function now operates automatically, showing a list of suggested keywords or variable names as you type. You can switch this back to the previous behaviour in Editor Settings.
• Autocomplete matching: Autocomplete now matches on word boundaries within a word where they are demarked by capitalisation or underscores, so that typing 'cou' will match ParamCount and my_count as well as Count, etc. It won't match mycount.
• Close project: If you close all the files in a project VenomIDE will ask if you want to close the project too.

Bugs Fixed

• Exclude files from parsing: Non-Venom files will only be parsed if they are included in a project.

2.1.0.16

Bugs Fixed

• Serial driver: The serial driver now works around Windows incompatibility with USB drivers based on the Prolific chip set.

2.1.0.15

New Features

• #If syntax highlighting: Sections of code that have been disabled by conditional compilation are 'lowlighted' in grey.
• Tabs or spaces: You can now opt to use multiple space characters instead of tab characters.
• Macro parsing: Macros are now expanded so that the parser can process their contents.
• Project Map: The project map tab in the Navigation panel now updates automatically.
• Error tab: There is now an Errors tab in the Navigation panel that lists all the syntax errors and warnings that the Parser has detected.
• Unmatched brace highlight colour: The default colour of the unmatched brace highlight has changed. To use it you may need to go to Edit Settings and click on Reset styles.

Bugs Fixed

• Find/Replace dialog: The size of this form is now more adjustable to suit different Windows settings.
• Initialise methods: Initialise methods were not included in the symbol map.
• Global variables inside Class: These are now correctly restricted in scope.
• Code detected outside Class or Procedure context: This is compiled, and a warning issued.

2.1.0.14

New Features

• Brace matching: When the cursor is put next to a brace (a bracket or parenthesis) then the matching brace is highlighted. If there is no matching brace then the hightlight is in a different colour. This feature may be modified or turned off in Editor settings.
• ISO 8859-15: This character set is supported by the editor. It is very similar to the 'Latin 1' character set.
• Autocomplete: The most recently used possible match is hightlighted.

Bugs Fixed

• Navigation: several bugs fixed in jumping to the definition of a symbol.

2.1.0.13

New Features

• Autocomplete: when you bring up the autocomplete menu using Ctrl+Space you can continue typing characters and the menu will automatically refine the list of possible symbols. You can also use Backspace to remove characters and Space or Tab to accept the current selection. The list of matches will also match character sequences in the middle of a symbol, not just the start, and has some context sensitivity.
• Highlight current line: There is now an option to highlight the current line in the text editor. You can also choose the highlight colour in Editor settings....
• Download echo names: There is now a download option that allows you to see the name of each Class, Procedure, Array, etc. listed as it is downloaded. This option is in Teriminal settings....

Bugs Fixed

• Replace: Replace works better when replacing the current selection.

2.1.0.11

Bugs Fixed

• F12 (goto definition) didn't work reliably unless mouse pointer was hovering over symbol.
• Tooltips on global variables showed only variable name, not definition line.
• Definition: Global definition, when based on first assignment in walking through code, were not consistent.
• Terminal display: Fixed display of the ampersand (&) character.

2.1.0.10

New Features

• Log file: This now also records when the serial port is opened and closed.

Bugs Fixed

• Crash on Venom code recursion: A bug in the parser would crash VenomIDE if the venom code contained redcursion in global procedures.
• Syntax highlighting: Bugs in the syntax highlighting of TextBlock and embedded text structures have been fixed.

2.1.0.9

New Features

• Standard views: The Windows menu allows you to select some 'standard views' (Terminal view and Docked view) that allow you to quickly configure VenomIDE for different uses.
• Parser: Improved parsing and linking of symbols in the symbol database.

Bugs Fixed

• Text copied from Terminal pasted without line endings in some applications.
• Log file: fixed several bugs and improved operation.
• Terminal: '&' character was not displayed correctly on the terminal.

2.1.0.8

New Features

• Rename symbol: this tool can rename symbols more accurately than a global search and replace as it takes account of a symbol's context.
• Error messages: hovering the mouse pointer over a syntax error will pop up a call tip showing details of the error.
• Download changed files (F5) now takes account of symbol dependencies so all necessary files are downloaded, not just modified files.

Bugs Fixed

• Parser: Various improvements in code parsing.
• Help: Drag and drop of Help files fixed.

2.1.0.7

Bugs Fixed

• Parser: Various improvements in code parsing.
• Editor control keys: Re-instate some control key shortcuts that were disabled.

2.1.0.6

New Features

• Parsing: VenomIDE now parses your Venom code to build a database of symbols, allowing more accurate navigation around your code and syntax highlighting of the symbols you have defined. Syntax errors detected during the parsing process are indicated by a red 'squiggle' under the error and in a status box at the bottom of the window.
• Symbol tool tips: When the mouse hovers over any symbol reference a tool tip is displayed showing information about the symbol. Tool tips are not shown for symbol definitions.
• Auto completion: Hitting Ctrl-Spacebar will auto-complete any symbol you have started typing, or show a menu of possibilities.
• Styles: You can customise all the syntax highlighting styles, selecting text colour, background colour, bold and italic.
• Editor options: You can set tab width, visible whitespace and indentation guidelines.
• Alternate COM port: You can set up alternate COM port settings, allowing you to toggle between settings to keep track of an applications that change COM port settings.
• Embedded text: the 'Embedded text' construct is recognised by the syntax highlighter.
• Download procedure: the F8 Key will now download the procedure, array or Class at the cursor position.

2.0.0.5

New Features

• Support for the VM1: You can now select VM1 as a target for VenomIDE 2. This changes the baud rate, syntax highlighting, style tidying and help files.

Bugs Fixed

• Style tidy: this operation could not be undone and did not show file as modified.
• Opening file when a 'New' document was open caused runtime exception.

2.0.0.4

New Features

• Code snippets: more code snippets have been included in the editor context menus.
• Better terminal text selection: You can now select text more accurately and outside the current window limits.
• Check for updates: A new menu item allows you to check for new versions of VenomIDE.

2.0.0.3

New Features

• Navigation panel sort option:
• Terminal can work with Prolific USB-Serial drivers:

Bugs Fixed

• COM port unresponsive: after sending characters that remain in output buffer, and then changing port.

2.0.0.2

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