TSW Blog

I'm happy to announce a new maintenance release for TSW phpCoder 2008. It comes with the following changes:

• A minor bug related to scripts and encoding were fixed.
• A couple of small PHP Tidy related bugs were fixed.
• If no text is selected and you start a standard Search or Search & Replace operation, the current word will be suggested as the search phrase.
• Access to the Shell context menu is now possible for both files and folders on the Projects tab, by holding down the Ctrl key when right clicking on a node.
• Code for communicating with TSW WebCoder 2009 was implemented. This will allow users of both applications to share projects and work on the same files with both editors at the same time. More information can be found here.
• Projects with a non-existing root path could not be updated. This should be fixed now.
• You can now define a specific encoding to use when loading and saving files from a specific project.
• The selected project database would not be shown when editing the properties of a project.
• Made sure that FTP/Web mapped URL's will get the refresh parameter too, to prevent a cached version of the file to be shown.

To upgrade, simply go to the phpCoder 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'm happy to announce the release of version 1.03 of TSW phpCoder 2008. It comes with a new feature called test mappings:

Test mappings allow you to test one or several files using another URL than the standard, servermapped version. This is especially useful in these cases:

• When you're using URL rewriting and wish to call the re-written URL instead of the actual file
• When you wish to always test a file (or several files) with a set of parameters
• When you wish to debug include files - you can simply call the file that includes it instead of the actual file

Test mappings can be defined on projects, and they support wildcards, which allows you to map e.g. a whole directory of files to a specific URL. A specific toolbar button has been added to the preview toolbar, allowing you to manage test mappings for the active project, if any. Feedback on this new piece of functionality would be much appreciated.

Besides that, TSW phpCoder 2008 version 1.03 comes with the following changes:

• Notices from PHP during debugging will now be handled differently - instead of halting the execution, phpCoder will try to continue and the notice messages will be shown in the application statusbar
• The search/replace dialog was always visible when active, even if phpCoder had been minimized
• Better handling of &$parameters in function parameters
• Better support for constants in IntelliSense and other IntelliSense related improvements
• Fixed a problem with some characters in the error reporting tool introduced in the previous version

To upgrade, simply go to the phpCoder 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.

My good friend Jeff Sabarese just sent me this nifty phpCoder 2008 button. If you feel like linking to phpCoder, and I really hope that you do, this button might make it cooler :)

You can insert it like this:

<a href="http://www.tsware.net/phpcoder.php" title="TSW phpCoder - Advanced PHP IDE"><img src="http://www.tsware.net/images/madewith/phpcoder2008.png" alt="TSW phpCoder - Advanced PHP IDE" style="border: 0" /></a>

I'm happy to announce the release of version 1.02 of TSW phpCoder 2008. It comes with the following changes:

• AutoProposal lists can now be confirmed with the Tab key as well
• Project based include directories can now be recursive, to allow for automatic inclusions of subfolders and thereby files
• A bug, which caused the debug interface to not be changed under certain conditions, was fixed
• A couple of minor PHP Tidy bugs were fixed
• HTML end tags will now be completed with the correct casing, according to the HTML tag settings
• Updates through the database result window would cause an exception if the user didn't have the required rights - a nicer message has been implemented

Besides that, a new error handling mechanism has been implemented. It will pop up instead of the old messagebox, when an unexpected error occurs, and besides looking better, it allows you to see more details about the problem, and even better: Submit them to us with a single click on the mouse. Hopefully this will give me a better overview of which problems still exist, allowing me to fix them faster and better :)

To upgrade, simply go to the phpCoder 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'm happy to announce the release of version 1.01 of TSW phpCoder 2008. It comes with the following changes:

• Several IntelliSense bugs were fixed
• Better support for the Ctrl+Space shortcut, in various PHP code contexts
• Minor PHP Tidy fixes
• A small bug where an extra / character would be used in a servermapped URL has been fixed
• The address field of the old style interface has been made more flexible, so that it automatically adjusts its size to better use up free space
• Added support for basic clipboard (Cut, Copy & Paste), Undo/redo and Select all shortcuts in IE preview (Mozilla preview does not seem to allow it)
• The font color of the PHP reference listview could get a bit hard to read with certain Windows color schemes
• Find references can now be used on a selected identifier as well
• The Save As dialog now uses path and filename from existing file, if possible
• An extra setting for controlling the PHP AutoProposal list was added, to differ between automatically showing for variables, class members etc. and for identifiers (when you start typing a word). You can turn the last one off, if the AutoProposal list is causing slow typing in phpCoder on your computer
• A bug where the FTP port number would not be displayed correctly in the FTP server dialog was fixed

Besides that, a new option will be added to the Start menu, allowing you to easily manage the settings for TSW phpCoder, without starting the application. This allows you to reset layout, reset all settings, access the various folders and even make a backup of your settings folder.

To upgrade, simply go to the phpCoder 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'm very happy to announce the final version of TSW phpCoder 2008. It can be downloaded from the product page, where I've tried to collect a bunch of cool videos and screenshots, for your viewing pleasure. Go download the trial version of it and I hope you'll all like it :). For those of you who haven't yet seen TSW phpCoder in action, here are the top list of reasons to give it a try as soon as possible:

• Real debugging
• Complete IntelliSense
• PHP Tidy
• Realtime syntax check
• phpDoc support
• MySQL database client
• Along with all the stuff you may already know from WebCoder, like CodeFolding, CodeSnippets, FTP/SFTP/FTPS client, scripting support and much, much more!

Go get it now!

A big thank you goes out to all the betatesters, who have been hunting bugs like crazy for the last 3 months. 3 months, where you guys started almost 300 threads in the beta forum, and where we all submitted almost 1.500 posts in total. Very impressive, guys! I promised to give away 5 commercial licenses for phpCoder 2008, and while you all did a terrific job, I feel that these 5 persons deserves it the most (in no particular order, listed with their forum names):

• amews_aj
• Mobleman
• BlackYell
• iosoftgame
• redndahead

Send me an e-mail through the contact form of this site, and I will make sure that you get your free license. Thank you, betatesters :)

Special note to people with a beta version installed: Unless you allow phpCoder to overwrite your previous settings, you may be missing out on certain fixes, since each beta release usually comes with slightly modified data files, to fix issues where these files are involved.

Final beta 6 has now been released. Only very few bugs were found in FB5, so we are definitely getting very close to the final release. Let's find the last bugs now! As mentioned, I will be giving away free commercial licenses to the 5 most active betatesters at the end of the test, so get busy :)

Download TSW phpCoder 2008 final beta 6 - please provide feedback in the beta forum

Special note to people with a previous beta version installed: Unless you allow phpCoder to overwrite your previous settings, you may be missing out on certain fixes, since each beta release usually comes with slightly modified data files, to fix issues where these files are involved.

I know I've said this before, but I really do love the scripting support in WebCoder and phpCoder :). However, you can do even more with it than just create simple scripts. Adam Moore has extended the functionality of phpCoder with SVN support using just scripting, as seen in this post, which really shows you some of the potential. In this post, I wish to highlight something equally cool: The ability to create plugins. It makes it much easier to add advanced functionality, since it allows the developer to create most of the functionality in an IDE designed for the job, like Visual Studio or one of the Express editions. I've written a small tutorial on the subject to get you started - it can be found right here. Have a look and let me know what you think of it.

Also, please have a look in this forum thread - I need your help on that one, guys :)

I have just released the 3rd beta version of TSW phpCoder 2008. I think that the application already feels more stable, but I'm sure that there are still bugs to be found, so keep up the good work, guys. As mentioned last time, I will be giving away free commercial licenses to the 5 most active betatesters :)

Download TSW phpCoder 2008 beta 3 - please provide feedback in the beta forum

Special note to people with a previous beta version installed: Unless you allow phpCoder to overwrite your previous settings, you may be missing out on certain fixes, since each beta release usually comes with slightly modified data files, to fix issues where these files are involved.

TSW phpCoder 2008 beta 2 has just been released. I wish to thank all the very active beta testers, who have kept me very busy for the last couple of weeks! More than 100 issues have been resolved from beta 1 to beta 2, and I really wish to thank you guys for being so devoted to finding the bugs and telling me about them. I forgot to mention this in the first blog post about beta 1, but I would like to give away a free commercial TSW phpCoder license to the 5 most active betatesters once the final version has been released - as usual :). Keep up the good work!

Download TSW phpCoder 2008 beta 2 - please provide feedback in the beta forum

Please be aware that the usual splash screen has been deactivated in beta 2, because of a compatibility issue with one of the components used. I hope to have this issue fixed soon, hopefully for beta 3. 

Special note to beta 1 users: A minor change was made to the internal name of the main menu. This invalidates the toolbar layout file that beta 1 has created for you. If you choose to keep your settings during the first start of beta 2, the main menu will not be displayed properly. In that case, please do the following: Press F8, go to Interface -> Toolbars and press the "Reset all toolbars" button. Now restart phpCoder, and the main menu should be okay again :)