The last “green” release was a couple of months ago already – time to take a step back, look at all we’ve done, and call it a “minor” update.
What’s up duck?
Functionality-wise, not much. Bug fixes, yes; this means fewer inspection false positives, fewer caching accidents, overall more stable usage. But this time some serious progress was also made in the COM & RCW management area, and Rubberduck 2.2 no longer crashes on exit, or leave a dangling host process, or brick the VBE on reload. Some components are still stubbornly refusing to properly release, so unload+reload is still a not-recommended thing to do, but doing so no longer causes access violations. Which is neat, because this particular problem had been plaguing Rubberduck since the early days of 2.0.
Source Control Disintegration
If you haven’t been following the project since v2.1 was released, you may be disappointed to learn that we are officially dropping the source control integration feature. Not saying it’ll never resurface, but the feature was never really stable, and rather than drain our limited resources on a nice but non-essential feature, we focused on the “core” stuff for now. So instead of keeping the half-baked, half-broken thing in place, we removed it – entirely, so there’s 0 chance any part of it interferes with anything else (there were hooks in place, handling parser state changes and some VBE events).
The “Export Project” functionality remains though, so you can still use your favorite source control provider (Git, SVN, Mercurial, etc.) – Rubberduck just isn’t providing a UI to wrap that provider’s functionality anymore.
Shiny & New
We have new inspections! Rubberduck can now tell you when a Case block is semantically unreachable. Or when For loops specify a redundant Step 1, or if you prefer having an explicit Step clause everywhere, it can tell you about that too. Another inspection warns about error-handling suppression (On Error Resume Next) that is never restored (On Error GoTo 0). If you’re unfortunate enough to encounter the thoroughly evil Def[Type] statements, you’ll be relieved to know that Rubberduck will now warn you about implicitly typed identifiers.
Code Metrics is an entirely new tool, that evaluates cyclomatic complexity and nesting levels of each method and module. The feature clearly needs some UI work (wink wink, nudge nudge, C#/WPF reader), and enhancement ideas are always welcome.
The unit test execution engine no longer invokes the host application. There’s a bit of black magic going on here, but to keep it simple, the unit testing feature now works in every single VBE host application.
But the most spectacular changes aren’t really tangible, user-facing things. We’ve streamlined settings, upgrated our grammars from Antlr4.3 to Antlr4.6 – which fixed a number of parser issues, including significant performance improvements when parsing long Boolean expressions; the IInspection interface was fine-tuned again, COM object references were removed in a number of critical places. If you have a fork of the project, you already know that we’ve split Rubberduck.dll into Rubberduck.Core.dll and Rubberduck.Main.dll, with the entry point and IoC configuration in ‘Main’.
Oh, I lied. One of the most spectacular changes is a tangible, user-facing thing. It’s just not exactly in the main code base, is all. Poor installer, always gets left behind.
Administrative Privileges no longer needed!
Since a couple of pre-release builds, the Rubberduck installer supports per-user installs that no longer require admin privs. This means Rubberduck can now be installed on a locked-down workstation, without requiring IT intervention! This revamped installer also detects and properly uninstalls a previous Rubberduck install (admin elevation would be required to uninstall a per-machine installation of a previous build though), so manually uninstalling through the control panel before upgrading, is no longer recommended/needed. Doesn’t hurt, but shouldn’t change anything, really.
The “installating / instructions” and “contributing / initial setup” wiki pages have been updated accordingly on GitHub.
This new installer no longer assumes Microsoft Office is present, and registers for both 32 and 64-bit host applications.
That’s it? What happened to the rest of 2.1.x?
I did say “minor update”, yeah? The previously announced roadmap for 2.1.x was too ambitious, and not much of it is shipping in this release. In fact, that roadmap should have said “2.x”… versioning is hard, okay? If we stuck to 2.1.x, then a v2.2 would have been moot, since by then we would have had much of 3.0 in place.
Anyway, 2.2 is a terrific improvement over 2.1, on many levels – and that can only mean one thing: that the current development cycle will inevitably lead to even more awesomeness!
Rubberduck News 