About a month after we released 4.6.1 we had planned to release
4.6.2. You could say that it is part of a natural progression to
have a beautiful service pack release to address the feedback we
had received once the project was in the wild. Business as usual
and we had been there with the 3, 4 and 4.5 releases. 4.6.2
was also progressing in the same vein. But…
Bring in the Australasians
When we released JUNO one of the things to follow was switching
from Team Foundation System (TFS) to Mercurial (Hg) for source
control. This was mostly related to the development of v5 but it
has rapidly proved that distributed source control is like adding
fuel to an 'open source' fire. After a month we have seen more
forks of v4.6/v5 than we had seen patches for v4. And why would you
care? Because it turns out that the community is smarter than the
core team, which is exactly what we had hoped for. Or, what we
hoped with v5 - certainly not with v4.6 as that was supposed to be
the final minor release until v5 was here.
But that's where those damn clever Australasians (apparently the
most clever word for people living in either Australia or New
Zealand which makes me doubt just how clever they really
are!) come in. You see, in Australia there's a guy called Elijah Glover and in New
Zealand there's a guy called Gareth Evans and they have one
thing in common - a craving for a more powerful Razor scripting
engine than the one we introduced in v4.6. And while these type of
people suck at coming up with words describing their geographical
region, they write code that makes you shed tears of joy. And the
result is a faster, more flexible razor engine with medium trust
support and a query language that'll cause your XSLT-loving
colleague to cry also (in pain at the slow death of their
language). It's so good, that I couldn't possibly look at myself in
the mirror if the version of Umbraco that included this code poetry
should be left with a pathetic patch increment in its version
number. (Well, my colleagues in the HQ
knew that I had no choice as these improvements require minor
updates to the web.config which isn't allowed when we release a
patch release).
So v4.7 it is
So the bottom line is that there'll be no v4.6.2 and out
of the blue v4.7 beta is here. It's beautiful... a veritable
buffet of great enhancements and bug fixes, but more than anything
in my opinion, the best Razor implementation in the industry.
You'll love it. Unless you're a die-hard XSLT lover... But then you
probably drive a Kia or a Hyundai and deserve to be left with
ancient technology in a wannabe modern wrapping anyway.
Enough rambling, I digress - v4.7 beta is awaiting your test and
we expect the full release within days. So enjoy. I certainly have!
Now go
download it.
Note for upgrades
If you're upgrading from 4.6.x make sure you read the release
notes. There are three minor updates to your web.config that you'll
need to make apart from the usual upgrade process. It's thoroughly
described in the stuff you normally wouldn't read yet would
complain if it didn't exist. This time we've tried our best :-)
More on the Razor improvements
Over the next few weeks Elijah and Gareth will be blogging here
about the awesome Razor improvements. So stay tuned!