Client Tools v2.0.0 RC published

As mentioned on Twitter I have published the new version (v2.0) of my ClientTools as Release Candidate 1 today.

If you don't know the ClientTools here just a short summary: the ClientTools is a windows form application which connects to one or more umbraco installations via webservices to maintain these. It adds some usefull and easy to use features like the log viewer and the version cleaner. I started the ClientTools back in 2007 and didn't touched it for more than a year. Now I did a redesign concentrating on v4.x of Umbraco.

What's new?

• v2 uses only one web service to reduce the maintenance work and to ease the upgrading
• v2 uses the build in DataLayer and standard SQL, so it will work with MS SQL Server but also with MySql and VistaDB.
• v2 is build with .NET 3.5. Sorry, but no support for .NET 2.0 only systems.

The Features: Settings

In the settings windows you define the Umbraco installations you want to maintain with the ClientTools. Add a new profile, edit the username, password and the url of the ClientToolsWebservices.asmx file on your umbraco installation. Remember: if you check the save password option the password is saved as clear text on the hard drive.

LogViewer

The LogViewer is the most used feature by myself. It gives you the option to check the log table of umbraco. You can filter by various options (by log text, by date, by log header, the user id or node id). You can also set the number of the rows to return. Also you can easily delete selected logs:

Version Cleaner

The version cleaner is new due to the fact that umbraco does not have a build in mechanism to delete old or messy versions (I will add an event handler to this project for that soon). Atm there is only the tree view for the version cleaner, but it shows you how much versions every node has and how much versions the nodes below are using. You can select unwanted versions and delete them. Versions which are the newest or the published cannot be deleted.

The next weeks I will publish RC2 including the grid view version cleaner and the option to delete versions by number of versions to leave or by date.

Suggestions and comments are welcome.

Cheers, Thomas

ClientTools progress status

I want to give a short status to all who are waiting for the version cleaner update.

The bad news at first: I am totally stuck. I thought of a very clean design of the tools and got into many, many really small and in a pragmatic view unimportant problems. Now I cannot see the wood for all the trees.

That's the point where I decided to stop. I will again start from version 1.5.0 (it was the latest version I used, although it was a alpha/beta, but it worked very well) again without changing the architecture and design of the ClientTools to get a working Version Cleaner as soon as possible. In the meanwhile I will try to read the pragmatic programmer from David Thomas and Andrew Hunt.

Opening this blog

Dear reader, umbracian and friend,

with this post I am opening this blog. In this blog I want to share my expiriences with some really great tools, mainly umbraco [1].

Also I will use this blog to introduce my ClientTools for Umbraco [2].

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions or criticism please contact me via the contact formular or via mail to th |at| thoehler |dot| com.

Yours,
Thomas

[1] http://www.umbraco.org
[2] http://www.codeplex.com/ClientTools4Umbraco