It makes me proud to look back on our launch of V5 of NCrunch to see that we've managed to make many people happy with this release.  A release of such a size always brings with it a massive feeling of anxiety as it approaches.  There are countless things that can go wrong when 3 years of development goes out the door all at once.  Although we've seen a range of issues come in since the big push, we've been able to promptly fix the serious ones, and the major features (JetBrains Rider support and RDI) seem to be doing rather well.

Another Fix Release

Today, we've released 5.4.  Like the three other minor versions we've released before it, this build is all about fixing issues and making improvements to RDI and our Rider support.

Included in v5.4 we have a range of fixes targeting some of the more niche areas of our Rider plugin, such as DPI scaling and UI responsiveness.  Our Rider plugin is rapidly solidifying, with performance and reliability improving with every update.

We've also introduced some fixes for the handling of async methods in RDI.  Async/await is an extremely challenging construction for us to support with RDI, as it involves multiple threads coordinating over a single method and needing to be stitched together to be shown in one coherent RDI frame.  This involves a lot of tracking down oddities in async that can be caused by race conditions or custom logic in the threading context.  I'm hopeful that we've now managed to pin these issues down, but if you are able to build an async method that RDI can't handle correctly, please do take the time to share it with us.

Please see here for the full list of changes in v5.4.

Future Plans

At the moment, our focus is still on improving the stability and performance of V5 so that it lives up to its promises.  This means we'll continue to push small, regular updates over the next few weeks to address reported issues as they come in.

Beyond this, we hope to eventually start working more on addressing some of the larger gaps around the new V5 features.

We are also finalising our submission to the JetBrains Marketplace to make our Rider plugin more accessible and hopefully open up NCrunch to a wider range of users.

I can't express how happy I am to have V5 be received as warmly as it has been.  I want to thank everyone that's helped to make it a success.