A new release for a new day. Presenting file@home 2.2 (r1)

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Yeah, OK, getting a little carried away, but seeing as these releases have become as rare as hens teeth we thought we should make some noise about it.

file@home 2.2 (r1) has been in planning for the past 5 months, in fact immediately after 2.1 (r3) was released we got to work.  Most of the changes to file@home are under the hood, so when you fire the new version up for the first time don't be alarmed that the user interface looks the same.  The reason this is a .2 release rather than .1 (r4) is because the architecture has jumped up a couple of notches - specifically we're now using the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 as the base line for everything.

This jump meant upgrading the database components and while a fairly straight forward task for new installs, getting the upgrade process wrong for existing installs would have been bad.  Very bad.  So we've toiled and chopped and changed and toiled some more and finally we've got it right.  The upgrade is integrated into the application and takes just a few seconds to complete.  Job's a good one.

We've had a couple of reports of our licence engine breaking when the client computer runs registry cleaning software.  For whatever reason, the registry keys we were writing out weren't liked by various software packages - so they got removed - resulting in our licence engine deciding that the install was broken - requiring a reinstall.  This new release takes care of this once and all.

An annoying bug, whereby you're unable to delete certain documents such as PDF's because they're in use, has been squashed and you can now add a document to a folder by choosing the option from the context menu when you right click said folder.

What you won't see are the myriad of tweaks to the code that we've been making on a weekly basis.  Little improvements here and there that make the application more responsive and reliable.

So that about wraps up the changes to this new release - although not massively exciting, they're all geared towards moving file@home forward.

We'd love to hear what you think, so why not leave us some feedback on your experiences with the new version.

Thanks from all the team.

P.S. We're not resting on our laurels now this release is out of the door.  With new development tools on the way we'll be tackling PDF handling, OCR speed and planning the move to .Net 4 over the next few weeks.  As they say, no rest for the wicked - and we've been especially incorrigible lately ;o)