Welcome to all of our new beta testers! In an effort to keep everyone informed of the beta's progress, I just wanted to let you know why a new beta build hasn't been released this week. The new beta represents a significant amount of work, even though it is only a 0.0.1 release. Just to give you an idea of the scope of the changes:

- The entire taskbar/button rendering process had to be re-written to accommodate the "special needs" of Windows 7
- The taskbar management that goes on behind the scenes is ~80% new code
- The code base is now ~40% smaller, with a more unified approach towards supporting different operating systems (less code branches, less special conditional code)

The goals behind these changes are speed and reliability. The new taskbar management is lightning fast, responds to events quicker, and allows for faster DisplayFusion start-up and shutdown. In previous versions there were many code branches to deal with different operating systems. This has been unified into 1 system that oversees everything. This makes it much easier for me to maintain, and much easier to extend. However, with every upside there is a downside. Changing 80% of the taskbar code means there is a huge potential for the introduction of new bugs. Once I release the next beta I'll be looking for as much feedback as you can provide, and not just in Windows 7. I'll provide more specific testing details once the build is released in a couple of days.

I am targeting May 30th as the release date for version 3.0.5, but we'll see how brutal the testing is.

May 21, 2009  • #1