We’re about to release another version of Synergy, and when we do you may notice that we’re not documenting any new features in the release. This is an intentional change, and I wanted to let you know about it ahead of time.

In addition to working on Synergy/DE, our development teams are also working on re-organizing many of our internal systems, tools, and practices. We’re centralizing almost all of our development around Microsoft Azure DevOps; we’re consolidating all version control on Git (currently, depending on the product area and platform, we also use PVCS and Subversion), we’re making extensive use of CICD principles and tools to build automated build and test pipelines for all aspects of the product, and much more.

The only exceptions to this are our open source products, CodeGen and Harmony Core, which will remain in their current locations on GitHub. This will be an on-going process extending well into 2021 and, when complete, will put us in a great position to be able to return our focus entirely to Synergy/DE within a modern, highly efficient and productive development environment.

And as part of this reorganization of our environment, tools and practices, we have also made some decisions about how we’re going to release changes to the Synergy/DE products. For the core Synergy/DE runtime products, we have decided to revert to our earlier practice of only releasing quality improvements in patch releases; new features will be released less frequently, in numbered product releases. There are some other changes coming down the pipeline, but we’re still fleshing out some of the details, we’ll let you know as soon as things are firmed up.

This decision applies to the runtime products only, not to the development tools; you will still see regular releases for the Visual Studio-based development tools (and maybe more) in the near future. And development and releases of CodeGen and Harmony Core will continue as normal.