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5.5 Release notes
5.5 Release notes

.NET 6, Rabbit Trigger, Monaco, Cross-platform, Code snippets

E
Written by Erkka Honkavaara
Updated over a week ago

What has changed

Breaking changes in 5.5

Service Bus for Windows
Support for Service Bus for Windows Server is removed, when updating to 5.5 switching to RabbitMQ for full on-premise deployments is mandatory. This also means that using the Service Bus Trigger no longer works with Service Bus for Windows Server.


​Remote Subprocesses

Because of changes to the message busses used by Frends, Agent groups within an Environment should be reinstalled at the same time. This is required when Remote Subprocesses are being used.


​Support for Frends 4.2 Processes

Editing old Frends 4.2 style Processes is no longer be supported. If you have old 4.2 style Processes, you will need to convert them to the new format before updating to the new version.

Frends.Tasks.Attributes support to be removed in 5.5.3

Frends Tasks Attributes was a way of modifying the Parameter editor for Tasks before Frends 4.5.6, when it was deprecated. Support for it is removed on the 5.5.3 release. Previously imported Tasks will continue to work normally, but new Task imports will require migration to System.ComponentModel.Annotation to support conditional parameter displays etc.

5.5.5

11th of January 2023

This Service release contains the following changes/fixes:

UI

Bug fixes

  • Fixed bug which prevented creating new Environment variables correctly from the Process Editor when there is a name collision

Agent

Bug fixes

  • Agent's automatic recovery from a prolonged RabbitMQ outage fixed for Remote Subprocesses

5.5.4

14th of November 2022

This Service release contains the following changes/fixes:

UI

Improvements

  • Process editor loads less API specification data to speed up page load time

  • Process Instance count updates are now decoupled from Process instance updates, this prevents slow count updates from slowing instance updates

Bug fixes

  • Empty user role rules are now ignored instead of interpreted as wildcards

  • Updates to Instance counts are now correctly shown when using Environment specific log databases

  • Deleting an Agent Group no longer tries to delete the Environment level exchange if it is still in use when using RabbitMQ

  • NuGet package dependency error tolerance improved, nuget.org v3 feed used as a fallback when compiling .NET 6 and Standard Processes

Agent

Improvements

  • Remote Subprocess message handling performance improvements when using Azure Service Bus

  • Cross-platform Agent now has the option to limit max concurrent Subprocesses (64 by default)

Bug fixes

  • Agent-specific queues now handle Remote Subprocess replies to support HA Agents when using RabbitMQ message bus

  • Legacy Agent no longer fails to install a Process when a NuGet package with runtime-specific dependencies that are not stored in the OS-specific/lib folder

  • Fixed issue with unloading Process' Assembly Load context when using Tasks that use a Memory cache

  • Agent no longer reports an error if it does not receive a Service Bus message after a 10-minute wait

5.5.3

8th of September 2022


This Service release contains the beta release of the Management API for the UI. It is a beta release, so you can try it out and give feedback. Some of the API signatures may change in the final release. You can read more about it here. Contact support@frends.com to have it enabled according to this guide.


This service release contains the following changes/fixes:
​

UI

Improvements

  • Beta release of the Management API

  • Process cleanup performance improved

  • Class names are now included in the Task name in the Process editor

  • API Triggers now allow using environment variable references outside of the API Spec

  • It is now possible to skip holidays for Monitoring rules alerting
    ​

Bug fixes

  • Back to list button fixed for Subprocesses started with run once

  • Process instance list had wrong columns for Processes started with run once

  • Process instance's Foreach loop index is now correctly incremented with the input element's controls when viewing the first iteration

  • Process Diff editor no longer crashes when viewing some parameters

  • Agent group names in URLs are no longer treated as case-sensitive

  • Toggling 'Retry on failure' sets the Process editor model as dirty and shows the save button

  • Fixed Monitoring rule processing for Max and Min aggregates

  • Fixed Process editor validation for Data Store and Data Object annotations

  • Cross-platform Gateway Agent installer download no longer fails when external address is not set

  • Azure SQL dependencies are now included in the Cross-platform Agent Windows installer

  • Process instance export is now filtered according to selected Agent Group

  • Environment Variable deletion fixed for variables with underscore in their name

  • Variable reference auto complete fixed when inside of curly braces
    ​

Agent

Improvements

  • It is now possible to disable legacy TLS on Agents

  • Legacy Agent installer now checks that the SSL Certificate exists in the local machine store

  • Shared state key cleanup performance improved
    ​

Bug fixes

  • Agent can now be installed on a non-English Windows

  • Reintroduced AmqpWebSockets TranportType for Service Bus connections

  • Cross-platform Agent Windows installer no longer fails due to doublequotes in config

  • Redundant IOCompletionCallback errors no longer fill the log

  • Operating system specific libraries are now copied correctly when deploying Processes

  • Agent installation no longer fails if it fails to add user to the Performance counters group
    ​

5.5.2

19th of April 2022

This service release contains the following changes/fixes:
​

UI

  • UI can now show in-editor documentation for Process shapes (cloud tenants only)

  • Improvements to Parameter editor behavior: automatic XML end tag insertion, colorization and variable reference intellisense fixes

  • Agent Group display name can no longer be an existing internal Agent Group name

  • Service bus partitioning can be disabled on per-Environment basis

  • Bug: Fixed problem with building .NET 6 Processes for the first time due to missing Frends.ExecutableProcessHostInterfaces package

  • Bug: Monitor rule copy no longer clears the Triggered Processes field

  • Bug: Bypassing Global exception handler on Throw shape now works correctly from a Catch block

  • Bug: Comment shape attached to a catch shape no longer causes validation to fail

  • Bug: Long toast messages are now ellipsized

  • Security: Process deployments no longer include unnecessary sensitive Agent information

Agent

  • Cross-platform Agent Process packages now include the source code and debug symbol for the Process

  • Agent no longer logs unnecessary messages for closed HTTP connections

  • Bug: Cross-platform Agent installer for Windows no longer causes multiple Add/Remove programs entries

5.5.1

8th of March 2022

Agent

  • File based Process logging is now independent of the Log process instance parameters and return value -setting

5.5.0

24th of February 2022

New feature: Cross-platform Agent updated to .NET 6.0

The cross-platform Agent has now been updated to run on .NET 6.0. This means Tasks can be built targeting the newest .NET 6.0 and Processes can be built to target it.

Security improvements: Increased security for Agent message bus access

Agents now have more strict security for RabbitMQ and Azure Service buses. This increases the separation between Environments, but will require all Agent groups within an Environment to be updated at the same time, otherwise Remote Subprocesses will no longer work.

New feature: Monaco Process parameter editor

Frends now uses the Monaco editor (the editor that powers Visual Studio Code) as the parameter editor. This allows us to provide better intellisense and other editor capabilities.

New feature: Code snippets

Code snippets allow you to store and share pieces of code/configuration between users. These snippets allow you to keep a library of frequently used snippets and easily add them with the new #snippet reference.

New feature: Installer for Cross-platform Agent on Windows

The Cross-platform Agent now has an installer for Windows which can be downloaded the same way as the installer for the Legacy Windows Agent. The installer requires at least .NET Framework 4.7.1 (shipped with Windows Server 1709+) and the Agent itself requires .NET 6 which currently needs to be installed separately.

New feature: RabbitMQ Trigger

RabbitMQ is now natively supported as a Trigger, it is the preferred Message Bus alongside Azure Service Bus. The native Trigger provides better support for RabbitMQ's functionality. It uses AMQP 0.9.1 which is the natively supported protocol for RabbitMQ instead of 1.0 used by the Queue Trigger.

Other improvements and bug fixes

  • Process search query is now persisted when navigating away from the Process List page

  • Process instance CSV download now supports downloading up to 10000 rows without selecting each row

  • Execution counts can now be limited to the last day in addition to 7, 30 and all days

  • Processes with only Manual Triggers are no longer shown in the Agent Triggers list

  • Dashboard now correctly shows execution times in the browser's current time zone

  • HTTP Trigger can now correctly return multipart responses, it no longer discards the boundary attribute from the header

  • Process execution duration is now updating in live for currently executing instances when auto refresh is enabled

  • Communication between Frends components is now more strict to prevent incompatible messages from causing problems

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