With the great help we receive from community and SE Beta testers we are marching towards RC quality with large steps. This week we hope to remove the last obstacles (mostly printing, some canvas problems and some synchronization problems) that are holding us back and to be able to close all open P1 & P2 bugs. If we achieve all this we will upload the RC1 (Release Candidate 1) build.

As a bonus we have now added the much requested “direct connection” notation between columns (better know as MS Access style notation) to the Standard Edition – a feature that has been requested since the old DBDesigner4 days. Personally, I am not so found of this notation because it limits the connection points to the left and right of the individual PK- and FK-columns which makes it harder to have a nice looking model. But given the flexibility of Workbench to hold an unlimited number of smaller diagrams this might solve this problem for most I hope.

There are a lot of really good feature requests that have been filed and I am sad that all that are now open will not make it into the WB 5.0 release. But we had to stop at some point and focus on quality. We will try to incorporate as many as possible into the WB 5.1 release that should happen later this year. So please do not stop to share your ideas on how to improve Workbench and file feature requests in the bug system – we are always listening.

I will blog about the process of the RC build during the week. Stay tuned!