BootZilla v5.x is dead and gone. Development on that beast was boring, buggy, and ugly. Today we are announcing the next iteration of the toolkit.

BootZilla version 6 will be the Major release.
It’s a complete re-write. There’s no old, crap-tastic code to be found here. Everything is minimalistic in nature, and is a whole lot faster. Building the entire package takes only a couple minutes, whereas it could have taken a full 45 minutes before. This version is about Speed, speed, speed, and versatility. Gone are the days of having downloads fail, and getting cryptic messages without proper logging.

The only con, if it can even be considered a con, is that the .NET Framework 2.0 is required. At this point in time, most people are using either Windows Vista or Windows 7, which both include .NET 2.0 as a component of the operating system. Only XP and 2000 users need to be aware of this dependency that BootZilla 6 has. Everything else is pre-packaged, and requires no additional utilities to function.

Technical details -

At this point in development, the essential tools have already been picked out, and now the only decision left is to decide on using just 7zip as the decompressor, or to use Universal Extractor (see www.legroom.net) as a helper application that covers anything I can throw at it (its getting more and more obvious to myself that I’ll use the latter). After this decision, the code for extracting files and folders needs to be implemented, but that’s all behind the scenes, and not something that the average user will ever know is coded by hand. That’s the beauty of BZ6 - no longer will there be a bunch of command prompt windows, bothering you while you try to do work and update BZ in the background. The only script included is used to get the latest database for the download application, (using wget for now) and then launching Ketarin with the latest database file. There’s simple logic in the script to keep bad things from happening, proper commenting for each function, and even proper administrator elevation information for users of Vista and 7.

Version 6 came about due to use of the toolkit in an environment where speed is of the essence, and efficiency is a required element to be successful.

As of today, the 27th of November 2011, development is closer to finished than it has been for over a year, or more, considering that the last ‘final’ version that can honestly be considered worthy of such a title, was released.