We are pleased to announce that six more TMS products have joined the family of TMS Smart Setup enabled products.

These six products are:

• TMS Cryptography Pack
• TMS MQTT
• TMS Passkit
• TMS VCL Plugin Framework
• TMS VCL Chart
• TMS VCL Cloud Pack
  
  

What is TMS Smart Setup?

For those not yet familiar with TMS Smart Setup, let's explain first what it is, why we created it, and how to use it.  

 Dependencies

The root cause for creating a tool like TMS Smart Setup was to handle component package dependencies smoothly. Imagine you want to install package A, but it depends on package B, which you do not have downloaded or installed. TMS Smart Setup recognizes that package B is not available in your IDE and automatically downloads and installs it. Another major reason for starting this project was to make the process of updating installed packages easier.

 Component Updating

With classic Delphi component installers, you typically run the installer, which first runs an uninstaller if a prior version is found, and then installs the new version. This process can be error-prone. If you have multiple products installed, you'll repeat these steps multiple times. With TMS Smart Setup, you simply execute its update command, and it fetches the latest product releases and installs the updated packages in your IDE. One command, and your IDE has the latest versions installed.

 Unattended Install

With a typical product install, you go through a wizard, selecting options repeatedly, and then let the installer run. Doing this for multiple products means you need to sit in front of your machine and go through these steps sequentially. With TMS Smart Setup, you can issue commands from the command line, and it performs the installation unattended. You can even automate this process, having Smart Setup run every day or week during the night, so your machine is updated with the latest components and ready for work.

 Open

To use TMS Smart Setup for installing packages in the Delphi or C++Builder IDE, all you need are the packages and a simple text file (in YAML format) to instruct TMS Smart Setup on which IDEs and platforms to install. TMS Smart Setup is not limited to TMS products; you can use it for your own internal build system!

 Self-Updating

TMS Smart Setup is self-updating. This means that when we add new features, such as support for a new RAD Studio IDE, you'll always have the latest version. No worries about installing updates for the installer 😉

 Performance

TMS Smart Setup uses parallel building for the multiple IDEs and multiple targets packages can be compiled.  By using this technique, we have seen in our testing performance improvement of up to a factor 6 for bigger cross-platform products like TMS FlexCel for example.

 Resilience

IDE configuration with its multiple optionally installed compilers and library setup per target can be tricky. Sometimes manipulating some settings causes building for a specific target to break. And with that, building our product packages possibly also breaks. With the classic installer, this meant the whole install failed. With TMS Smart Setup, it will just try to complete what is possible to complete and let you work with the targets that were successfully installed. Later, when the configuration of a specific target that had issues has been repaired, simply rerun TMS Smart Setup and all should be fine.

 Interesting trivia

Our TMS Smart Setup project that was quietly brewing in our labs got a significant boost after the TMS Training Days 2023. In a roundtable discussion with attendees during this event, it became clear how desirable the tool was for you, so this accelerated our work and results a year later in the tool being significantly enhanced and covering the majority of our products. So, in September this year, we are again holding our TMS Training Days, so we are already curious to learn what you will want to see getting a significant push forward!

 What's Next?

While many TMS product users are already happily using the current TMS Smart Setup command-line & basic visual tool that comes with it, to regularly update their products, we want to take it a step further. We aim to offer a dashboard for managing all your product licensing, purchases, renewals, resources and triggering TMS Smart Setup updates from there. This tool will show all your products, its related resources, new release information and let you update one, several, or all products. The goal is to eventually replace the TMS Subscription Manager and classic installers. In the coming weeks, we plan to start a closed beta for this visual dashboard tool. If you are a customer with active licensed products and want to participate, please sign up here, and we will inform you when the beta is ready for download.

 You and TMS Smart Setup

The Smart Setup command-line tool has been available for testing for quite some time. Now is a good moment to learn whether you are using it regularly, whether you like it, and what you think the future direction of TMS Smart Setup versus classic installers should be. Please fill out this questionnaire, it would greatly help steer our efforts in the right direction!

 More resources

• Documentation
  
  
• Holger Flick explaining TMS Smart Setup:
  
  
  
• We held a webinar on TMS Smart Setup that you can view here: