This is the first in a new series of progress reports. These will be posted with a monthly-ish cadence when there's notable progress made on the project.

v1.1.13 Release

v1.1.13 saw the implementation of two major, much-requested features by @Roukanken42:

• Deduplication on writing of Datacenter #68
• Add schema generation command to Novadrop DC #69

The data center API will now deduplicate nodes and attributes when serializing the data tree. This shaves off ~50% of the size of the packed data center compared to before, and even sees us producing data center files that are ~2% smaller than official ones. Somewhat counterintuitively, this change also resulted in a ~20% decrease in packing time. So, this change is a win on all fronts.

Additionally, the novadrop-dc tool learned a new schema command. This command is capable of generating approximate XML schemas given a packed data center file. It should be noted that the schemas generated by this command will need a human touch to be truly representative of the semantics of certain areas of the data center; for example, it is impossible to accurately determine whether a given path in the tree represents a fully recursive structure.

The effort to implement the schema command also uncovered some incorrect minOccurs and maxOccurs attributes in the schemas shipped with Novadrop. These were fixed.

Finally, the DataCenterExtensions.Descendants(DataCenterNode) method was changed to return nodes in the expected document order.

v1.1.14 and v1.1.20 Releases

v1.1.14 and v1.1.20 were minor bug-fixing releases:

• Some issues with markup interpretation in tool log messages were fixed.
• Some cases of argument validation exceptions being thrown asynchronously were fixed.

Additionally, pooling optimization of ValueTask was applied throughout the project.

Future Plans

Most development focus is on the Celerity project at the moment, especially since the most pressing feature requests from Novadrop users have now been addressed. That being said, the highest-priority issues for future work on Novadrop are these:

• Implement the Vezel.Novadrop.Net library #15
• Support older data center format versions #19

The latter is especially important and would be the primary focus of future Novadrop work.