The new Start screen simplifies creating a new project or working with existing ones.

When a project is open, the main screen is the Project Explorer. The Project Explorer provides a clean, easy-to-use experience for creating, updating, and organizing your automation projects. The Project Explorer shows important information about recent projects.

The Toolbox contains components and variables, organized into logical sections. In addition, we have extracted properties, methods, and events from the utility components (such as stringUtils) and placed them directly in the Toolbox. You can easily search for and locate the item you need. Recently used objects display at the top of the Toolbox. In addition, you can right-click an item and add it to your Favorites, which are always handy at the top of the list.

The Palette replaces the Object Explorer. Like an artist’s palette, it provides a clean, well-organized location containing only the items that are relevant to build the current automation. The Palette always occupies the left side of the screen.

Adapters are now referred to as application project items. The matching window has been redesigned. The single property grid on the right side of the screen is used to evaluate all sections—match rules, targets, and selected controls—and swaps views based on the item in focus.

Visually, the automation surface has been updated but the general workflow of automations has not changed.

The Select action dialog is used to add blocks to the automation surface; select an item from the Palette and drop it onto the automation surface to show the Select action dialog. Select a pinned property, method, or event, or click More to explore all properties, methods, and events that are available.

A login sequence is automatically recognized and can be moved to a new automation, ignored, or not included in your automation, which promotes modularity and reusability.

In addition, application login credentials are stored via DPAPI and applied automatically at design time for Robot Studio users, ensuring that credentials are secured and speeding up the login process.

Automation testing allows users to debug automations for currently running applications, which provides rapid debugging across different sets of input data without restarting and logging into the application.

The black-eye icon has been added to the Palette to identify issues, highlighting duplicate matches to address.

When debugging, property values display on automation blocks, providing immediate feedback.

Application methods are single-purpose automations that are created by automation developers and used in an automation just like any out-of-the-box method of an application. Application methods isolate key functionality in small components or modules that are easy to reuse, test, and share.

Other developers can download assets from a Robot Manager 8.8 repository and import them into projects.

The new Pega Browser Extension (PBE) component ensures that the Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browser extensions comply with the Chromium Project Manifest V3 specification. PBE is a standalone component, just like Pega RPA Service and Pega Native Foundation that’s used to automate Chrome and Edge applications. PBE includes the extension and the Messaging Host.

Environment overrides replace Configurations in prior versions of Robot Studio but work in much the same way. Use environment overrides to customize your project to run in different environments. Some examples of environments that you may need to customize for are Development, QA, and Production. You can override property values for variables, controls, and match rules at runtime for each environment.You can set values of certain variables and properties at runtime based on the environment you're running.

Use Text applications to integrate with terminal emulator applications. Pega Robot Studio lets you create projects that integrate with mainframe applications. Robot Studio supports the most commonly used WinHllapi- and EHllapi-based emulator software.

The script component lets you add custom C# methods to your solutions. The script component can only be added to Globals.

The Manage references dialog allows you to add references to your project that are required for your C# scripts. You can access this dialog from the Script editor.

You can now add a project item to your project that exists within another project. You can also use the Generate new ID capability to safely duplicate a project item that exists within your project. You can add an automation, an application, or a Windows form.

In the Project Explorer, select Add > Existing file.