The biggest change for 0.50b is currently a rework of the upload / disk IO mechanics to switch to asynchronous operations , allowing to OS to optimize the disk access better and upload much faster on big lines. Otherwise there are some fixes and optimizations.
In general you should not reuse protocol related changes for your mods before they are released, because they might still change and break old versions of the dev branch (there are no major protocol changes currently though). Otherwise just keep in mind that it's untested.
Obviously I don't recommend to use this branch for end users, but since some might want to try anyway I will provide a binary for the current dev code now and then. Here. (current build: 16)
This post has been edited by Some Support: 25 April 2015 - 02:57 PM