Reviewed October 2008

Prior to build 1128 of 23 Oct 08, A-Shell looked for %miame%\default.ash unless a settings file was specified via the -o switch on the command line. In that case, if the specified filespec started with "%USERPROFILE%\Application Data\ATE" directory, and the file was not present, it would have looked in %MIAME%, but the File>Save function would have saved it to the %USERPROFILE% directory.

Beginning with build 1128, the new scheme is  that if no -o switch is specified, the search path is:

%APPDATA%\<appname>\<cfgname>.ash

%APPDATA%\<appname>\default.ash

%MIAME%\<cfgname>.ash

%MIAME%\default.ash

where <appname> is "ATE" or "A-Shell" depending on the context. For ATE, <cfgname> is the name of the connection profile; for A-Shell it is the name of the ini file, or "default" if the ini file is miame.ini.

If a -o file is specified, then it overrides the above rules, although if the file has no directory, the search path will be %APPDATA%\<appname> and then %MIAME%. This matches the prior search path when -o was used without a fully qualified path, except that %APPDATA% works better (and resolves differently) under Vista.

The File>Save and File>Save As menu items have been merged into a single File>Save... dialog, which allows you to save the current settings to one of the four locations/names above, and in addition contains a Save As button for more exotic options. It also contains a Delete button as a convenience for deleting a saved settings file (although it does not allow deleting the %miame%\default.ash file). And, it shows the filespec of the settings file that the current settings were loaded from.

The objectives of the above changes were:

•   To better support Vista, which has a different location for which the %APPDATA% directory is not the same as %USERPROFILE%\Application Data directory;

•   To make it easier for dealers, site managers, and individual users to manage their personal window settings without having to manually adjust their shortcut command lines.

The new scheme is as security-lax as the old one (allowing anyone to overwrite the shared %miame%\default.ash), but the save function does always default to one of the %APPDATA% options (hopefully eliminating some of the accidental overwrites). The next step will probably be to allow the shared copy to be password protected.