I was going to upgrade and test the lastest patches, but there are multiple copies of ashell/ATE as well as documentation that doesnt match the latest patch release number...

What's a developer to do???

Good question. The bad news is that there has been a bewildering array of patches to the "stable" release, including two yesterday. In the silver lining department, the good news is that most of these are resulting from a new wave of development, as developers start to do new development with 5.0.

I'll confess to quietly posting some patches to ashw32.exe so that people who reported the problems can test them, while dragging my feet on a more public update. If you want to check the very latest patch (985.6 for ashw32), you can get it, and the associated notes, directly from the /dist/50rel/bin-win directory.

If no problems are reported with the latest patches, and no new problems reported, I'll post more official updates this evening.

P.S. 99% of these patches have been to Windows and related to GUI and/or ATE issues, so the UNIX distributions that are on the download page are still up-to-date, except for the three LIT updates which you can get separately below: (you may need to use right-click and save-as)


HOST.LIT 2.0(102)
SHLEXC.LIT 1.0(102)
ZTXFER.LIT 1.1(103)

Thanks for the reply...

I will wait for you to clean house and go with your new "packaged release" when you are ready.

I will stay tuned to this bat channel for future developments.

Since there seems to be a flurry of updates/enhances/fixes recently to 5.0... here are a couple of things i would like you to consider:

1) The possibility of more than 16 colors support in Xtree. I have already maxed this out but was afraid to ask for more.... any chance of going past "P", or is there an inherent limit to 16 simultaneous colors?

2) The devnotes mention work on the drag and drop feature... is this supported in editable cells? Is this supported across columns?

(And no wise-cracks about me asking for features... as long as the door on this baby is still wide open, i might as well walk thru... )

Other than the HOST.LIT/HOST.SBX feature, I think that pretty much all of the recent XTREE patches have been fixes rather than new features. That said, it most likely wouldn't break anything to increase the limit on defined colors from "P" to "Z" (i.e. from 16 to 26). (I guess I set the limit at 16 in one of those "no one should ever need more than 640K" moments.) Beyond Z we just start getting into syntax/semantic issues that I'd rather avoid. At least, that is, until I see you post a screen picture using 26 different colors in a single XTREE where we can all plainly see that there aren't enough colors.

As for the drag-and-drop references, these were just fixes to the existing drag-and-drop feature which allows you to reorder the rows. There were some bugs there that caused it to malfunction when applied to trees with editable cells (relating to confusion over the ANSARY layout).

I don't quite know what you mean by "across columns". Currently, drag-and-drop only operates on entire rows. You can already reorder the columns with another form of drag-and-drop. But there is no support for drag-and-drop operations into/out-of a tree or between individual cells.

If you test out the 986.8 patch to make sure that we didn't break anything, I'll extend the color limit to 26.

But then, PLEASE, let's call it quits on 5.0 enhancements!

I will be happy to test the release after you add to 26 colors... and will be happy to provide some kaleidescope-esque screen shot.

The drag/drop question was across cells... dont worry, i won't ask!

I'm sure the "No more enhancements" wasnt directed at me!!!? I've tried xtra hard to not request/alter existing 5.0 functionality!!

FYI, the 5.0.987.0 patch supports 26 colors. I haven't yet posted a full update release package but you can test it by downloading one of the bin-win zips, or using the new ASHUPD.LIT or ATEUPD.RUN modules (which I will describe in a separate posting).