W3bbo

Public, but XP only; I haven't built up a list of differences between NT5.1 and 5.2; that'll be the release afterwards, which I hope to be a few days (rather than weeks or months; I want to be done with xpize and Vize by the end of June).

Good news: The next beta is pretty much completed and it's chock-full of features and weighs in at about 18MB. All that's left is some hefty testing by myself before I let it loose on everyone. Bad news: the testing will take another day. I wanted to ship it tonight but Ricktendo reminded me of how the original xpize reset the PE checksums after it patched resources. I quickly implemented it in managed code (making it faster than xpize, and also allowing Resourcer to make use of it), but it also requires further testing (I've only tried it on x86 files, not x64 where the PE file format is subtly different).

I've just done a weigh-in on the current build, it's at least 20MB, phew. ...this kinda flies in the face of earlier releases of xpize all being under 10MB, but I think it's worth it. Does anyone have an opinion on the large file size? If enough people ask for it I can make a smaller one that excludes the extra visual styles and resource colour schemes.

Huzzah, another deadline missed. I decided against releasing on Wednesday because I've only got a few more features to implement before I get an even more complete version done. I386 patching is done, and Uninstallation is nearly complete too; all that's left is some minor refinements. The best I can promise is sometime this weekend. Oh, and I've got a much improved UxTheme patcher too; I'll talk about that during the release.

As I said in my PM to you, you can leave it for a while, your exams are far more important.

I wasn't able to take as many photos as I'd have liked (since y'know, I was there to move the servers). The photos don't really give you the impression you get when you walk in there, Synergy House is a large DC (compared to the smaller Tier 1 places you see around), it's a 7000 square feet facility with the usual mod-cons and redundant facilities. It's also very loud (imagine a couple million quid's worth of servers filled with fans, yeah). They're here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/w3bbo/sets/72157619757905347/

The move has been completed; it took longer than anticipated because the second server took a while to shut down (for reasons unknown). Setting up at the new DC also took longer as WS2008 doesn't accept plug-in USB hardware during logon so I had to use the onscreen keyboard. Everything should be running like it was before, if there are any problems post them here. I took photos of the move on my camera, but I'm not near a computer with a CF slot and I didn't bring my camera cable so you'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Update: Because of today's outage, I'm going to have to push back the next release to Wednesday, sorry about that.

Just a heads-up: I'm moving my servers that the xpize/Vize/Anolis websites are hosted on to another datacentre today. I don't expect the downtime to last more than the 20 minutes or so it'll take to physically move them (it's literally down the road from the existing DC). I'll see if I can post photos of the move too.

It'll have to be an SP3 CD, but it should work regardless of any extras pre-installed; but ideally you'd run this before anything else.

I've just finished off the code for patching I386 collections, but it needs some testing. Testing in a VM on a single computer can only get you so far. I'm wondering, who'se able to do some more intensive testing on the modified I386 dirs? I hope to get the next beta out by Monday evening (UTC) or maybe Tuesday. Will all those who volunteered to do translations get back to me as soon as you can; and if you're fluently bilingual with English why not volunteer yourself?

We've never experienced problems with themeui.dll before. What language version of Windows are you using? Can you reproduce the problem within a VM environment? You can restore your system with System Restore (assuming you have it enabled); that should resolve the situation, at least for now.

hmmpth, it seems there's a 10-minute cooling off period between sending PMs to people (it wasn't there 2 months ago...); so rather than spend an hour trying to PM people I'll just post this publically: When you're done translating it, just send in a PM to me.

I've sent PMs to those people on my list in the post above this. The PM contains further instructions. If anyone else wants to volunteer, let me know. I'd like to re-emphasise my request for people who can write fluent Japanese.

German - MrBusty Spanish - Ricktendo Italian - Smiley89 Norwegian - Banankrem Arabic - ghassen Chinese - SlideMaster Portuguese - Mort I've already go people who can do French and Dutch. If anyone can do Japanese, that'd be great. I'll have the tables to translate within a few days. I'm going paintballing tomorrow and then I'm having a bocking meet in Birmingham on Sunday so probably Monday.

Sorry, that "end of June" date refers to when I hope to be finished with all Anolis-related activities, including Vize and getting started with Sevenize. As for the next beta of xpize 5, how does next week sound? It isn't early June as originally promised, but it's close enough.

I found a problem with my icon handling code so I'm having to rewrite it. Then I need to run regression tests on it, then there's a few more features left to implement. It might take a while, but I want to be finished by the end of June.

Hmm, this is interesting. I assume ullusingh has an Indian-language version of Windows. Can anyone else repro the problem? I can modify the software so it doesn't add 128x128 icons (which is the real space-taker) if it's a language version of shell32.dll that might go over this limit.

Yes. I'll PM people when I'm ready. I'm still aiming for next week for a release.

I'm afraid you'll have to reinstall Windows if you want to get your system back. To avoid the problem from happening in future though, what issues were you experiencing with AVIRA and Photoshop?

Have you had a look around in WindowsX's Vista Transformation Pack?

I'm aware of the I386 patching process, I was just wondering if there was anything special for it to work with nLite's GUI. I've seen people speak of an "XPize Hotfix" add-in for nLite that automates the process or something. The same system that xpize 5 uses to modify the system, I386, and uninstall itself is made available to everyone. There will be a tool called "Anolis Packager" which lets you do this. I'll release it sometime in early June.

The xpize 5 final release will let you patch an I386 directory. I don't know how the earlier XPize integrated with nLite though. Chances are this feature will be available in the next beta, it'll be out within 3 weeks from now (early-mid June)

Ooooh, that's nice. With your permission I'd like to include these in the upcoming release of Vize.

There's a pretty serious race condition in the loading of the list view in the 0.8.7 release; I've fixed it in today's 0.8.8 release. I've also taken the opportunity to finally fix some things up: Changelist: Fixed an unhandled exception where loading the list view (the thumbnails and icons) would cause an ArgumentOutOfRangeException. This is caused by a race condition with the ImageList component. The fix does mean the list loads about 5-10% slower than usual, but this is hardly a big deal. In future I'll rework the mechanism to restore full speed. Menus and Dialogs changesMenuEx structures are now interpreted correctly, meaning an end to caption strings missing a few characters Dialogs are now displayed with the native dialog display libraries. HOWEVER they only seem to work for a few seconds before locking up and freezing the whole application. This probably has something to do with not handling the DialogProc correctly. I'll fix this in time for 0.9 The tree view and property grid now shows things and works... to an extent. I haven't properly tested it though. [*]Resource casting now works: if Resourcer does not correctly identify a given resource you can cast it to the appropriate one. This feature is largely redundant since it gets it right 99.9% of the time, so it's only really useful when working with badly authored files Download it at http://anolis.codeplex.com/Release/Project...ReleaseId=27687