I'm playing around with using the Update Center for updating A-Shell itself, and have posted a utility which might be useful to those developers who like to remain on the cutting edge. It's a simple program, ASHUPD.RUN, which is very similar to the existing SOSUPD.RUN, except that it updates the A-Shell/Windows BIN, 001004, and DOC directories. (Sorry, no UNIX yet, although you can do that via Samba.)

Note that a severe complication arises when updating ASHW32.EXE in that no one can be using the file at the time. ASHUPD.RUN will launch the Update Center and shut down A-Shell, but it can't do anything about other users who might be sharing the same copy, or other instances of A-Shell on the same PC. So this technique can probably never be very useful in a multi-user Windows network, although for developers who just want to keep their development PC up to date, it could be much more convenient than manually unpacking the ash-5.0.xxx.x-w32-upd.zip files or re-running the full installations.

(The technique could be extremely useful for ATE, which is usually running standalone on each PC. I'm going to look into that next.)

Anyway, to use this utility for updating A-Shell, you have to start by manually downloading ASHUPD.RUN and running it. (You can put it anywhere, but I recommend 901,2 as that is where it will be in the next release of the SOSLIB. Note that although it doesn't update the SOSLIB, and thus has little to do with it, I put it there to associate it with developers rather than production users, who probably should not be updating their copies this way.)

Once downloaded, just RUN ASHUPD. The first time, it will force you to manually retrieve and unpack an update to the UpdateCenter, which will go into the %MIAME%\bin directory. (That will be a non-issue in subsequent updates, since we will also be packaging the new Update Center with A-Shell, and, it updates itself anyway.)

Nice! All working with no problems, and im now fully updated. Cheers!

Looking forward to the ATE version.

I must admit Jorges ‘Update Center’ is great! and easy to use! Thanks to Jorge and a little help i’ve got DART updating self using it.

Well, that was fun. Downloading ashupd.run worked well. When I ran it, it downloaded a zip file to my desktop behind the A-Shell session. I couldn't close or move A-Shell because ASHUPD put up a dialog I needed to close once the zip file I couldn't get to was unloaded. Good thing I put "Show Desktop" on the desktop .

So then I could unload the zip file. Everything OK so far. I tell ASHUPD to proceed. I then get a message saying that files couldn't be locked. I tried again in case something was mangled when I minimized a window that couldn't be minimized. Locking problems still appear.

I made sure all my A-Shell sessions were closed, including those open over the internet via ATE or EZ-Term. Still no joy .

The only thing left open that could be involved were two Editor sessions running via Samba over the internet. Each project's INI files are in c:\vm but not c:\vm\miame. That should be OK, right? Well, it's not. Closing my Editor sessions allowed ASHUPD to lock whatever needed to be locked.

The defaults are: I just changed arguments to Windows notation because it had forward slashes and no c:. I think I had trouble running from Editor in the past so I just run from A-Shell. Often, I'm editing files over the internet and it doesn't make sense to run them on my home system with no data.

Anyway, everything's updated now on my machine and if you have trouble, you might need to close Editor.

Hmm ... I wonder what happens if you get everyone to log off and then run it from ATE into a Windows server. Does ATSD hold anything open once there are no more sessions? Nope ... ASHUPD won't let you try .

The initial download of the zip file is problematic. It would be nice to have internal control of that, but that's definitely not happening in 5.0. Fortunately, this is an oddball case, since once you either download it, or run a newer A-Shell installation, you'll have the Update Center loaded and won't need to download it again. Perhaps I should have just given instructions to manually download and install them and left that for you to do independent of A-Shell.

If anyone wants to do that, you can get the zip from:

http://updatecenter.microsabio.net/updatecenter.zip

Just unpack the contents in the the %MIAME%\BIN directory (where your ASHW32.EXE) is.

I may have also gone overboard with the use of MBMISC_TOPMOST in MSGBOX, thinking that it would eliminate the problem of message boxes getting hidden behind the window.

In any case, I'm not sure why the unzip utility launched by your browswer didn't put itself on top. In my case it did, but perhaps that was chance, luck, whatever.

Anyway, moving on the the locked problem, this is probably something that could be improved in the UpdateCenter. Currently, if it can't get a lock on one of the files, it just aborts the operation, without telling you which one. It would be nice to get an abort/retry message. I'm not sure why the Editor would have caused any conflict, but ATSD.EXE would have been a problem. I probably should remove that from the package, since it doesn't change much, and is never going to just shut itself down without manual action. (But for that matter, I don't think the UpdateCenter should worry about files that don't actually need updating - that needs to be looked into, assuming that was the issue.)

Ty has discovered another problem - ASHUPD doesn't handle directories with spaces in them very well. Fortunately ASHUPD is a simple Basic program so most of the issues here can be dealt with easily.

I use Firefox. When Firefox "launches" a file, it downloads it. I download everything to the desktop. With A-Shell running on the left, the zip file appeared on the desktop under the A-Shell Window. I should move my A-Shell window over in case of downloads .

I didn't have ATSD running when I ran ASHUPD.

For what it's worth, I've replaced the ASHUPD.RUN with an ASHUPD.LIT 1.0(101)

This one attempts to respond to some of the issues raised previously, although the set of update files hasn't changed (so if you really want to test it, try renaming a bunch of SYS:LIT files in to .XXX)

For what it's worth, I updated just now and downloaded ashupd.lit 1.2(114) when I had 1.2(119) on my system.

Oops. I forgot to copy the ASHUPD.LIT to the Update Center. Should be fixed now.

Just tried at home and got 1.2(114). No biggie for me, just thought you might want to know.