MultiCommander and the end of Windows XP Support

6 May, 2016 - 13:28

One thing that is a problem when developing MC is that it still kind of support Windows XP.
MC is not tested on XP but it is built to work on XP. and this is a problem.

A lot of new things have been added to Windows since XP SP3 was released.
Some part of MC can use the new features on new platforms but it is a pain and require a lot of extra work.
But it is not just new OS feature that is a problem, MC is built using the C++ programming language, And C++ have got a lot of new language features in recent years and some of them I cannot use since I have to build MC with Visual Studio 2013. 
VS2015 do have XP support but it is broken, And I can't use it and Microsoft will not fix it. And later this year C++17 will be released with even more new C++ features that I want to be able to use. And I need to be able to build MC using a modern C++ compiler. I can't be stuck on VS2013 forever.

Whats new in 5.6

15 September, 2015 - 17:30

v5.6 is soon out
There are over 160 changes in this release.
It contains a couple of stability issues that was found from crash reports,
A couple of changes to MultiRename and some other fixes and minor changes.

The biggest internal change is that MultiCommander is now built with Visual Studio 2015.
There was some issues with it, But I believe that I been able to add some workaround for them for now.
So hopefully everything works.

But the biggest change have gone into the internal file viewer "MultiFileViewer", It have got some upgrades.

The entire system around how configuration profiles works have changed.
All color configuration have been moved out, and into it's own color theme configuration.
It is now a lot easier to configure the colors for different file types.
If you tweaked the colors and profiles in the MultiFileViewer in a previous version. The configuration for that is lost because the new system store the configuration is a completely different way.

Multi Commander and Visual Studio 2015

8 August, 2015 - 14:01

Multi Commander v5.5 (1975) is built using Visual Studio 2013. And a couple of weeks ago Visual Studio 2015 was release and I have been upgrading my development environment so that the next version of Multi Commander will be built using Visual Studio 2015.
I like to stay up-to-date and VS2015 include support for a lot of new C++ features that I want to use in future versions of Multi Commander.

XP Support

I was surprise to see that VS2015 still support building applications that works on XP.
Personally I would like to skip the XP support because XP are a bad platform. Many features and APIs are missing on XP.
But since VS2015 still support it, the next version of Multi Commander will be built using the platform toolset v140_XP. And that means that Multi Commander will continue to work on Windows XP. At least a little longer.

If VS2015 had not supported XP. Multi Commander would have been forked into two edition. A normal and XP edition.
And the XP edition would only get fixes and no new features. But it looks like that is not needed yet.

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