Newsreader problems

This one has nothing to do with the beta test.  I've already "lost" the
posts from a week ago, only seeing from 1/27 and on.  Is this happening to
others or is it because my isp is using a shoddy newsgroup provider.  If the
latter, is there another, public provider I can try.  I see this is
happening with the regular newsgroup too so I suspect it's my isp (friggin'
Earthlink).

Along these lines, is there a way to prevent Outlook Express from getting
rid of old posts.  I've run into this before and tried different
synchronization settings, but it never worked for me.  *mumble grumble*

In the meantime, can someone please email me (or repost) Andy's first or
second post to the newsgroup, where he lists and describes about 10 things
that are new in the beta.  Thanks.

-- Louis

Louis,

> This one has nothing to do with the beta test.  I've already "lost" the
> posts from a week ago, only seeing from 1/27 and on.  Is this happening to
> others or is it because my isp is using a shoddy newsgroup provider.  If
the
> latter, is there another, public provider I can try.  I see this is
> happening with the regular newsgroup too so I suspect it's my isp
(friggin'
> Earthlink).

No, nothing to do with your ISP.  This group is hosted on an OA server that,
as far as I know,  never expires messages.  I can see all the messages back
to 24/1.

> Along these lines, is there a way to prevent Outlook Express from getting
> rid of old posts.  I've run into this before and tried different
> synchronization settings, but it never worked for me.  *mumble grumble*

"Tools/Option/Maintenance" and make sure that "Compact messages in
background" and "Delete messages n days after download" are both unselected.
That should cure the problems with the beta newsgroup. If you then right
click on the newsgroup, in the tree on the left, and select
"Properties/Local File/Reset" then you should get all the messages
re-downloaded the next time you go online.

That won't solve the problem with your ISP as OE will only cache messages
locally while they are present on the ISP's server. If Earthlink expires
messages after 15 days the OE will remove your local copy at the same time.
All you can do, and I do this for my main Dolphin archive, is create a new
mail folder and copy messages from the newsgroup folder into the mail folder
at appropriate intervals.

> In the meantime, can someone please email me (or repost) Andy's first or
> second post to the newsgroup, where he lists and describes about 10 things
> that are new in the beta.  Thanks.

Below.

Regards
    Ian

-~-~-~-~

Hi Folks,

Thanks for offering to try out the next version of Dolphin Smalltalk.

By now, you've most likely fired up the release and taken a look around so
you've probably a pretty good idea about what's new in version 5. However,
apart from the obvious additions like Refactoring Browser support there's
quite a lot of stuff that's changed "under the hood". I'll try and set out
the major differences below:

1) Probably the biggest change is the integration of the RB support into the
native Dolphin browsers. We'd like to think we've done a pretty good job of
getting most of the functionality available by using expanding menus which
allow us to keep the normal browser interface fairly uncluttered. If you
want to try out the various refactorings but don't know what they do, then
the thing to do is ask in the newsgroup. Hopefully, John Brant and Don
Roberts (the guys who wrote the refactoring engine) will be joining us here
so they'll be able to help out if no one else can. Anyway, another thing to
remember is that if you try a refactoring and it all goes horribly wrong
then you can always undo it using History/Undo in the browsers.

There are some features of the RB that aren't yet available in Dolphin,
however. For example, we don't have buffers for the browsers and we don't
have UI support for the rewrite engine. Also the reference finder and
Smalltlint aren't being used in the tools at present. We are going to take a
look at some of these if we have time before the release. We've added a
couple of new refactorings not available in the standard RB. These involve
the ability to filter the scope of some of the standard operations so that
they only work within a local class hierarchy or particular set of packages.

Note that the RB integration is plugged into the image by means of a new
class, RefactoringSmalltalkSystem. With this class removed, the browsers
work pretty much as they did before with all the refactoring options
disabled. The integrated RB support will only be available in Dolphin
Professional. The RB engine will be available for lower end Dolphin versions
but these will have to make use of third party browsers.

2) You'll also see that the Package Browser has now been substantially
redesigned.

The first thing you'll notice is that the directory structure of loaded
packages is displayed in a tree pane at top left. The idea is to encourage
developers to create their packages in line with this hierarchy. Vendors
will hopefully create directories named after their company name at the same
level as the Object Arts directory. Individuals can use their own names; for
example we'd encourage Ian Bartholomew to install his goodies in a directory
tree $\Ian Bartholomew. The $ represents the directory where the current
Dolphin image resides. Naturally, this structure is advisory only and you
may continue to create and distribute your packages in any way you please.

Selecting a directory in the tree will display all the packages in the
hierarchy below it in the list pane at lower left. This is a multiselection
list so that you may then choose one or more packages to examine. If you
choose more than one package the tabbed panes at the right of the browser
will show the contents of all the selected packages where it makes sense to
do so. Hence, it is now really easy to examine, for example, all of the
Object Arts samples packages. Choose $\Object Arts\Samples at top left and
the packages list will fill with, and automatically select, all the
appropriate packages. The Classes pane will then show all of the samples
classes in the image.

You'll also notice that the package prerequisites have now been integrated
into a tabbed pane in the main browser, rather than being accessed from a
separate dialog. Hopefully, you'll find this much easier to use.

Another useful feature in the Professional version is the appearence of the
Refactorings menu in the Package Browser. This makes it easy to apply a
number of refactoring operations within a chosen set of packages.

3) Another major addition to the development system is the introduction of
the System Browser. In the past, we've been asked many times for a way of
browsing and editing code within a restricted set of packages. This is the
main feature of the Dolphin System Browser. It is not based on (rather
nebulous) class categories like the System Browsers found in VW or Squeak.
Rather, we have chosen to make use of the same multiple package selection
mechanism used by the Package Browser. Hence, if you want to work with a
browser showing code from only your own packages then (asssuming you've
followed the package naming scheme recommended above) it is only necessary
to select the root of your package tree in the top left pane.

4) Another big plus is the introduction of the Flipper inspector. It gets
it's name from the ability to "flip" between different views of the object
under inspection (it's also a small tongue-in-cheek reference to the
VisualWorks Trippy inspector but with dolphin-like connotations). The
FlipperInspector class maintains a collection of "renders"; these are value
presenters that the inpector will use to display it's objects. You can add
(or remove) renditions using the System Options, if you wish. The two
default renditions are InstVarInspector (for displaying a pane based on
instance variables) and PublishedAspectInspector (for displaying, ot
surprisingly, the published aspect hierarchy). Both these inspectors are
"diving inspectors" with the ability to drill down into the hierarchy of
objects below the inspectee.

Flipper makes use of a major-reworking of the old PublishedAspectInspector
and the associated Aspects framework. A part of this has been the addition
of default published aspects to classes that don't specifically provide a
#publishedAspects of instances methods. By implementing the class-side
method #newAspect:name:, the instances of a class will be automatically
embued with published aspects that match the associated public accessor
methods  See the image for examples.

5) Both the Hierarchy Browser and the System Browser now support the ability
to display inherited methods. Use Method/Show Inherited Methods (or the "i"
toolbar button) to turn on this feature. You can also choose whether the
inherited methods that are displayed include those in Object. Since all
classes (except ProtoObject) will contain these methods it is sometimes
useful to be able to turn of their display for clarity. Use the
Method/Filter Object Methods command to do this.

6) We've restructured the packages in the base Dolphin image. You'll find
there are a lot more than there were in Dolphin 4. The main reason for this
is to help the image stripper better decide what can be safely removed
during Lagoon deployment. We've found that one of the best ways to improve
the performance of the stripper is by this sort of modularization. Hence
we'd recommend that you structure your own projects as multiple packages
where it seems appropriate to do so.

7) Improved stripping for application deployment. We've improved the image
stripper once again and, together with the package modularization described
above, this means that the resultant applications are now around about 50%
of the size of the equivalent Dolphin 4 EXEs.

8) To Go deployment. Here's a great new feature that should make it much
easier to distribute your Dolphin applications. By turning the To Go option
on in Step 2 of the Lagoon Deploment Wizard (it's actually on by default)
the image stripper will create an executable that is bound in with the
Dolphin VM. This means that, in many cases, you may only need to distribute
a single file for your application and you will no longer need to copy and
register the Dolphin VM on your user's machine.

To Go applications are still dependent on the MSVCRT runtime library but
virtually all machines will already have this present. The beta creates
applications with a dependency on MSVCIRT but this limitation should
hopefully be solved for the final release.

One other good point to note is that, despite the increase in size that
occurs because the VM is bound in with each EXE, the resultant file sizes
are still substantially smaller than those for Dolphin 4 execuatbles because
of the image stripper improvements mentioned above.

9) Ability to create true "in process" COM components. Once your COM
component has been written it can be deployed using the AXDllImageStripper.
This will automatically default the AXDllSessionManager to handle start up
and shutdown of the DLL as appropriate. In general it is not necessary to
sublcass the session manager with one of your own. For an example of how to
create an in-proc component see the COM Random Stream sample.

10) The MVP class hierarchy has been refactored to remove the need for a
separate CompositePresenter sub-hierarchy. This means that any type of
presenter can correctly support sub-presenters. You'll find that
CompositePresenter is still present as a stub but is deprecated; it will be
removed in a future release. You should move all your existing
CompositePresenter subclasses to be directly beneath Presenter and,
hopefully, you should find that they still work without modification.

One of the big advantages of this restructure is that it is now much easier
to create value presenters that are themselves composites. As an example of
this you'll see that the various inspector classes, FlipperInspector,
InstVarInspector and PublishedAspectInspector, can now be subclasses pf
ValuePresenter to easily re-use the value behaviour.

11) The display in the Class Hierarchy Diagram has been improved by the
addition of expanding/contracting nodes. This makes it a lot easier to
concentrate on particular areas rather than viewing the entire hierarchy.
The change to the MoenTreeView that enables this will also make it much more
effective as a replacement for the TreeView in situations where you want a
more graphical display for a TreePresenter.

Ok, well that should be enough for the moment so I'll let you get on and
explore at your leisure. One last thing though; we've attached some reports
from our problem tracking database. One lists the bugs/enhancements that
have been fixed between Dolphin 4 and Dolphin 5. The other lists the known
issues with the beta (but there is no guarantee that these will all be
addressed in the final release).

Best Regards,

Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
http://www.object-arts.com
---
Are you trying too hard?
http://www.object-arts.com/Relax.htm
---

Ian,

Thanks _a lot_ for the tips that resolved my problems with OE.

-- Louis