[ANN] tRev Pre-holiday Update!

[Jim Bufalini]

Jerry Daniels wrote:

> As you know, Len, we have never officially supported XP (OS X, Vista/7
> only), although we do have tRevers out there using XP. There are so
> many variants of XP and so much going on with screens and sockets, we
> decided from day one to avoid those headaches.
> 
> Eager to have you back!
> 
> 
> Best,
> 
> Jerry Daniels
> 
> The latest Rev Editor Video:
> http://reveditor.com/feature-friday-drag-a-handler-to-any-tab
> 
> On Dec 25, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Len Morgan wrote:
> 
> > Got it.  Looks cool.
> >
> > Just to let you know, it appears that tRev working on XP is now
> > (unofficially) now longer possible.  Don't get me wrong, SOMETHING
> > is happening, and I still get a nice picture of tRevor in the upper
> > right hand corner of my screen, and I even get the completely blank
> > screen every time control is passed back and forth between tRev and
> > the Rev IDE, but there is no tRev editor screen visible.
> >
> > Just thought you might like to know so you can post somewhere that
> > tRev on (at least 1) XP system does not work.  Let's hope there are
> > some nice after Christmas sales at BestBuy so I can get a new
> > machine and get my tRev back.
> >
> > R.I.P. XP  :-(
> >
> > len

For what it's worth, I have found that whenever something works on Vista/7
and not on XP (it's usually the other way around), greater than 9 times out
of 10 it has nothing to do with versions of XP (Home Premium or
Professional, etc.) or 64 bit or 32 bit, etc. It has to do with spaces in a
file path.

If you shell, or open process or pass a parameter to a process, it will work
in Vista and not work in XP because of the spaces in the file path. Even if
you are just writing to a user's Documents directory, in Vista this is
*C:\Users\<username>\Documents\* (notice no spaces unless a user put a space
in their user name). But, in XP it's C:\Documents and Settings\<userName>\My
Documents\.

See all those spaces in the file path in XP? They wreak havoc when passed as
params, etc. This is the main reason MS renamed directories like *Documents
and Settings* to *ProgramData* and *My Documents* to *Documents* and *All
Users* to *Default*. 

The answer is just enclose any file paths in quotes. So do *quote &
"C:\...." & quote*, and almost always your non-XP-working-Rev-app magically
starts working on XP. Without this, it goes off into lala land. This just
happened to me yesterday. I had something working perfectly in Vista but
would not work on any XP machine. Luckily I remembered about spaces and
quoting and got it working in short order.

The other tip is even in Vista/7 avoid using directories that involve the
user name as users will do things like firstName<space>lastName and this
will cause the identical problem on Vista/7. It's why I recommend against
using a user's Documents directory.

Aloha from Hawaii,

Jim Bufalini