[Elecraft] K3 Cool version 6 - posted.

[ab2tc]

I did eventually get it to work by downloading an older version and then 
upgrade. But I found that it does not do anything useful for me so I got 
rid of it again.

BTW you do not need any 3rd party software to do serial I/O under 
Windows. Standard Windows APIs like CreateFile(), ReadFile() and 
WriteFile() are quite easy to use for serial I/O and are well documented 
by Microsoft.

Knut - AB2TC

David Woolley (E.L) (via Nabble) wrote:
> ab2tc wrote:
> > I have tried to install this program, but it appears that unless one 
> has VB
> > installed, one is out of luck. The first complaint was the missing
> > vbrun300.dll. I located this on the web and installed it the folder 
> I tried
>
> Note, if it is legal to download this from the web, in isolation, at
> all, the only place to download it from will be Microsoft themselves.
> Conversely, if you can't download it from Microsoft, it is almost
> certainly an illegal copy.
>
> > to install Cool from. Rerunning the setup, it's missing another dll 
> file; I
> > forget the name. I suspect I could go on like this until I had found 
> and
> > installed all files needed by the VB runtime system. Is there perhaps a
> > compiler switch or something that could be changed so that it would 
> produce
> > an executable that is not dependent on other files? It does look a 
> very nice
> > program to try out.
>
> Basically, no. Unless he rewrote it in C, using only basic Windows API
> capabilities, which would be a major job (many times the job of writing
> it originally) it is always going to require additional DLLs if it is to
> run on a wide range of versions of Windows. (He is actually writing
> using tools that haven't been supported by Microsoft for some years, but
> that does make it more likely to work on versions of Windows that are
> likely to still be in use but themselves haven't been supported for 
> years.)
>
> Normally the development tools contain some files which are termed
> redistributables. These can be redistributed, free of charge, as long as
> they are included as part of a program that needs them, and the licence
> for that program gives adequate protection (e.g. not allowing them to be
> further redistributed, without the program, or to be reverse engineered).
>
> Assuming that he only used redistributable DLLs, he should have included
> those used in the setup package. A caveat, though, this age of tooling
> was particularly prone to a problem known as "DLL Hell" (Google it),
> which relates to having conflicting version requirements for DLLs, or
> different versions installed in different places.
>
> A commercial developer, writing a Windows only GUI program, these days,
> would probably use .NET.  The DLLs needed for that should already be
> installed on Vista, and are, I think, installed on XP.  A commercial
> developer simply wouldn't support 98 or ME, but to run the program on
> those, you would need to either include .NET framework redistributables,
> or the end user would need to install the full framework.
>
> (.NET programs tend to perform poorly on older machines and access to
> lower level functions, and other more technical features, often involves
> third party code (which would need its own redistributables to be
> supplied) or coding some parts against low level Windows interfaces,
> which requires a technically skilled programmer.
>
> Where I work, we have to use third party code just to access serial
> ports, although I think that might be because we need more than two
> ports - although serial ports seem to be considered obsolete by
> Microsoft, and the lowest levels of abstraction they really want to
> support, for normal programmers, is a TCP connection, although they
> might prefer it to be the .NET remote procedure call level)
>
>
> -- 
> David Woolley
> "The Elecraft list is a forum for the discussion of topics related to
> Elecraft products and more general topics related ham radio"
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-----
AB2TC - Knut
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