Monday, June 16, 2014

Which version of MSVS do you (still) use?

As you might know, we've recently dropped support for VC98, and now I've started thinking about which versions of MSVC we should support in wxWidgets 3.1.0 release. Even for 3.0, we only provide binaries for 2008 and later, and by the time 3.2 is out, Microsoft will probably have released at least a couple of more compiler versions, so we will probably have to drop at least it to from the list of binaries by then. I don't really think we are going to fully drop support for it though, doing it for only a 7-8 year old compiler would be quite out of character. But who knows?

And, in fact, I'd very much like to know more about the versions of the compilers that wxWidgets users really use. So here is a small poll, please take a few seconds to click on the earliest version of MSVC that you still use:

surveys

And, if you have any trouble with voting here, you can also do it directly from the poll page.

Thanks in advance!

3.0.1 released

We have just released wxWidgets 3.0.1, a bug fix release in 3.0 branch. The release files can be downloaded from either SourceForge or our FTP mirror as usual, and as less usual, but is the case for the last few releases, we provide not only the sources and documentation, but also the binaries for the selected Windows compilers.

This release is 100% compatible with 3.0.0, i.e. any code which compiled and worked with 3.0.0 continues to do so with 3.0.1 and so upgrading to 3.0.1 doesn't require any changes and hence is recommended for all 3.0.0 users: basically, without any extra effort on your part (even make or project files don't need to be updated as the libraries use the same names in 3.0 branch), you get more than a hundred bug fixes and improvements.

The release announcement has some details about the changes in this release, but there were really too many of them to list them all, so you should consult the description of the most important changes in the change log directly to really appreciate the scope of the work gone into this release (and the change log doesn't contain relatively unimportant fixes).

Finally, in addition to the bug fixes, if you are using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 or 2013, there is an extra reason for upgrading to 3.0.1: this release includes the project and solution files for building the library with these compilers, so you don't need to upgrade Visual Studio 2010 projects manually any longer. These projects have been contributed by Artur Wieczorek and I'd like to use this opportunity to thank him for this and numerous other enhancements and bug fixes, especially in wxMSW, as Artur managed to eradicate many bugs that I couldn't fix since many years and is responsible for a good part of the 100+ bug fixes mentioned above. Thank you!

Monday, June 02, 2014

Help with testing 3.0.1

We plan to release 3.0.1 on June 15 (this year, before the jokes start coming in). There have already been a lot of changes since 3.0.0, with many important bug fixes in all three main ports, including tons of corrections to everything bitmap/alpha-related in wxMSW by Artur Wieczorek who managed to eradicate swathes of long-standing bugs, so we'd like to make these improvements available as soon as possible. However we'd also like to ensure that we haven't broken anything since 3.0.0. And while we are relatively confident that the ABI hasn't changed, the behaviour of the code is another matter and some new bug(s) could have been introduced in almost half a thousand commits since 3.0.0.

Which is why it would be really great if as many people as possible could test the 3.0 branch sources before 3.0.1 is done, in two weeks time. Regressions are usually found quite quickly after each release, which is great, but it would be even better if we could find at least some of them before releasing it. So if you are using 3.0.0, please grab the latest 3.0 branch sources using either Subversion (https://svn.wxwidgets.org/svn/wx/wxWidgets/branches/WX_3_0_BRANCH) or Git and let us know if you see any new problems.

Thanks in advance!