ASM Community

The first service pack for MASM32 version 6 has been posted at, http://www.pbq.com.au/home/hutch/masm.htm It will be posted soon on Iczelion's site. It contains later binaries for Quick Editor & TheGun, another full directory of example code, a range of additional modules in the MASM32 library and it has two specialised libraries added to it. Ernie Murphy has written a version of his COM library for MASM32 and Ray Filiatreault has written a mixed integer library complete with its own example code. It is not an automatic installation and should be expanded into a seperate directory then each directory in it should be added to the default MASM32 directory, the instructions are in the README.TXT file and the code must be installed correctly to work. Regards, hutch@pbq.com.au

I use hutch's Quick Editor for all my asm stuff. Nope, it doesn't do syntax highlighting. I've yet to see ANY program that does it properly, which I define as the way MS has the VS components do it; highlight *everything* as you type, and complete what it can for you, such as give you the members of a struct. I've seen some that merely highlight ASM keywords. Hey, if I get those wrong the compiler is quite happy to let me know. So why Quick Editor? It's extensible menu and editor. The way I can customise the .bat build files. The ability to be able to tell people "just hit BUILD ALL" and a tutorial source will compile for them. I'm surfe lots of people miss the power of those configurable menus in QE. They are well worth the price of admission.

yeah, i fully agree to that, textpad is the *BEST* editor available... you've got much more control as with many other editors like quikedit and by the way in quikedit you must save all your doc's before you can compile, with textpad you can switch autosave on and it will do the job for you... syntax highlighting works GREAT...

www.textpad.com. if you pick the shareware version there is a reminder but i wrote a patch for this... anyhow, i admit to buy this software. you can create your own setup-files, they include the highlighting definitions and some other stuff, write me and you can have mine...

I like QE, it is my main tool for MASM coding. But under my Windows 2000 SP 1, Russian Edition it works in some very strange way. The main font is switching arbitrarily to very tiny one. The greatest problem with copy-paste from MSDN - instead of exact copy of some function prototype you may get a very big and ugly stuff with a needed text somewhere inside. I think - the matter is the RichEdit control - in Win2k the basic control has version #3. DVA

Guys, Thanks for the feedback on Quick Editor, I wrote it in the first place to do many things, programming being one of them and the criterion was SIZE and SPEED. There are many editors that do more and have many more features but they tend to be 10 times bigger so I concentrated on performance to size ratio, not feature bloat. I have had the problem mentioned with the Russian Version of Windows before, font sizes that are too small or too large and I may have to code a later version to have manual font settings as it seems the only way to fix the problem, QE uses system fixed fonts that according to the M$ documentation are supposed to be reliable across different versions but it appears not to be on some of the non-US versions of Windows. Regards & Thanks hutch@pbq.com.au

Persoanlly I use VC++ V6 to build with, I imported all the keywords, and use a custom build step to make the .obj, then use VC++'s linker to link with, it means I can use the integrated debugger with it :-) umbongo

Two things: 1) TextPad is a very nice general-purpose editor. It's easy to crack, but it's so nice and cheap to buy that only a lout wouldn't buy it! 2) I have registered QE for all files with asm extension. One bug I've noticed is this: When I make changes in QE and then assemble, the changes aren't recognized. Instead, I have to save the changed file to disk first. But it's a nice editor. Going back to the DOS-style environment of Programmer's Workbench would drive me insane at this stage.

hutch--, I am very impressed with the service pack. However I would like to ask for one thing. Would it be possible to distribute a file that documents all the changes to the new SP with each SP release. Like a CHANGELOG or WHATSNEW.TXT file. That way I wouldn't have to go through each directory and see what is there. Obvouisly I can see that there is new examples and new COM stuff but I also see changes to Masm32.lib. Maybe the file that contains the changes for each release could tell us what new functions came with the masm32 lib or something. Anyways, excellent work! Thanks, Devin

Mucho thanks to hutch for maintaining the MASM32 lib, it is a very helpful asset. I use it wherever need be, it's trouble free and well documented. I took a quick comparison of the New to MASM32 lib help files and noted these changes: New Conversions dw2ah udw2str ustr2dw Custom Control BmpButton Image Functions DisplayBmp DisplayIcon VerticalTile Memory Functions iMalloc iFree MemCopy memfill New String Functions szLeft szRight szMid Obsolete String Functions (note: these have been replaced, and now map to new functions Mapping keeps old code from breaking) lstr rstr midstr System Dialogs BrowseForFolder ColorDialog FontDialog PageSetupDialog PrintDialog