Multi Commander v3.5.1

Multi Commander v3.5.1 is now out.
The focus of this release have been to fix stability issues.
Most crash are very rare and most of them I can not reproduce.
Over 70+ Changes and 14 Rare Crash issues that was reported by Crash report system is fixed.

Since this crashes are not common and I have not been abel to reproduce them it have not been easy to fix them and I'm not sure that all of them are fixed since I'm not able to reproduce them . What I done on some issues is that I found what might be the problem and fixed that. Hoping that is what caused the problem.

I have track down that a lot of the problems is because of some reference count errors so I created a couple of RAII classes that now will make sure that the reference count now is correct. So that objects is not deleted while they are still in use. This often the case if Multi Commander crashes when exiting.

Also a big portion of rare crashes are from Shell Extensions. Shell Extension are extension to Windows Explorer that adds its own menu items to the shell popup menu (Right click menu).
The problem with Shell Extension is that it is 3de part code that gets executed inside Multi Commander. So when a shell extension crashes it will bring down Multi Commander and the users thing that it is because of a problem with Multi Commander.

The problem is that a lot of Shell Extensions are only tested for Windows Explorer and these shell extension assumes that they are started from Windows Explorer so when a program like Multi Commander launch it, They can get confused and crash.

For this release I have rewritten how Shell Extension works and hopefully there will be less crashes with this. But all of them can not be removed since some Shell Extension will not work proper unless they are started from Windows Explorer.
To find out what shell extension that causes you problem you can use ShellExView from NirSoft and from it you can disable/enable shell extensions one by one.

A know Shell Extension that causing a lot of crashes is ASUSWSShellExt.dll / ASUSWSSHellExt64.dll
I see from crash reports that this file is behind a lot of crashes.


Read more and download it

Multi Commander v3.5

v3.5 of Multi Commander is now out. This version contains a lot of fixes and changes. Over 310+ changes.

One of the biggest additions in this release is that the rule based file coloring can now be configured using an UI. Also inline rename can now move to previous/next item using the arrow up/down key

Windows Control Panels can now be launched from the Tools menu. Making it easier to find and start the different control panel. It is even possible to assign hot-keys to them.

Another change is the Delete progress window. It will now show how much it is going to delete and how many items / MB is has deleted. This can be useful when deleting many files over a slow network.
You can also configure the delete operation to continue on error. It will then not ask what to do if an error happens. And you can also configure it to always delete. If this is enable the delete operations will always try to delete files without asking. even if they are readonly, or other issue.
This options can also be toggled from the delete progress dialog. But you will only have a change to change them there if you are deleting over a slow network. On local harddrive delete operation are often over in in seconds.

File search has also got some minor UI improvments. It will remember what was entered into it between runs and you can now clear everything in the Find files dialog with a click on the clear button.

The Regular expression engine is also updated. It is now using the engine that is included in the C++11 standard and that engine is more compatible to how regular expressions works in perl.
So writing expressions should be a lot easier. You can now look for help online on how to write them.

And much more...

Read more and download it

Multi Commander SDK

Multi Commander is built around a very large extension and plugin architecture.
Every virtual file system is a file system plugin, Explorer Panel, Search UI, CheckSum , MultiRename are all different Application Extensions. And they all use the SDK. Everything you see in the Tools menu are from Extensions.
The SDK allows me to add new tools and features and integrate them into Multi Commander with less work. However there are some times the extension design has been a hinder. But those case are rare.

The SDK have not been public So only I have been able to use it. I been planing to release it publicly but doing that I need to clean it up, remove obsolete code and create a couple of sample and more.
And that is want I spent quite a bit of time on lately.

The first public version of the SDK is now out. It contains some sample plugins for FileSystemPlugins, Extending the MultiScript Language,  Adding Tools that uses information provided by the API.
However the SDK can do a lot more. It can also create a UI that is show and use inside tab. But that is not included in this samples.

The interface the filesystem plugins can look a bit scary but that is because it support multiple way of doing things. Look at the samples to see how it really works.

There is no documentation that describe every API call. but the documentation is heavily commented.

More information and download

For question about it use the forum or mail

Multi Commander v3.2.1

v3.1 is now out. Over 145+ changes has gone into this release.

Most changes are related to stability and bug fixes.
Also a lot of changes and clean up for the SDK. Making the SDK ready to be released.

Read more and download it

Multi Commander and C++11

I been doing a lot of code clean up and refactoring in Multi Commander, I been updating a lot of the code to use new C++11 features, like lambdas, shard_ptr, uniqie_ptr , auto, ravlue and more.

The result is a code that is much more cleaner, safer and it is much easier to maintain.

I still got a lot of old style C++ left. But I will update the code class by class when I'm in changing and fixing bug in them. So more and more code will be updated.

I also added rvalue support in my script engine. That increased the performance of the engine a bit. However I do not think anyone will really notice it since most script are very small. But everything that uses less CPU cycles is a good thing.

Multi Commander v3.1

V3.1 of Multi Commaner is now out. It has over 190+ changes.

I got a long list of thing I want to add. I just need the time to add them.
Many stability fixes around FTP and UTF8 support, Better relative path support for FileTypeSetup and QuickLaunchBar.
File search can now search content inside binary files better and a some stability issues around search has also been fixed.

Also experimental support for rule based file coloring is included in this release. However since it is still in experimental stage there is no UI to configure it. So configuration of it has to be done using MultiScript. (See the beta forum information )

Read more and then download it

Multi Commander v3.0

V3.0 of Multi Commaner is finally out. It was planed to be out a while ago but I had so much to do so it got a bit delayed.

This released has over 360+ changes. Most changes will not be noticeable since they are internal core change that has been done to prepare for feature that will be added in the future.

I got a long list of thing I want to add. I just need the time to add them.

Read more and then download it

Building Multi Commander with VS2012

Since the C++ compiler in VS2012 do support a lot more of the new C++11 standard, this is a compiler that I want to move over to. So I spent some time upgrading the Multi Commander project so that it can be built with the new C++ compiler.
( C++ news in VS2012 )

The upgrade was almost flawless. Their was only some minor issue to get my VS2010 projects to be built with VS2012. Like I had to upgrade WTL to version 8.1 (I had not upgraded this in a while so it was about time anyway) and also some other minor issue.

Multi Commander builds pretty clean, no warnings with the exception of some 3de party code. (zlib/bzip2)
With VS2012 I do however get a couple of more warnings, most of them are
 "warning C4702: unreachable code" VS2012 is a lot better at finding unreachable code.

Build Time

The build time is a little longer with VS2012, But that was expected since VS2012 support so much more and optimize code a lot better then VS2010 (Like the auto vectorizer), Not that I think it will be noticeable in Multi Commander since it is not very CPU consuming anyway.

Multi Commander v2.7

Multi Commander 2.7 is finally out.

This version has over 180+ changes since last version (2.5.1)

Read more and then download it

Multi Commander v2.5

Multi Commander 2.5 is finally out.

This version has over 345+ changes since last version (2.1.2)

Read more and then download it

Multi Commander v2.0

Multi Commander 2.0 is after some delay finally out.

In this version I have added a lot of new features and many bug fixes. Over 300+ changes.

Read more and then download it

Multi Commander v1.2.1

Multi Commander v1.2.1 is released. This release contains mostly bug fixes. Over 100+ changes has gone into this release.

Before I sad that the next update would be a major update. But that version is not quite ready yet and I have fixed a lot of issues in the current version. So before I start to merge in all the new major features into the current version I decided to release this version that has all the latest fixes.
I does have more then 100+ change since v1.2.0 so it contains a lot of fixes.

Enjoy.

Multi Commander v1.2.1 Build 863 [BETA]

Most of my spare time that I have left, is spent on developing new major feature for the next major version of Multi Commander.
But I do fix bugs and issues for the current version. And I fixed a couple of issue so I decided to release a new beta. So they can be tested.

I also included one minor new feature. Quick Copy, It will create a backup of the file or folder in focus in the same place. But with ".bak" appended to the end of the name.

More information about the beta

Multi Commander v1.2.0

Multi Commander v1.2.0 is released. This release contains mostly bug fixes. Over 160+ changes has gone into this release.

It might take some time until the next version is ready. Because the next version will be a major update with larger new features and new extensions.

There might be a version 1.2.1 before the then, But that will be a release that only fixes bugs and minor problems. No new additions.

Windows 8 - File Name Conflict Dialog

The Windows 8 team release some video and information about the new and improved copy process in Windows 8. It is really a nice improvement from Windows 7. However not good enough to kill Multi Commander, It will still be needed if you want full control of your files.

A lot of the comments in the Windows 8 file copy post was about the file name conflict dialog.
And today they released a new post ( Designing the Windows 8 file name collision experience ) where they talk about the design decision behind that dialog. It is a simple dialog but it is not an easy task to get it right.

I have some experience with this my self. I been working on a redesign of the file name conflict dialog for Multi Commander, and it is not easy. There should be enough important information so the user can make a good decision. But to much information will make the dialog hard to read. To little and the user might not know what file to keep/overwrite. It hard to make a good balanced decision here.

The Importance of Crash Reporting

One of the most useful feature that I implemented into Multi Commander was that if it crashes it will automatically upload the crash dump to my server.

Of all the crash report I received, I never received a mail or forum post from anyone that reported that it crashed when they did X. If Multi Commander did not send a crash report, there would be a whole bounce of bugs that I would not have been informed about and that would not have been fixed.

Having automatic crash reporting is probably the most important feature you can have. Without it you would not find all the weird problem that user can be affected by.

Multi Commander Free Edition - First Month

I released Multi Commander for free a month ago (12-July-2011).
I did not expect I would get many more downloads. But I got a lot more downloads then I expected.

It hard to tell the exact number of downloads since some sites like download.com / fileforum.com and some other store the file locally, instead of redirect to my site. And some people still use download accelerators and that can gives a incorrect download statistics.

Taking all those factors into account, I still get a number of over 20.000 downloads.

A lot more then I expected.