Inventors.ECP 2.0.1

This is a release that is backwards compatible with Rev. 2.0.0, and is a release that is focused on the usability of the ECP Tester.

Major changes

The release contains the following major changes:

• Update to the handling of opening device and opening and closing connections
• Performance improvement of the log window
• Possibility to pause the log window
• ECP Tester will display creation time for the loaded dll
• Initial directory for FileDialogs are now remembered
• Auto save of device logs
• Configuration of confirmation for log deletion

Minor changes

The release contains the following minor changes:

• DebugSignals will now show their signal also as decimal and hex.
• Property grids will refresh for functions
• When a device definition file is loaded the creation time of the loaded dll will be displayed.

Changes

Update to the handling of opening device and opening and closing connections

It has been observed that the naming and shortcuts for the opening of device, and opening and closing of connections were unintuitive for users.

As a consequence this has been refectored to:

The rationale for Ctrl + X is that this is usually used for terminating an action, and the shortcut Ctrl + C has been discontinued because it prevented the use of the shortcut to be used for copying text from the ECP Tester. For example, to copy snippets of the log out into emails.

Performance improvement of the log window

Previously, the log window in the ECP tester was updated for each log entry, and the log entries was color coded according to their level in a RichTextBox control.

With exessive logging occured this caused the log window to be unable to keep up with the incomming log entries. When this happened it could cause the UI of the ECP Tester to freeze and become unresponsive to the point where the only way to recover from the problem would be to kill the program.

This has been refactored in the current with this release:

1. Log entries are now cached, and the log window is only updated every 100ms.
2. Log entries are no longer color coded and a TextBox, which offer superior performance are used insted.

Possibility to pause the log window

Previously, it was not possible to scroll in the log to inspect it while log entries was received. This was because when a log entry is received the log scrolls automatically to the end so the new log entry can be seen by the user.

However, this had the side effect to make it impossible to scroll in the log while log entries are received, because it would immediately scroll to the end of the log.

To solve this problem it is now possible to pause the log from updating, so it is possible to scroll in the log to inspect it. New log entries are cached in the background, so they are not lost while the log window is paused. When the pause is removed these log entries will be added to the log window.

This is implemented with a menu item in:

• File Menu ⇒ Pause (Ctrl + P)

ECP Tester will display creation time for the loaded dll

Previously the ECP tester only displayed the name of the loaded device dll. This could course uncertainty whether the correct device was loaded when working on a device library.

Now the ECP tester will display creation time for the loaded dll. In that way it is possible to see that it has been recently been created and hence that it is the correct dll that has been loaded.

Initial directory for FileDialogs are now remembered

The directory in which logs are saved are now remembered by the ECP tester, this means that the next time a log is saved for a particular device the Save File Dialog will start from the directory a log was last saved to.

Auto save of device logs

The ECP Tester will not auto save the log to a text file, if either the confirm-log-deletion attribute is true in the ddfx file, or if it has been enabled with the File=>Auto Save Log menu item.

The log will be saved in a ECP Logs folder in the My Documents directory, which can be assessed with the File=>Open Logs menu item in the ECP Tester.

Configuration of confirmation for log deletion

It is now possible to configure whether the ECP Tester should confirm deletion of logs.

This is done in the ddfx file with a confirm-log-deletion="true" attribute. If this attribute it set to true deletion needs to be confirmed before the log is deleted, otherwise it will be deleted immediately if it is set to false.