admin's blog

WaterSums is currently a 32-bit application because neither Microsoft Silverlight, nor Adobe SVG Viewer are available in a 64-bit version. WaterSums 1.1 runs on 64-bit versions of Windows in 32-bit mode. A version of WaterSums that does the analysis in 64-bit mode is slated for public release today. The download will be slightly larger, and testing so far indicates that the performance is almost identical. Not a very compelling case to move to a partially 64-bit version, but it will be there if you want it!

Now is the time to introduce Ben Morgan to readers of this blog. This WaterSums admin blog is written by Mark Morgan and Ben is one of my sons. He is doing a software engineering course at university, but his skill at finding obscure bugs was finely tuned before ever he started any formal training! Whenever you read about the fixing of any obscure bugs in the release notes, Ben is probably the one who found them. For example, he has recently found that clicking to the right of the histogram area in the pattern editor will cause WaterSums to crash. This will be fixed in the next release, but by then he will probably have found some others as well.

Vigorous development continues with WaterSums 1.1 ready for the release of 1.1.1. However, a few bugs have been reported with the current release and some have been discovered internally, so a patch has been issued to fix them. The fixes mostly relate to improvements in editing of patterns, curves and junction demands. Details of all fixes are given in the release notes included with the release. What seems to be a bug in the data grid view of the .Net Framework 2.0 makes it difficult to programatically change the number of rows in the grid safely when scrollbars are required. The patch version is reported as 1.1.0.10 in the About box.

The WaterSums About box displays the WaterSums version number which is normally in the form x.y.z.0. So, for example, the last release of the WaterSums 1.0 was 1.0.13.0. WaterSums 1.1.0 has also used the last dot point to distinguish between different Beta releases. The public release of WaterSums 1.1 was displayed as version 1.1.0.8.

On 18 July 2009, a new version has been released to fix some problems discovered shortly after the public release and to improve the scaling of network objects in some situations. Details of the changes are included in the release notes. This patch displays a version number of 1.1.0.9.

After 8 months of development to support Microsoft Silverlight 2, WaterSums 1.1 has finally been released and is available for download. Many new features are now available, although most of the graphical features are only available with the Silverlight plugin. However, many other features have been added to WaterSums that users will benefit from whether they use the Silverlight plugin or the Adobe SVG Viewer plugin.

With WaterSums 1.1 available as a finished product, the 30-day free trial is still available for you to test WaterSums and make sure it meets your requirements. If there are features you still need, why not enter them in the issue tracker here?

An issue reporting system has been added to the WaterSums website. To review the current issues, go to the Issues menu item on the left. Users can submit reports of issues or bugs without logging in. If you log in, however, you can keep track of the issues you have submitted.

The issue tracker has been added to help with the reporting of bugs for WaterSums 1.1 which is about to be released.

In recent times, development has been concentrated on the Microsoft plugin as a graphical presentation medium. This has given significant improvements in functionality, but it has also resulted in various problems when using the Adobe SVG Viewer. Beta 5 addresses these problems and also adds support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 when using the Adobe SVG Viewer. Various other bugs are also fixed in this unexpected Beta 5 release. We hope that the final release of WaterSums 1.1 will be available tomorrow. That is the plan....

The latest Beta has been released and the code is now digitally signed. We are gearing up for the final release of WaterSums 1.1. Some final regression testing is being done and one or two minor bugs have already been found and fixed. Some tweaks to support for use of the Adobe SVG Viewer when Microsoft IE8 is installed are being finalised. Unfortunately, it is not possible to support the Adobe SVG Viewer on Vista, so any Vista users will have to use the Silverlight plugin.

Control of the playback of analysis results has been updated for the next release of WaterSums. In a final Beta version (probably to be released today!), the new toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts allow much better control than was previously possible. The Network Toolbar now looks like this:

As we are still sorting out code-signing certificates, there will probably be one more Beta release of WaterSums 1.1 including various bug fixes and some new functionality that makes the analysis results easier to work with.

In the latest development build of WaterSums, the following new features are being tested:

• 64-bit analysis when running on 64-bit operating systems - a separate build is required for this
• multiple maps now display correctly at startup