There should be a small performance improvement during the disk opening with this version, since I deferred some code which was only useful to the file properties dialog and took some time when confronted to many files, or big files.

Apart from that, given the number of bugs I found last time, I realized that it's nice to fix all that stuff, but then you need to keep up to date to benefit from it. There was no way to tell if the version you were running was the latest without having a look at this website, which might be a pain. I decided to include a new background task which checks if DriveSort is up to date. If it's not the case, it informs you of the new version, and allow you to go directly to the download page. By default, this checks are activated and performed at most once a week during DriveSort startup.

If you want to disable the update checks, or change their frequency, or manually launch an update check, you can do so from a new submenu "Updates..." in the mysterious menu on the right ("?").

If you have a firewall, it might ask you whether to allow DriveSort to connect to the Net. To help you set that up, here is what DriveSort does when it check for updates:

• DriveSort asks the IP address of the www.anerty.net server, through a DNS request.
• Once it found out where that is, it tries to connect to it on the TCP port 80 (HTTP)
• It then requests the following URL: /software/file/DriveSort/?style=ver&curVer=1.222&curLang=0409.You can check it out if you want, there's only the application name and a version number for now. Later I might add some other stuff, that's why I added two parameters describing the version you're running. It'll allow to distinguish between critical and minor updates, and to redirect you to the traduction you had.
  • curVer is the program version you have (1.222 in this example)
  • curLang is a Windows language code which meands "French (France)" for 040c or "English (US)" for 0409
• If DriveSort receives something ("DriveSort v1.222"), it checks if it's up to date, otherwise it tries a second time, and if it still doesn't work it informs you about not being able to get the version, and drops the matter until the next update check.

I decided to do a bit of pruning in DriveSort source code, to remove some old stuff related to the I-Bead (partial analysis of the SETTINGS.DAT file, special icon for that player, ...).

During this cleanup session, I found four bugs:

• A rounding issue in my FAT-12 handling code prevented anyone from reading a disk formated in that filesystem. Hopefully this did not trouble many of you, since FAT-12 is only useful for real small disks (usually less than 8 MB, and never more than 32 MB). So unless you tried to sort an old floppy disk, this shouldn't have affected you.
• When you were trying to open disk which was locked by another process (for example an Explorer window), DriveSort complained about the lock, but unlocked it and dismounted it anyway, which allowed to open it if you tried once again. This is a bit more severe since it may have lead to errors if the locking process was writing at the time DriveSort forcefully removed the lock. This is now fixed, you can test it by repeatedly trying to open a disk which is open in an Explorer window. The message will appear as long as there is a lock.
• When backing up or restoring a disk from DriveSort the disk was not correctly locked. This bug is also quite severe since it might have lead to inconsistent backups, or a corrupted restored disk if another process was writing to the disk while a backup or restore was in progress. I've fixed it so that when you launch a backup or restore on a disk, the task will wait to obtain an exclusive lock on the disk before doing its job. Its displayed status will then contain "Waiting disk lock". When the lock is released, the task will start the backup or restore in the next 15s.
• The playlist mode did not work correctly when using any other sort mode than ascending with the folders after the files. In descending sort, the playlist numbers were still generated in ascending order, which made the files jump from one side of the list to the other. The relative order constraints between folder and file were not built in the playlist mode, which made some files or folders seem stuck in that mode.

I used this opportunity to add a confirmation message when leaving DriveSort while there's still some tasks in progress (for example a backup or restore). The default action was to abort the tasks, which you can still do using the 'Ignore' button.

Since I was tired of hunting the DriveSort window around the screen at each startup, I finally decided to save the last window position in the settings file. Now when you start DriveSort, it goes nicely where you left it the last time.

Next, something a bit more useful, I've added a dialog box under the Playlist/Extensions... menu to configure which file extensions can be dragged around using DriveSort's playlist mode. It saves the trouble of messing with the settings file with a text editor, and should simplify matters for those of you who download DriveSort to sort their GBA/DS roms... Anyway, since I'm not into handheld games, I've no idea which additional extensions would be useful, so I've made it a bit less of a pain for you to configure.

This version fixes a problem leading to a crash of DriveSort during the disk list creation for the open dialog. This problem happened when a device driver refused to answer a low level partition layout request. It's for example the case for some SD/XD/CF/MS card readers. This case is now handled correctly.