ShellPlus reviewed
It could be said the vendor is playing "Shell games" with delphi developers - with slow updates (1), buggy software (2) and spam-filled forum (3).
For point (3) See www.shellplus.com/forum/ for their forum :)
For point (1), look no further than the once-a-year DCU update and no Delphi 2009 support. In order to get Delphi 2009 support, you would probably have to wait more than 6 months from now. (They took 9 months to get Delphi 2007 support out :( )
They often hint you to buy the sources to fix the problems yourself. Since the Source code is updated on yearly basis (i.e., you buy the license every year) you can nearly forget about bug fixes.
For point (2) It don't work, work on Vista.
Surprisingly, the product does not work on Vista. The reason is because internal in the code, it has many internal access violations. The exact reason is because the author hard-wired many ShellPlus codes to fixed constants in Shell32.dll and User32.dll.
The source code is nearly worthless. Your blogger, Delphihater brought ShellPlus and sources, and later spent like nearly three hair-raising weeks adding Unicode support to it, fixing nearly hundreds of bugs with it (Did anyone notice their Mantis bug tracker site is password protected?) only to give up when none of the fixes work with Vista.
Eventually, DelphiHater re-did the whole Shell integration in C++, not because DelphiHater hates Delphi, but for these reasons:
1) Delphi has no 64-bit version, so 64-bit Explorer will not load 32-bit Delphi DLLs
2) Delphi 2009 (Unicode) has no good 3rd party support. In this case, ShellPlus has no Delphi 2009 version.
3) The shellplus code has DEP problems. It uses excessive pointers and don't free them correctly - big no-no in Windows XP-SP2, XP-SP3 where DEP is enabled by default.
4) You would have to extensively debug ShellPlus on Vista 32-bit SP1 to get it to work. Believe me, after that, you can drop ShellPlus.
5) Many things claimed don't work. The Explorer toolbar don't work correctly, the NSE-Name_Space libs don't work as claimed. There are so many issues outstanding.
Updated:
Please see my fan-mail response
Fan Mail response
March 2013 update:
They do not have a 64-bit version of their product. Even if you buy the source-codes, you will find it arduous task to update the whole library to 64-bits, then find lots of instability with your Shell Extension. Suggestion is to use C++ or C# - See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2194572/windows-shell-extension-with-c-sharp
See: Article Corrections
It could be said the vendor is playing "Shell games" with delphi developers - with slow updates (1), buggy software (2) and spam-filled forum (3).
For point (3) See www.shellplus.com/forum/ for their forum :)
For point (1), look no further than the once-a-year DCU update and no Delphi 2009 support. In order to get Delphi 2009 support, you would probably have to wait more than 6 months from now. (They took 9 months to get Delphi 2007 support out :( )
They often hint you to buy the sources to fix the problems yourself. Since the Source code is updated on yearly basis (i.e., you buy the license every year) you can nearly forget about bug fixes.
For point (2) It don't work, work on Vista.
Surprisingly, the product does not work on Vista. The reason is because internal in the code, it has many internal access violations. The exact reason is because the author hard-wired many ShellPlus codes to fixed constants in Shell32.dll and User32.dll.
The source code is nearly worthless. Your blogger, Delphihater brought ShellPlus and sources, and later spent like nearly three hair-raising weeks adding Unicode support to it, fixing nearly hundreds of bugs with it (Did anyone notice their Mantis bug tracker site is password protected?) only to give up when none of the fixes work with Vista.
Eventually, DelphiHater re-did the whole Shell integration in C++, not because DelphiHater hates Delphi, but for these reasons:
1) Delphi has no 64-bit version, so 64-bit Explorer will not load 32-bit Delphi DLLs
2) Delphi 2009 (Unicode) has no good 3rd party support. In this case, ShellPlus has no Delphi 2009 version.
3) The shellplus code has DEP problems. It uses excessive pointers and don't free them correctly - big no-no in Windows XP-SP2, XP-SP3 where DEP is enabled by default.
4) You would have to extensively debug ShellPlus on Vista 32-bit SP1 to get it to work. Believe me, after that, you can drop ShellPlus.
5) Many things claimed don't work. The Explorer toolbar don't work correctly, the NSE-Name_Space libs don't work as claimed. There are so many issues outstanding.
Updated:
Please see my fan-mail response
Fan Mail response
March 2013 update:
They do not have a 64-bit version of their product. Even if you buy the source-codes, you will find it arduous task to update the whole library to 64-bits, then find lots of instability with your Shell Extension. Suggestion is to use C++ or C# - See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2194572/windows-shell-extension-with-c-sharp
See: Article Corrections
No comments:
Post a Comment