News

Virtual Access 6 Releases

Going to retire the old 2003 portion of this page soon. Please check the downloads page for the latest releases. There are official and unofficial releases. Latest official release is Build 12 from last year, latest unofficial release (17b) is from May 2005. You are strongly encouraged to follow the beta newsgroups if you are interested in VAOS. There's the place where news, new releases, test builds etc. will be released and where your questions will be answered. Thanks!

Initial Virtual Access 6 Releases

Friday 7/3/2003

A new version of INET32 has been released. This module is a plug and go replacement for the existing INET32, and should be safe to use with existing installations of VA 5.5x. This module ONLY handles internet communications - SMTP/POP3 mail send/receive and NNTP news send/receive. Existing mail/news rules should continue to function correctly.
A new version of the Rules dialog has been released complete with import/export functions for manual editing purposes.
Later this month we will complete Alpha testing of an entirely new 2-part suite of comms code: this will released very shortly.
A new term32 executable is introduced, whilst the existing term32 will be retained and renamed and, for the short term future, the old term32 version will be used only in support of CIS connections.
Thus for CIS connections, VA calls the new term32 which then calls the old [renamed] term32, whilst for CIX connections VA calls the new term32 which in turn calls a new scriptless comms executable.
Existing mail/news rules should continue to function correctly.
For a number of reasons it will probably not be possible to provide a simple installation or patch mechanism for this module when installing with VA 5.5x - though there should be detailed manual installation instructions available. For this reason during the first few months following release we will only be recommending the installation of the new comms module to experienced beta testers. The module will also be marked as a beta module in the naming of the distribution.
The first beta release of the core code is now ready and a binary version should be available before the end of the month.
Because we have had to make some very fundamental changes to the coding architecture of VA, in order to handle the replacement code, this version WILL require a "clean" install to a new directory.
This distribution will also be marked as a beta module in the naming of the distribution.

We do hope to provide a mechanism for importing content and pointers across to the new VA: however potential beta testers need to be aware that there are currently no really good open source equivalents for the WISE or InstallShield application binary installers - which means that in the first instance you will have to handle your installation process manually. This should involve nothing more than unzipping the file to a directory of your choice, but that information may be subject to change between now and the release date.

This clean install environment also means that you will be able to use both old and new versions side by side, although it may take some manual juggling on CIS/CIX to keep unread message pointers in synch.

Once again, given the degree of change in the new version we will only be recommending this build to experienced beta testers during its first few months, despite the fact that we have high hopes of its stability.

Limitations of the initial "full" release

This first release omits several features with which users are familiar: specifically these are as follows

Spell Checker and Dictionary
HTML Display
Rendering of bold, italic and other font attributes.
Keyboard macros.

Whilst we recognise the importance of these features, we also felt constrained to get a public release out as rapidly as possible, in order to allow VA to benefit from a wider community of developers.

The Open Source Team
Virtual Access Foundation
Friday 7/03/2003

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