Weather Message 3.4 Beta 7 Changes

Weather Message 3.4 Beta 7 will fully support Microsoft 64 bit operating systems. I thought all of this worked in the past, but that was not the case. Just looking back at the blog will reveal the kind of issues involved.

I believe I have addressed all of the issues. I have compiled the programs to run as 32 bit applications on 32 bit operating system and 64 bit applications on 64 bit operating systems. There are only two programs that will run as 32 bit applications on 64 bit computer due to dependencies. I don't think that will cause anyone a problem.

I had to make quite a few changes in the installer to address the differences in the 64 bit and 32 bit registry. There were also some changes to the native image generation routines to use the 64 bit Microsoft.Net framework.

While I was testing it appears that I found a bug in the installer. It did not appear to be testing for the .Net framework and installing it properly. I had two users report a problem - that should now be corrected.

Existing 64 bit user Warning
I will be uploading these betas on Sunday. If you are presently using Weather Message on a 64 bit computer, you may have to enter your registration code and some settings after this update. I recommend that you export your registry settings using Weather Message Server Setup's File, Export Registry option before installing the beta. If you run into a problem, drop me an email and I will restore your settings.

One Other Thought
During all of my research on 64 bit systems, I discovered several things that had not occurred to me. One was that 64 bit programs will use more memory than 32 bit programs. That occurs naturally because memory pointers in 64 bit systems are twice the size of 32 bit pointers. The advantage of 64 bit systems is the ability to address a large amount of memory. If you have a 64 bit system, make sure you have plenty of memory installed.