Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

[Sam Gerber]

I decided to break out my old A5V3 software and try to update my XBASIC scripts. Once I got my old V1.02 application working, I was going to upgrade to 4.5. It appears that the Version 3 board is mostly defunct with very few postings and no threads which deal with DLL crashes ... so I came here.

There's no chance right now that I can get the old app upgraded because I crash so frequently. Same stuff that's reported here in volume, such as A2XBASIC.DLL, A2CNTRL.DLL, both tied to MFC40 problems, and I have many, many A2CRDSYS.DLL problems. Then there's the list of A2HALT tasks which occupy my "Close Program" window.

My bottom line concern is whether Alpha Five is in decline and that perhaps I should give up on it. Many postings here report the same DLL problems I seem to have and yet the posters act like these crashes are THEIR fault, because they coded something badly on a form, a field rule calculation, and so on.

Maybe I'm naive, but it seems that Alpha Five should at least continue to run without crash and provide error messages to indicate syntax problems.

Since Alpha Five personnel don't monitor these boards any longer, I was hoping for some honest feedback from some of you.

Why all the system crashes involving so many DLLs? What can I do about these? I'm running a basic Windows 98 system and have applied the only available update which was 3.01. I hear people talk about a 3.04 patch and yet nothing is available beyond 3.01.

I would have gone to 4.5 but from the postings here, DLL crashes are still abundant. I'm reluctant to pour more money into this and I certainly won't pay Alpha personnel $120 an hour to see if they can get their product running.

Any assistance or advice is quite welcome. If you're shy about telling me here, private email is fine.

Thanks to all who have heard my tale of woe .... Sam

[Ohlen Cartmell]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Hi Sam,

You're correct in that most of us have migrated to A5V4.5 so most of the action is on this board. However, most of what's discussed here applies to A5V3, also.

The last update to V3 is the upgrade to V3.01 which is accessible from the support page.

I think the basic problem is you're trying to run a Windows 3.1 program on a Windows 98 platform. While your data will be applicable to the newer system, I don't think any of your layouts will open at all in V3. The underlying environment is just not going to allow it and the scripting is too different. In other words, you need to redesign your forms, browses, reports, etc. I didn't get into A5 until V3, so maybe others will chime in with better news for you.

A5V3 and V4.5 are much more powerful than V1 allowing you to do more with your data. However, greater power leads to greater responsibility for the programmer. In other words, it's really easy to screw something up.

Alpha personnel monitor the board frequently, but most of the help comes from people helping each other. It's not uncommon to see the owners of the company answer questions for customers - not likely to see Bill Gates answer an Access question.

Alpha is working on A5V5 which promises to be a great advancement in relational database design. Lots of goodies for the amatuer and the professional. Most of us would rather they spend time working on that instead of answering our questions.

As you continue your programming be sure to post any and all questions here. Someone will always try to help.

[Ohlen Cartmell]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

P.S.
A conference is in the planning stages for March 21 to 24 that you may wish to attend. There will be sessions for amatuers as well as professional programmers. The last one was fun and informative and it was good to meet some of the people we've only known through this board. We hope Alpha will have the new Version ready for introduction, purchase, etc by then. The conference will be in a suburb of Boston (the name escapes me now - senior moment).

[David Mason]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Sam,

I have been using alpha over 10 years.

A5V1 was a very good Program and I skipped a lot in between, but v4.5 is much stronger than any previous version.

I have used a4v6 and up on win98 machines without any great difficulty.

The trick to any Program today is to try to make it work and to not try to make it fail. There are some things in alpha that do not work exactly right. There are things in Windows that don't either. Some programs you load on your computer may overwrite the dll's alpha uses in windows with older or broken versions.

I had a real problem with crashes with alpha on my main machine a while back and discovered my cpu was running too hot. The grease between the cpu and the slot was insufficient. We added grease ( 12.00 a tube ) and all has been great since.

Alpha will be around and improving.

Dave

[Peter.Wayne]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

hello, sam.
you write:

My bottom line concern is whether Alpha Five is in decline and that perhaps I should give up on it.
Many postings here report the same DLL problems I seem to have and yet the posters act like
these crashes are THEIR fault, because they coded something badly on a form, a field rule
calculation, and so on.

Maybe I'm naive, but it seems that Alpha Five should at least continue to run without crash and
provide error messages to indicate syntax problems.

in an ideal world, alpha five would detect all syntax errors. unfortunately there is no way to detect all possible syntax errors in any sizeable program. i have had crashes with MS Word and other major apps--it's even been rumored that Windows 98 and Windows ME have crashed. perhaps others on this board can confirm those rumors--i would hate to be sued for libel by microsoft.
in any event, as a5 has matured, it has improved to catch more errors. i think all the .dll errors mentioned on this board were, in fact, errors in coding--xbasic is pretty powerful, and it doesn't always keep someone from trying to stuff a date variable, say, into a numeric field. the assumption is that if you're going to use xbasic instead of the built-in tools, you will have the patience to debug your application. personally, i can't remember the last time i saw one of those errors--probably years ago, which just means that after a while, xbasic isn't that difficult or obscure. i certainly have enough programming errors, but i guess they're not the kind that brings alpha to its knees--just the kind that give me the wrong output.
having a perfect xbasic checker is a little like having a perfect spell checker. it's one thing to make sure that the syntax is correct, and it's another to correct "its to bad that we can't make it perfect" to "it's too bad..." despite this, xbasic is becoming more robust with each iteration of alpha five.

[Peter.Greulich]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Sam,

I think the dll crashes is something from ver. 3. I am not aware of any kind of systematic Alpha problem with dlls in ver. 4 or higher. Anything written in ver. 1 should more or less work in ver. 4 or higher, except some scripts. So if you choose to upgrade, expect to somewhat relearn xbasic (the new syntax is fairly intuitive and more powerful that ver. 1) and expect to rewrite some of your scripts.

Peter

[Sam Gerber]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Hi Ohlen, thanks for response.

I think what I'm trying to do is claimed to be supported by Version 3.

My 1.02 application is quite extensive and provides invoicing, mailing list name selection and sales analysis for my son's business. Back around 1995 I was quite active with Alpha Five and reasonably proficient in XBASIC despite the documentation then available. I was extremely active on Alpha's Compuserve board and have helped several other users at a personal level.

1.02 is a 16-bit application and has survived 3.1, WIN95 and WIN98 for us. Runs without any crashes, with good performance characteristics, and has only one deficiency which I found a workaround for.

Alpha Five Version 3.0 was intended to run in the 32-bit OS environment and it appeared quite inviting at the time I purchased it. I wasn't aware that the XBASIC was that different although I knew I'd have to replace or upgrade parts of it. However, Ohlen, it did "promise" to convert my 1.02 application, and in fact it has. I went through every form and report and had A5V3 convert them. Ditto with the application cards I had written.

What totally surprised me was that the A5V3 engine has proven so unstable with all its DLL crashes that I don't have an opportunity to upgrade the XBASIC. Until I feel I can manage (read eliminate) those crashes I'm quite reluctant to invest time in the XBASIC upgrade and complete system test. I've alread spent 4 or 5 hours installing, converting, reinstalling (3 times), and I've gotten little accomplished.

For what it's worth, my two primary problems are A2CNTRL.DLL crashes when I try to push buttons on my application cards, and the several types of DLL crashes (like A2XBASIC.DLL) when I close a form by clicking the "x" on the upper right. There are a few other DLL situations so far, but these are the most common.

Ohlen, this is the only application I can't run at all since I've used WIN98 (4 years now). I have around 60 applications installed and a few have pestered me but none have crashed to the point where I had to discontinue their use. I generally addressed those issues by upgrading a video driver, placing a specific version of MFC42.DLL in the app's directory, and things like this.

Sorry for the long post but I wanted you to know that I have tried, and that I'm not having problems with 1.02, but only V3's "rendering" of 1.02.

Thanks ... Sam

[Sam Gerber]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Dave, I can accept that there are things that won't work perfectly when converted to V3 (or V4x) but I was hoping that at least Alpha Five would run to give me a chance to make changes. Long ago when the 32-bit version was about to be released, Selwyn and his support people pretty much assured that 1.02 would convert but they forewarned about the newer XBASIC causing some incompatabilities.

My problems are well beyond this. By the way, in terms of other applications installing DLLs and other software that could affect A5, I certainly understand that this can happen, but it happens even when A5V3 is the most recently installed program.

Thanks for your interest, Dave ... Sam

[Sam Gerber]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Hi Peter. I remember you from the Compuserve boards and from the pubs you authored.

I can appreciate that badly coded XBASIC can cause some intermittent problems/crashes, but it's very painful when the crashes are every 2 minutes, necessitating a reload of Alpha Five and removal of the nasty HALTA5 task which for inexplicable reasons continues to run and clutter memory as they stack up.

The real point here, Peter, is that assuming that ALL my dll related crashes are caused by bad XBASIC, there's not a thing I can do about it. Selwyn's "promise" (in 1995-96) was that I could still convert the V1 application and then deal with XBASIC's required changes under V3. These frequent crashes won't permit even running the old code to modify it.

My XBASIC from 1.02 is totally pure and runs 100% with the 1.02 engine. I had expected that Version 3 would tolerate the old XBASIC and either run it incorrectly or else report syntax errors to me ... but certainly not allow itself to crash consistently.

Don't know where to go from here. I would trade in my old Version 3 (which I've never used until now) for the newer Version 4.5. But I paid $99 for something that had no yield and would feel foolish to scrap that money and pay it again + more for a newer version that may still crash me. Then I'd really feel like a jerk.

If you're reading this Selwyn, will you take my invoice/receipt for V3 and credit it toward V4.5?

Any ideas on how I might proceed would be appreciated Peter.

Regards ... Sam

[Sam Gerber]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

P.G. wrote:

I think the dll crashes is something from ver. 3. I am not aware of any kind of systematic Alpha problem with dlls in ver. 4 or higher. Anything written in ver. 1 should more or less work in ver. 4 or higher, except some scripts. So if you choose to upgrade, expect to somewhat relearn xbasic (the new syntax is fairly intuitive and more powerful that ver. 1) and expect to rewrite some of your scripts.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Peter, I would like to believe that 4.5 would tolerate the bad XBASIC syntax carried over from 1.02 and not crash me for having it there (unlike V3.01). I have no problem relearning XBASIC. In fact, the document on the Alpha site seemed to be very informative in pointing out what needed to be done ... almost a cookbook.

If you read my response above to Peter Wayne, you'll see that I have a problem buying another complete upgrade just because V3 was a failure. I'm not trying to be cheap but I can't abide buying two upgrades to accomplish what the first should have.

Well, we'll see if someone else has some "magic" for me to get the crashes out of Version 3 and then I can judge whether 4.5 is a worthy upgrade from that.

Regards and thanks for your response ... Sam

[Tom Cone Jr]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Sam,

It's been a *long* time since I worked with Vers. 3. I recall that there were numerous enhancements and fixes in moving from version 3 to version 4.

Personally, I think you're valuing your own time too cheaply. You're spending time trying to verify that an out of date version of the program will be useful to you? Why? I recommend you upgrade immediately. And, no, I don't work for Alpha Software...

If you're concerned that you'll be wasting your money, check out their returns policy.

Your fear that there are numerous unresolved issues 'out there' with system level DLL's has not been borne out by my own experience with the product. Others have had trouble with a few of the newer HP print device drivers, but apart from that, I think you'll find it to be a very stable product.

-- tom

[crimmelcp]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Sam:
Why dont you download the 30 day trial version from the web site.
See if it works.
Then make the decision to buy or not.
Charlie Crimmel

[Sam Gerber]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

Tom, if you don't recall having my problems with V3, perhaps you started with that version and built new applications. It may be that migrating 1.02 to 3.01 brings out the worst in this version.

I may see whether Selwyn would have his people sell me Version 4.5 at the differential between the V3 and V4.5 upgrade price. Worst that can happen is that he'll say no.

Thanks ... Sam

[Sam Gerber]

RE: Concerned about DLL page faults and A5 quality

That's a good thought Charlie. I almost did that the other day but I wasn't eager for a huge download at that time. No cable or DSL at my place yet.

Thanks ... Sam