CWINA - CASIF/Win for Applications
V0.9 Test Package README

This archive contains the V0.9 test package for CWinA, CASIF/Win for
Applications.

Contents:

	README.TXT - this file
	CWINA.EXE - the program
	CWINA.DOC - documentation in Word 6 format
	CWINA.TXT - same document in ASCII text
	DDEEXMPL.XLS - DDE example for Excel
	CVIEWxxx.EXE - associated data viewers for Win 3.1
	MSGBLAST.VBX - additional VBX file required for drag-n-drop

This is an early pre-release test version of CWinA - it undoubtedly has
many bugs, shortcomings, loose ends, etc. Please don't use it if you
can't put up with such things and provide useful feedback to IMSL
Software!

CWinA contains repackaged code from CASIF/Win, and there are some loose
ends left over from this. You should definitely have a copy of CASIF/Win
to help you work with CWinA, and to provide general Help (CWinA
doesn't have its own Help file yet).

If you are going to experiment with the DDE interface to CWinA, please
study the example VBA macro code in DDEEXMPL.XLS. This code has been
tested on both Win 3.1 and Win'95 with Excel 5 and Excel'95.

Some problems to watch out for:

If you are using DDE Execute commands on Win'95, there is a bug
somewhere between Excel and Visual Basic which requires CWinA to
close the DDE link in order for Excel to continue following any Execute
command. Therefore on Win'95, CWinA closes the link
following any Execute command, and you must re-establish the link
to request any data. DDEEXMPL.XLS shows how to work around this.

Another bug with pasting Excel links into CWinA on Win'95 - Excel
won't recognize its own clipboard link format
"Excel|path[sheet.XLS]!range" when CWinA tries to open the link. This
could be something to do with differences in how 16-bit vs. 32 bit code
delimits file names. In any case, CWinA strips out the path in the Excel
link format and all is well.

DDE can be difficult to use in general. Although it is a relatively
simple interface, it is not very robust. If an operation doesn't work,
there is very little information available to help diagnose the problem.
The DDE interface of most applications is not well documented, and is
generally intended to be used in specific ways between specific
applications, and breaks easily if everything is not exactly correct.

Send feedback to imsl@compuserve.com

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