Managing several projects at a time

Hi Paul,

at present Plato can only manage one project (program) at a time. This means that if a change between projects I fist have to close the actual one and then opens a new (or other one). In some cases it would be very comfortable to only click in the project explorer on the project (or rather program) I would like to work on instead of using File → Open Project.

Is this possible? Or are there perhaps some ideas on this?

Plato can only handle one project at a time at the moment. There is a setting in the Plato Options dialog that allows you to have more than one copy of Plato running so you could try opening two projects in separate instances of Plato.

If you try opening a *.ftn95p file from the Microsoft Explorer (or using Start on a command line) then the application for *.ftn95p will fire up and open that file. On my machine this opens Visual Studio because of the installation configuration for VS. You can set or change this to fire up Plato if you prefer.

In theory one should be able to make this happen from the Plato Options dialog box by selecting the appropriate option. But this does not seem to be working now even when I switch it off then on again.

Paul, thanks for your comments.

What I have in mind is the following: At present we only use commercial finite element software. However, these guys continuously change their roadmaps (even though week close together) which make me believe that (maybe this is a general comment) software developers deliberately do this to keep the customer in their support program, i.e. only money making technique (my way of seeing this). The problem we experience that the interfacing is changing all the time. We keep on adjusting file formats instead of improving our software performeance.

What I actually plan is to compile our own finite element libraries to static libraries then use Plato as a developing tool. From what I have seen with simdem, this idea must be similar.

As a comment on how I handle multiple projects, I have many projects going (or being maintained) at the same time and always use simple DOS batch commands to rebuild them outside the IDE. I have a make.bat file which recompiles and re-links the executable. The first 2 lines of the batch command are 'del *.obj' and 'del *.mod'. The last line is 'slink <load.txt'. I would have at least 8 static libraries, most of which have not changed in the last 10 years. Static libraries are included using tree names in load.txt. This is a good way of 'fixing' stable functional code, away from the development environment. I have minimal options in ftn95.cfg and put most compiler options in the .bat file. I mostly also have alternative make.bat files with /check rather than /debug (but rarely /opt). My win16 IDE is old and selects 'projects' by DOS directory, with all code in the one directory. It may not be the quickest or smartest approach (having never adopted the make utility), but it is a reliable way of ensuring the rebuild always works.

John