Version 2.0 of FASM Writer was just posted today, and it is really, really nice. THIS IS WHAT I HAD HOPED FASMW WOULD BE LIKE! It is very slick, and it's been working flawlessly on my 64-bit Vista Home Premium setup. I suggest you try it out.

Download it from http://www.codexxi.com/MyTools.html (under 'Tools'), copy the files to wherever you want. It maintains a 'Projects' folder under its own folder ('\FASMW32\Projects') that will contain your projects.

It's not complex, has a good editor, and lets me see all the functions, macros, constants, include files, etc. in my project and jump to any one instantly. There's good documentation, and I love the new 'Reference Links' under the 'Help' button. I can add all my URL and .PDF links here, keep them grouped (optimization links, manuals, code samples, etc.) so I can quickly access all the docs I need while writing code.

I just tried it for the first time a few weeks ago, and I've seen a couple nice upgrades already during that time. The current version is extremely useable and quite nice. AsmGuru62 has been very responsive to my emails about a few issues I found -- almost all of which have been corrected, and some cool features added, with a few remaining issues on the "To Do" list.

When you first use it, I suggest you NOT try to import any of your projects immediately. Instead, create a new project and play with it for a while to get the flavor of it. Try the sample projects. Copy some code into a module, or write something, build and debug it. (In using it, I found that when I wanted to switch projects, it was cleanest to exit and then restart FASM Writer.)

To make it just a bit nicer, select Tools->Options and click 'Show Line Numbers' and 'Highlight Caret Line'. I like the way I can choose the tab column for my comments, and I can select a block of code lines and reformat them all so the comments and instructions all line up the same. Cool!

The program encourages you to break up your code into multiple modules, and manages them effectively. I hadn't been using much structure to my source-code modules (think "monolithic spaghetti" to get an idea), but I like the structure that's created with a new project. I think it will make it easier, in fact, to keep my main libraries of source code in a separate folder.

Once you are a bit more familiar with how it works, you'll see what you need to do to move your projects over.

As you can see, I'm very excited about this. This is a real winner in my book.

Now if only we could have a true source-level debugger with FASM-generated debug info...

ejamesr

Hanged as soon as I created a new project. Whats with the Win3.1 looking toolbar?

Can you tell me more?

What OS?
Was the project name any kind of "special"?
Did you use other project as a template?

The Writer is just a side effect of me writing the OOP IDE.
I use it to write code and of course, learn my mistakes.
I can make toolbar look OK, but the functionality will not change.

Windows 7. In the new project window, I just pressed "e" or something for name, didn't even check the other boxes, and directly hit ENTER. I saw what looked like a win32 pe stub, trying to scroll down, but it had already hanged and asked to close the program.

Bubach,

I just tried what you explained you did, and everything went fine.

I created a project named "e" and it created a project named "e" with a main file named "e.asm". And it assembled fine with no errors. Using 64-bit Vista Home Premium on an HP HDX laptop.

Maybe it's becasue I never located fasm at the beginning. Closed that window. shouldn't hang or warn again about it unless i try to assemble/run?

This is the complete steps, did it again now and crashed again.

* Downloaded zip in Win7.
* Double clicked the fasmw32.exe from win internal zip viewer
* choosed "run" (not extract all)
* closed down popup asking me to specify fasm.exe location
* clicked new project, specified name "e" pressed "ok"

could also be because i didn't extract all files - but i thought that windows did that to a tmp folder when you run a file directly?

Bubach,

That is likely your problem. Until you unzip the files, the 'working directory' for the files in the .zip folder is not what it appears, so the .exe can't find the files it depends on. Try actually unzipping, or copying the entire FASMW structure to a new directory and run it from there.

Yes that seems to be the problem, worked fine now. But IMO thats still a bug, it should refuse to start or something instead.

You are right.

But... I see the same problem with almost every program I download, so I always copy the files to a different directory first (unless there is only one .exe file with no other obvious binary files that the .exe might try to load).