Windows Integration in Epsilon 10

Epsilon has two new add-ins for Windows.

DevStudio Add-in

This add-in makes it more convenient to use Epsilon alongside Microsoft's Developer Studio, version 5.0 or later. It lets you set up DevStudio to pass all requests to open a source file over to Epsilon. Here's how:

Within DevStudio, use the Customize command on the Tools menu and select the Add-ins and Macro Files page in the dialog.
Click Browse, select Add-ins (.dll) as the File Type, and navigate to the VISEPSIL.DLL file located in the directory containing the Epsilon executable, typically c:\Program Files\Epsilon\bin. Select that file.
Close the Customize dialog and a window should appear that contains an Epsilon icon (a blue letter E). You can move the icon to any toolbar by dragging it there.
Click the icon and a dialog will appear with two options. Unchecking the first will disable this add-in entirely. If you uncheck the second, then any time you try to open a text file in DevStudio it will open in both Epsilon and DevStudio. When checked, it will only open in Epsilon.

See MS-Windows Integration Features for a different method of integrating with Developer Studio.

Desktop shortcut add-in

The add-in provides additional flexibility when you create a desktop icon for Epsilon, or use the Send To feature of Windows. The add-in consists of a program named sendeps.exe, which is installed in the same directory as the Epsilon executable. If you create a desktop shortcut for Epsilon, or use the Send To feature in Windows, you should have it use this program instead of the main Epsilon executable. The sendeps program will locate an existing copy of Epsilon (or start Epsilon if necessary), then have it load the single file named on the command line.

We do it this way because Windows ignores a shortcut's command line when you drop a document on a shortcut, or when you use the Send To feature. (If it used the command line, you could simply create a shortcut to the main Epsilon executable and pass the -add flag. Since it doesn't, sending a file requires a separate program.) Also, Windows sends long file names without quoting them in these cases, which could also cause problems if sent directly to Epsilon.

Sendeps may be configured through entries in a lugeps.ini file located in your Windows directory. Create this file if necessary. The section name it uses is the same as the base name of its executable. You can make copies of the executable under different names to create Send To entries that behave differently.

The sendeps program uses these default settings:

[SendEps] server=Epsilon topic=Open ddeflags= executable=epsilon.exe runflags=-add -w1
The sendeps program uses these settings as follows. It first looks for a DDE server named by the server setting. If found, it sends the server a command line consisting of the ddeflags setting, followed by the file name passed on its command line (inside double quotes), using the specified DDE topic name. If there is no such DDE server running, sendeps executes a command line built by concatenating the executable name, the runflags, and the quoted file name.

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