XYplorer Beta Club

Working on Windows CE development, the two most missed features for me are currently:
- Equivalent to "Mobile Device" in Windows Explorer
- FTP

For the first I have to use Windows Explorer, for the second I have to use Filezilla. Not that working with these two would be a problem, or that they wouldn't be up to the task. But if that functionality would be in XY it would save me some task switching and let me benefit from all these other useful XY features.

phitsc wrote:Working on Windows CE development, the two most missed features for me are currently:
- Equivalent to "Mobile Device" in Windows Explorer
- FTP

For the first I have to use Windows Explorer, for the second I have to use Filezilla. Not that working with these two would be a problem, or that they wouldn't be up to the task. But if that functionality would be in XY it would save me some task switching and let me benefit from all these other useful XY features.

Your first wish is already listed on the roadmap as Support for Non-Drive Devices. As for FTP, I don't think that's currently planned.

The roadmap reference comes with the usual disclaimer: it's an indication of what's currently planned without any ETA.

In this thread form a few years ago -- http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=476 -- Don said that he would love to do it and it [apparently] easy to do. He either changed his mind or just has not got around to it yet.

zer0 wrote:In this thread form a few years ago -- http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=476 -- Don said that he would love to do it and it [apparently] easy to do. He either changed his mind or just has not got around to it yet.

At a guess, this quote:

...but it might turn into a can of worms easily once the network does not function as supposed...

probably refers to the current lack of multi-threading. It's probably one of the things that would need to be taken out-of-process, at which point it stops being trivial to add.

Maybe the infrastructure that was added to handle background processing of file operations could be used for it?

phitsc wrote:Maybe the infrastructure that was added to handle background processing of file operations could be used for it?

You're right that the secondary process should handle the actual file operations, of course.

The challenges may involve the communication between the main and the secondary process(es) in combination with the UI: currently, XYcopy.exe doesn't show an UI but lets Windows show its UI for file operations. FTP folders, to have an advantage over a third-party FTP client, would have to be integrated in XYplorer's main window, which would increase the demand for the two processes to quickly share information to prevent UI lag. If there's a network time-out, the secondary process will hang for 20 seconds and stop communicating with XYplorer.exe.

As the developer takes great care to keep up XYplorer's performance, there may be problems there.

In case anyone is counting - I'd love to see FTP functionality added. Thanks in advance for any consideration.