Programming design under way

Wierd - I'm sure a news item went up for this earlier, but SF seems to have lost it.

Anyway, I'm currently working out what needs to get passed around for the automagic compatibility check on devices and programmers to work. As you can imagine, this is non-trivial! :-) I haven't touched code for a while - all the development is in Word. So far it's looking good, but it's taking a lot of thinking about and little visible progress. The key is that I want to get it generic for every device/programmer with as few adjustable parameters as possible.

This is the heart of making the automagic check work, so if I get it wrong then I'm going to have to bugger about with it sometime later when DLLs to support stuff are already out there. So I want to get this really nailed *once*. The actual detection stuff (electrical models, etc) I can leave until later, but I need to know what the programmers and devices need to pass around so that I can set up the interfaces to classes and get some stub routines in there to keep stuff happy.

Currently the auto-detection will have three phases. The first phase is a physical check, where we work out which physical positions the device can occupy in the programmer. The second phase is an electrical check, where we work out for each physical position whether the device and programmer are electrically compatible, given the pin configurations possible. Finally we do a dry-run check where the device tests out its programming and we see whether the programmer can support it (ie. if there's any surprises in the programming algorithm). Each of these three checks will probably have a class to implement it, and there will be a class on top of this coordinating it. All pretty complex, so I want to have the interactions between them designed before I hit an editor and start coding, otherwise I'm going to end up in a right mess.

Graham.