[Usbpicprog-technical] win7 testing

[Francesco <fra...@gm...>]

Hi Frans,
    did you have a chance to test usbpicprog on Win7 64bit or WinVista 64bit?

I've recently upgraded to Win7 64bit and I cannot use UPP anymore...
in fact UPP doesn't detect the programmer anymore. This is a fault in
libusb-win32 which as the name implies has been coinceived for win32
only and not win64 :/
Tracing with MSVC++ debugger the execution of the program I found that
usb_get_busses() simply returns an empty object, i.e. libusb doesn't
seem to detect any USB device at all.

An important thing I should add is that I've firstly installed latest
0.3.0 upp EXE installer _after_ enabling test-signing drivers (with
the command "bcdedit /set testsigning on"). This allowed me to
successfully install the libusb driver but apparently it doesn't work.

I looked on the web and this is a summary of what I found:

1) libusb-win32 is maintained "only" by Sthepan Meyer; many people ask
for win64 support but so far libusb-win32 is for win32 only (and many
report that just installing libusb-win32 wreaks havoc your 64bit
system!! I was lucky ;)).
Stephan has been working on a libusb1 backend which uses the new
(introduced with WinVista) WinUSB API which allows to create user-mode
USB apps: http://libusb-win32.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/libusb-win32/trunk/libusb1/
  (btw this Stephan's new library seems to follow the same libusb-0.1
API of the main libusb-win32 project).

2) http://sourceforge.net/projects/openusb/    is a fork of libusb but
seems to be Mac and Linux only. I couldn't find much info about this
project (no mailing list or forums).

3) http://www.libusb.org promotes the use of the new stable 1.0 API
which has many advantages compared to the libusb-0.1 (maintained,
better docs, better design, MT safe, etc). Unfortunately there's still
no Windows backend for libusb-1.0. Josh Perry did some efforts
apparently successful to implement the backend using WinUSB (see
http://www.libusb.org/ticket/1) but he didn't post any patch AFAIK.

I think Win64 support is strategical and I'm planning to use USB for
other PIC-based projects I'm working on... so I'd be curious to know
if you have further info about this issue.

Thanks,
Francesco