dacs.doc electric

I have always been what you might call a tinkerer, and this program is meant for those who want to do just that. InstantEXE is able to do things likeDDE, manipulation of COM ports and writing INI and Registry files, among other things. The CD contains 4 files, just over 7 MB, of which only one is really needed to install. The other files are included in case the recipient of a compiled exe doesn’t have the needed VB6 runtime on their PC. Since VB6 is installed as part of MS Internet Explorer 5, most everyone in the world will already have this capability. The box says “Start programming in five minutes” but it took almost that long for some troubleshooting. Installation is very easy, getting the program to run took some ‘tinkering’. The default installation put the executable into C:\Program Files\Instexe20\, which makes it easy to find, although I would have preferred Instexe2 (which is what it is) without the extra 0 on the end, which takes up room in the fat for a whole other file, but that’s just a pet peeve of mine. I noticed that the shortcuts to the program and the help file had the wrong icons to them, and the shortcuts wouldn’t work. Examining the properties of those shortcuts revealed that they were pointing to a subdirectory called scripts, which is not where the program installed itself. After fixing this little glitch, it did start up ok and I was on my way to creating my own executable programs.

Starting the program puts you in edit mode where you can compose or edit scripts that will be compiled later into your own program. Just over 50 commands are provided to you for placing into scripts for execution. Depending on how these commands interact, you could make some pretty impressive scripts that do neat stuff. There are 59 example scripts already there to use and for tinkering. One of these looks for temp files on the hard drive and deletes them for you. I
adjusted the script to make it go directly to the windows\temp folder for this operation. The File menu contains an option to Create EXE from your current script. This worked nicely and now I have an EXE for cleaning up that temp folder. Some of the commands available include display menu, IF, GoTo, read, loop, print, search, and write. Someone with very little programming experience could actually make an EXE to do something with this program. One of the examples provided is for an analog clock for your desktop. That’s the first one I chose to play with but found that it would not work properly for me. The face with the numbers would display and then that would disappear when the hands were drawn. No amount of tinkering I did would get the two to display together. Probably I just needed more time. There’s even a Bavarian clock which has the numbers in backward counter-clockwise fashion, but that one didn’t show me hands either. Other examples include a music box for playing wav files, a viewer for bmp files, a mini calculator and a modem dialer, all of which work pretty well.

More sample scripts are to be available someday, on their website, but none were there yet when I looked. That page had only four lines and two obvious misspellings which means that English is likely not the author’s native language. There is a link though to a Yahoo group for sharing scripts among the 57 members. InstantEXE 2.0 needs Win 95 on up, 166 MHz, 64 MB RAM, 5 Megs of disk space, SVGA, mouse and CD rom . A trial version is available for tinkerers to download at http//www.instantexe.com and if you want, you can buy the boxed program for $59.95.

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