This issue continues our look at what's coming up in the ACE 5.6 release. The February , March, April, May, June, and July newsletters also contained articles in this series looking at what's coming in the next ACE release, ACE 5.6. If you're a new subscriber, please review the previous articles for information that may affect you.

This article is the seventh (and last!) in the "What's Coming" series. ACE 5.6 is on track for release September 4, 2007. As with the previous articles, we note that all user-visible changes to ACE are described in the ACE_wrappers/NEWS file of each ACE beta as development progresses. You can review that file here.

This article describes a new port of ACE+TAO to National Instruments' LabVIEW RT 8.2 with Pharlap ETS. The LabVIEW Real-Time Module extends LabVIEW Embedded technology to NI hardware running real-time operating systems, in this case, Ardence's Phar Lap ETS real-time operating system for x86.

The LabVIEW RT port is built on a Windows host using Visual Studio .NET 2003 (VC7.1) and the Phar Lap ETS SDK. The resulting code is then executed on the target LabVIEW RT node.

The build environment for LabVIEW RT/Phar Lap ETS requires different settings than the regular VC7.1 Windows builds, so it requires generation of new Visual Studio solution and project files with specific settings. If you plan to use this new port, please see the ACE-INSTALL.html file in the ACE kit for details about how to generate solution/project files and how to set up a configuration file for building.

Riverace has a new ACE platform sponsorship program designed to get ACE up and running great on more of today's new computing platforms at a lower cost to you. This program helps you get ACE tested on your favorite new platforms and can save you lots of money in the process.

Before this program, the ACE user community needed to wait until a single company wanted ACE ported to a new platform enough to pay the entire cost to port, test, and qualify ACE on a new platform. Many companies have born the burden for dozens of ACE ports over the years, and we are all very thankful for their foresight and investment.

Now, though, there's an even better way to get ACE up and running on new platforms. Riverace's new ACE platform sponsorship program can coordinate funding for new platforms across a number of sponsors, speeding up the porting process, and lowering the cost to support new ACE platforms. Everyone wins!

Under Riverace's standard ACE support service, the supported ACE versions are the current and previous versions. Therefore, when ACE 5.6 is released, the supported versions will become ACE 5.5 and 5.6. ACE 5.4 will no longer be supported.

End of ACE 5.4 support will also mark the end of support for platforms having a "Last support version" of ACE 5.4 (you can view the complete support matrix at www.riverace.com/support.htm). The following platforms will no longer be supported when ACE 5.6 is released:

• Solaris 8, SPARC, all compilers
• Red Hat Linux 7.x, x86, g++
• Red Hat Linux 8, x86, g++
• Red Hat Linux 9, x86, g++
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1, x86, g++

If you require these platforms to remain supported for later ACE versions, or you require an extension of ACE 5.4 support, please contact me to discuss service options past the release date of ACE 5.6.