This issue continues our look at what's coming up in the ACE 5.6 release. The February , March, April, and May 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 fifth in the "What's Coming" series and we'll continue until ACE 5.6 is released. 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 three new format specifiers for ACE_Log_Msg message formatting. These new format specifiers are:

1. %B for size_t values
2. %b for ssize_t values
3. %: for time_t values

If you've been programming with 64-bit platforms (or have been using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 aka VC8) you'll recognize these types as among those that change size depending on platform. Thus, matching the value to format with the correct basic integer format specifier is a platform-specific chore and, thus, prone to error. These new formatting specifiers help you to write portable logging code across all platforms.

The new logging format specifiers are important because size_t and ssize_t values are often used with I/O operations and I/O operations parameters and return values are very common data items to include in logging output. If your code also uses timing values or timeouts, you may also wish to log time_t values and they can change sizes across platforms as well. These new formatting specifiers can help to remove a common source of errors from your code quickly.

If you want to experiment with this upcoming addition before ACE 5.6 is released, grab a copy of the latest ACE beta and try it out! If you get stuck or have questions, our new Whitewater Level of ACE support can help you get going quickly.

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!