November 17, 2005 - PCAUSA has released Rawether for Windows V5.5.18.04, a
maintenance release that also includes some enhancements.

The initial motivation for this release was distribute fixes to two problems
that had been reported by PCAUSA customers as well as some fixes that had
been identified in-house over the past few months. We also took this
opportunity to release some enhancements - especially in the Rawether .NET
C# framework.

This release also supports use of Visual Studio 2005 for 32-bit and 64-bit
user-mode development.


Base Runtime Component Bug Fixes and Enhancements
=================================================
The bug fixes incorporated into this release were initially reported by
PCAUSA customers. There were two loosely related problems:

1.) A crash that could occur when exiting an application that has multiple
reads pending on the PcaSp50 NDIS protocol driver.

2.) A crash that could occur when entering Standby.

In addition to providing fixes to these problems, a systematic review of the
Rawether driver memory reference counting logic was made. This review
identified the possibility of a few additional similar problems. At this
point it was decided that the existing Rawether reference counting logic
should be systematically revised.

The Rawether reference counting logic was replaced with components from the
PCAUSA "Network Driver Framework" (NDF). The NDF reference-counted memory
logic loosely parallels memory management functions provided in the
Microsoft "Windows Driver Framework" (WDF).

Fallouts from the task of integrating the NDF into the two Rawether drivers
included using newer NDIS lookaside lists for managing user-mode handle
contexts.

It is believed that this effort has improved the stability and reliability
of the Rawether NDIS protocol drivers.



User-Mode Application Enhancements
==================================
One key enhancement provided in this release is support for building
user-mode Rawether components using Visual Studio 2005. VS 2005 can be used
to build both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of key Rawether components
including NDIScope, MPRead, HookPeek and the W32N55/W64N55 support DLL.

The Rawether .NET C# sample applications and the Rawether .NET class library
can also be built using VS 2005.

Although VS 2005 can be used to build the Rawether user-mode samples, they
will actually continue to be maintained primarily in the Visual Studio .NET
2003 environment for mid-term (next year or so). The VS 2005 projects
actually link to the base VS 2003 projects.

In the case of the C# applications, functions which are deprecated in VS
2005 have not yet been replaced; this means that builds of the C#
applications will generate warnings for deprecated functions.

This release includes some bug fixes and enhancements to Rawether .NET class
library. Among other, the IPHelper class has been extended to include IPv6
support.



Detailed Release Notes
======================
Detailed release for Rawether for Windows V5.5.18.04 can be found at the URL
http://rawether.net/product/RELEASE.TXT.


Sample Rawether V5.5.18.04 executables and documentation have been posted on
the Rawether .NET website. The V5.5.18.04 SDK and Professional sources will
be available later this week.

If you are a currant Rawether customer (with unexpired support and update
privileges...) and need to download the V5.5.18.04 SDK or Professional
version, please send an email to me.

Warm regards,

Regards,

Thomas F. Divine