We’ve always perceived the FileSystemWatcher as “moody”, meaning that it would work on some disks and not on some other… but we couldn’t quite understand the reasons behind it. It would work on fixed HD but not always on removable drives…

A few days ago we bought 2 of those fantastic mini NAS-adapters, which work indeed fine even if they:

1)  have an embedded Linux using Samba to manage the sharing.

2) support only FAT32 partitions.

Of course we started testing Tabbles furiously and we immediately started yelling “OMG, the FileSystemWatcher doesn’t work on Network drives!”. The reason of such a panic attack is that our auto-tagging rules and one click-tagging are based on the FileSystemWatcher and Tabbles looses much of its appeal without those.

After a bit of yelling and hair-tearing we googled “FileSystemWatcher Samba” until we stumble on this article suggesting to use the “Win9xWatcherStrategy class”… deeply moved in the heart, Maurizio tries immediately to implement this but soon enough he finds out that the method “Win9xWatcherStrategy” doesn’t exist in the FileSystemWatcherClass. This means that we’ll probably bin the .net FileSystemWatcher wrapper, and move to the lower-level Win32 function.

For any of you using Tabbles Portable: be aware that for the moment the auto-tagging rules work only if your USB drive is formatted as NTFS… sorry for that but we’ll try to fix this soon!

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But we also have some good news here: totally out of the blue, Mr. Leandro “O Dragão” posted on our forum a solution to the annoying problem of  Tabbles not being able to track files moved with Explorer, have a look at this thread. This is among the most exciting thing that happened to us in the past months…we don’t really know a lot about it yet, but so far it looks really promising – Kudos to Leandro!

Mr. Burns

(Not sure why, but I believe Mr. Burns would be proud of us!)