ReactOS 0.4.7 Released

[Colin Finck]

The ReactOS Project is pleased to announce the release of version 0.4.7
as we continue to work on releasing every three months.

We’re especially pleased to present this release as the very first one
that’s been developed in our new Git/GitHub repository. Moving from
Subversion to GitHub has proven to be an invaluable way to reach new
testers, users and improve the overall awareness of the ReactOS project.

To highlight the impact we’ve had since we moved to GitHub two months
ago, ReactOS now leads the Win32Api and OsDev categories in Github,
overtaking many amazing and well established projects.

User Experience
===============
0.4.5 introduced visual styles support, 0.4.6 matured it, and now 0.4.7
has further improved support for styles created for Windows XP. If you
haven’t already, just follow us on Twitter so you can see first hand the
many skins being applied in ReactOS. Giannis Adamopoulos solved many
issues in which ReactOS was managing transparency and messaging. His
work on msstyles support paid off, as it’s reduced visual glitches in
many applications.

Support for Shell extension for files has been included by Giannis in
this new version, and several other shell extension improvements have
been worked on by Eric Kohl. The quick launch shell extension, developed
by Shriraj Sawant under Google Summer of Code 2017, can also be enabled
manually within this release for an early peek into this feature.

James Tabor has put in a great deal of effort into getting the ReactOS
painting process as close to Windows as possible. Furthermore, Katayama
Hirofumi MZ has fixed the anti-aliasing text when a button was grayed
out (and which was impossible to read before this fix).

Another major achievement brought to you by Giannis has been to solve
the Clipboard and Recycle Bin bugs. Now, in 0.4.7, ReactOS won’t crash
due an invalid/empty clipboard as it did previously, copy/pasting
multiple files and pasting folders in the background should work well
and now follows the Windows specs more closely.

In 0.4.7, ReactOS now correctly manages file deletions when dragging
them to the Recycle Bin thanks to a patch from Serge Gautherie. Add to
that numerous fixes regarding Drag and Drop and the whole user
experience now feels much more polished for end users.

Thanks to Kamil, several glitches that have been evident in the
free/available pie chart for file systems are now gone, and he has fixed
several other user experience issues such as Notepad showing multiple
instances of find/replace windows, or stopping Bitvise SSH Server
Control Panel from crashing due to a bug in NtGdiGetPixel().

Hardware support
================
ReactOS 0.4.7 allows you to reliably install the ISO from any drive
without needing a CD, as a result of the work Colin Finck has done on
the CDFS/ISO-9660 filesystem driver. We’re very thankful to our
community about this point in particular, as the actual development work
above happened at the ReactOS Hackfest, which was only possible thanks
to your ongoing support and donations!

Thomas Faber has addressed an issue in the HDAUDBUS driver that
prevented VMware from loading ReactOS when a HD sound card is present.
He has also addressed an issue in mbedtls (the SSL support library that
we use in ReactOS) that could affect old hardware that doesn't support
SSE2 instructions. Previous crashes on older hardware are now much less
likely when interacting with SSL connections.

In addition to the above, ReactOS 0.4.7 is now properly checking the
end-of-memory-map entries and aligning physical addresses thanks to some
work done by Serge. That contributed further to better hardware
compatibility.

If you have encountered problems when trying to run previous version of
ReactOS on your PC, please consider retrying with 0.4.7 and sending us
bug reports so we can work on them.

New ReactOS Application Manager
===============================
As part of the Google Summer of Code program, the ReactOS Application
Manager was improved in many areas by Alexander Shaposhnikov, including
many new features and fixes. Now you can install multiples pieces of
software from Rapps in bulk and downloads are now done in the background
ensuring you can continue to use the app whilst installing. Install
percentages are now shown, force update finally works, the Installed
category is now back, and the details sections show enhanced information
and various other fixes and features.


More info about this new version in Rapps blog posts.

Applications/Games Compatibility
================================
For those who enjoy retro-gaming, Aleksandar Andrejević has fixed linear
4-bpp mode, meaning even more old and addictive games are now playable
in ReactOS, and your productivity has another a good reason to fall…

Mark Jansen has fixed a critical issue regarding services. ReactOS 0.4.7
now supports creating an interactive service under the LocalSystem
account. Now, among other software, VMWare Horizon setup works in
ReactOS. Mark is also working on Application Compatibility support
(shims) which is still an ongoing project.

Thanks to Eric, the User/group/share management modules (netapi.dll,
netapi32.dll and samsrv) have been greatly developed in the 0.4.7
release, getting them even further in terms of compatibility.

Kernel and Filesystems
======================
ReactOS is now able to handle Ext2, Ext3, Ext4, BtrFS, ReiserFS, FFS and
NFS partitions. We’re proud to say that ReactOS natively supports more
File Systems than all Windows versions combined!

Continuing on filesystems, Pierre Schweitzer has implemented the fsutil
tool, which arrived in Windows 2003, and is now available through
ReactOS as open source. Furthermore, the ReactOS fsutil tool also
supports FAT file systems whereas its Windows counterpart does not, so
this is another instance of ReactOS improving something over what
Microsoft originally offers.

Pierre’s work on FastFat, fixing reference counting overflows and file
attributes settings, correcting the opening counts, implementing
statistics counting and squeezing bugs in the Common Cache, is all part
of this enhanced stability in 0.4.7. It got also improved thanks to the
upgrades of the various file systems drivers supported by ReactOS (Ext2
and BtrFS) and the fixes they required to avoid regressions.

New apis have been implemented in Kernel32.dll, which has seen several
rewrites in order to fix bugs detected by our test suite, but also to
bring in support for Windows 2003 features such as reparse points and
mount manager backed volumes.

Timo Kreuzer has also fixed some Memory Manager bugs with the goal of
more stability. If 0.4.6 surprised you with its stability thanks to the
work being done in this area, then you will find 0.4.7 to be another
step further in that regard.

Eric Kohl has added initial STORPORT/STORAHCI implementations that can
be enabled manually for now via registry as an alternative to the
default UniATA driver, in an effort to get closer to native behavior and
maximize compatibility.

Third Party Modules
===================
ReactOS depends on 3rd party open source projects so in 0.4.7 we’ve
updated them to their latest version. Libpng, mpg123, mbedtls,
btrfs,along with the many modules that Wine shares with us, which are
individually synched by Amine Khaldi, that ReactOS can use in the user
mode. We express our gratitude to every single open source project we
use, and send regards to all teams behind them. We also keep
contributing back to them, in the spirit of open source, whenever we
can. For instance, David contributed a 64bit related fix to the MKISOFS
project, and several ReactOS developers contribute patches back to the
Wine project and also Wine Staging, in addition to performing patch
reviews in the appropriate mailing list.

Quality Assurance
=================
ReactOS believes heavily in QA so many new tests have been integrated
and implemented covering critical areas as Memory Manager (IO MDL,
MmBuildMdlForNonPagedPool, etc..) or Common Cache. The ReactOS testing
infrastructure now supports testing File System mini-filters which is an
important step forward to ensure future development in the upcoming
filter manager. This new version of ReactOS has gone through several
Coverity scans to detect and fix critical bugs detected. In addition to
automated tests, ReactOS enjoyed impressive testing coverage thanks to
the manual tests for the Release Candidates by Joachim Henze.

General notes, tests, and changelog for the release can be found at
their respective links. A less technical community changelog for ReactOS
0.4.7 is also available.

ISO images are ready in the ReactOS Download page.

Some statistics
===============
The oldest bug fixed was CORE-2366. "Rapps: modify link does not work".
Reported 10 years ago.
During these 3 months, 453 bugs have been resolved: 263 marked as fixed,
46 as duplicates, 56 as won't fix, 41 as incomplete, 47 as can not
reproduce.
246 bugs fixed were directly related with the operating system, 12 from
ReactOS online services, 1 from ReactOS test suite, 3 from ReactOS
Building Environment and 1 from ReactOS RosApps.


- Press Release: https://reactos.org/project-news/reactos-047-released
- Press Kit:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos/files/ReactOS/0.4.7/ReactOS-0.4.7-…
- General Notes: https://reactos.org/wiki/0.4.7
- Tests: https://reactos.org/wiki/Tests_for_0.4.7
- Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/ChangeLog-0.4.7
- Community Changelog: https://reactos.org/wiki/Community_Changelog-0.4.7
- Download page: https://reactos.org/download