Build a replacement for the Dialer on Windows

[davidrg]

The Dialer is pretty much trapped in 1998. It can't be built properly with any free compiler, or any compiler newer than Visual C++ 6.0. It looks increasingly out of place on modern windows, has a number of UX issues that can't be resolved due to toolkit limitations, and features expected of modern software such as jumplists can't be supported.

The only option is a from scratch rewrite. Ideally the rewrite would still work everywhere the current Dialer does except for OS/2 and NT 3.1/3.50. It should support modern features such as Jump Lists where available. And it should look more native on which ever versions of windows its running on.

A solid start has been made on this already. Called the Connection Manager, it can generate all the same scripts the Dialer can, but not all of its UI is hooked up yet.

Current effort is probably 50-75% of the way to a minimum viable product (no modem support) so it really just needs to be finished off. As part of this, an export feature probably needs to be added to the dialer so that connections can be moved from there to its replacement.

Once the new Connection Manager done the Dialer would become an optional/legacy feature on Windows but it would remain part of the default install on OS/2.

Delivery of this feature will probably be delayed until after the K95 v3.0 release as right now restoring features missing from K95 2.1.3 is a higher priority.