WHATIF Release Notes

Version: 3.1

Released through this website in August, 2010.
WHAT IF 3.1 was ported to MS Visual Studio 2008 and the DotNet framework v3.5, and from the users’ perspective, incorporates an expanded and enhanced toolset that encompasses regional EMAP data of Mobile Bay Estuary, Alabama that extends WHAT IF’s geographical domain.
WHAT IF 3.1 incorporates a new general purpose query tool the Database Exploration Tool, with the output being site data records that match the query.
A new Mobile Bay Fish Assemblage Predictor tool, species relative abundance based, is included in WHAT IF 3.1 that allows a user to predict a fish assemblage at a location of interest based on characteristics of that location.
A new Biota Indices tool utilizes the results of multiple linear regression (MLR) analyses to estimate two different metrics of invertebrate communities in the Mobile Bay Estuary: total number of species and the Shannon-Weiner Diversity Index.

First released through this website in April, 2007.
WHATIF uses the open source software MySQL (4.1) for its database server. This is installed with WHATIF and started when the application is launched. It does not install the server as a service; it starts and stops the server when it launches and exits. The server is configured to not answer requests from other computers on the network. If you already have MySQL running on your local workstation or network, you can use WHATIF with that server if it is version 4.1.x. We have not tested with higher numbered versions, and we use features not found in earlier versions.

When initially running WHATIF, you may encounter a Windows Security Alert dialog asking if you wish to block mysqld-nt.exe. Click the 'Unblock' button to allow the database to run on future occasions without this dialog.
If your computer has Microsoft Office 2000, when you search for a site, you may encounter an Office Setup Dialog. Click cancel as many times as necessary to dismiss the dialog and continue using the site search window. Please ensure that you have the latest updates and patches for Microsoft Office to avoid this message in the future.