Hi Don,
It's at least a "possible" item:
http://www.projectpluto.com/future.htm#ascom
As is mentioned there, the big advantage of ASCOM would be that it
would enable me to stop worrying about the various ways in which scopes
are controlled, expanding the range of supported scopes a bit. (Not
enormously, since so many scopes are already LX-200 or Celestron
compliant. And I can't simply throw out the scope control code I've
got; some scopes supported in Guide, such as encoder-based systems,
are not supported by ASCOM. But it would help.)
Jim, what Don is talking about is the fact that when Guide needs to
control a telescope, it accesses the serial port, then releases it for
use by other programs. A lot of less "civilized" software grabs the
serial port when it starts up, then doesn't release it until it's shut
down. So while software X is running, software Y is unable to access
the telescope.
The approach used by Guide is helpful in some limited conditions
(ones where all the programs agree to behave nicely, and to not grab
the serial port more than they have to), but it's not really sufficient
in some cases. In theory, if Guide works through ASCOM, more of these
"conflicting software" problems could be resolved.
-- Bill