APRS-SCS

Last week, the developer of APRS-SCS, John - KB2SCS announced that he was dropping all support for APRS-SCS, as it is written in VB6, which is no longer supported by "the boys from Redmond", aka Microsoft. At that time, John put the source code up on his Web Site.

I started to talk with John (he lives close by, and I really have to get together with him), and I think I'm going to take a crack at porting the program over to VB.NET.

This is NOT going to be a trivial port, and in fact, I've had a bear just getting the development environment up to the point I can compile the existing source (I'm there now - if you need hints, email me)

Anyway, John as agreed that I can "open source" the program.

I'm thinking that I'll put this up on Sourceforge (gasp - a windows app on Sourceforge!), and anyone who wants to contribute can.

The first issues that MUST be taken care of

1)The application uses what are called "old controls". These are .OCXs that Microsoft shipped with VB4 and 5, that were basically replaced by native controls in VB6, but were still available for download, but non supported. There is an "interesting" problem with the "Old controls" - they will not work in the VB6 development environment under Vista. (an aside, the VB6 IDE does not work in Vista64, but IS supported under Vista32)

2)The application uses a 3rd party OCX called "Socketwrench". There was a free version of this control, but there no longer is. Under .NET, we don't need it, the stream reader/writer classes can handle this for us

3)The VB6 and .NET graphics systems are totally different, and this will probably be the biggest part of the port

Anyway, I'd like to hear what you think, and many hands make light work. I'll need testers, reviewers, and even a few developers to help.

Anyone game?

Developer Tools

I don't think I've ever made a list of MY favorite developer tools.

First some background. I've been at least a part time developer since 1982. Since the late 80s, I have been pretty much a full time developer. Yes, during part of that time I did operational stuff with the software I wrote, but I probably spent 75% of the time coding/designing, and 25% as my own end user. Anyway, here is a list of tools I use all the time:

Microsoft MSDN Team developer ($5469) or Visual Studio Professional with MSDN Premium ($2,499)

Textpad I see lots of other editors mentioned - but I like Textpad

Cygwin Being able to use most UNIX command line tools in windows is great. I regularly have to parse 30+ meg files here at the office, and the tools in Cygwin do it faster than any windows based product I've found

RefactorPro! A totally amazing tool for refatoring your code. I'd say most C# programmers feel the same way about ReSharper. At one time, ReSharper didn't do VB.NET, so...

Microsoft Virtual PC The ability to have clean build boxes, and test boxes, plus being able to test my software under various OSes. Great

Paint.NET Free Photo Editor