Late Release Update 16-Feb-06

Because I promised my beta testers something to beta test on Valentine's Day, and because now it's 2 days after that, I thought I'd give short, regular updates on what's happening. As if you were my project manager. Breathing down my neck like all good project managers do :-)

I spent most of a day researching obfuscators. For those non-techies, essentially creating a program in Java or .NET allows anyone with freely-available software to view the actual code that you wrote. I did it. It was scarily easy. So you need to buy something that makes that code incredibly hard, but not impossible, to read. Those things are called obfuscators.

The first few obfuscators I tried did a good job, but I could still tell what I was looking at. And if I could tell, then, sure, it would take a bit longer, but anyone else could work it out as well. Copy the code, minus the subscription checks, and they've got a year's worth of free software development.

So, after most of a day had passed, I decided I would use one of the obfuscators that creates a WIN32 executable, rather than one that makes the code hard to read but retrains the .NET compatability. Found one, cheaper than the others I had already tried, and spent most of another day trying to get it to work. Sent an email to their support asking for a reply asap, and am yet to have any kind of reply. Have downloaded a different one which I will try soon.

Deployed the webservice to the server, and it works fine. Through http. But I want to connect to it through https. It's another Intellectual Property protection technique, so people don't use other freely-available software to modify the reply from the webservice and give themselves free access to everything. I did it. It was scarily easy.

Sent an email to my webhost's support crew, and the word back just now is that it's because they don't support webservices under their shared ssl certificate. So I have to purchase my own ssl certificate. I'll arrange that right now and look to deploy and get that sorted when I wake up in the morning.

Doing the little things that would take longer to explain than to fix has not been started. But that should take just a couple of hours.

The executable to set up and load the MySQL database needed for Thinking Stuff, has not been started. But, the recent comment about SQL-Lite got me thinking about my whole database strategy of making it available for many database types.

I might ditch MySQL altogether, and make Thinking Stuff available solely for the free ones. That would get around the licence fee MySQL want for commercial software. To start with, I'm thinking of using SQL-Lite or PostgreSQL. In the future I might also make it compatible with MS Access, so people can use a trial version with little hassle. Unfortunately I can't see a way around doubling the amount of code I already have for each type of database I make it compatible with. This doesn't please me. And makes my plans for making it compatible with each and every database type I could think of as rather... far-fetched. As a project manager, I'm sure you are happy to hear that. (Hey, if this was a real project, we would have had 10 meetings to discuss this with all the stake-holders and decide upon the best strategy to move forward).

Did I say short updates?

If you click this link, you can see a simple web page detailing the currently known bugs in Thinking Stuff.

What you should remember, is that this is still a beta, i.e. pre-release, version. And beta, i.e. pre-release, versions always have lots of bugs. That's why they are pre-release.