Surprising SdiDesk news!!!!!<\/p>\n
Like Cthulhu<\/a>, SdiDesk, is still, currently dead, but occasionally stirs in its sleep and sends out weird dreams to the minds of men. Here’s one-such …<\/p>\n Around this time last year I got a new laptop with Vista and discovered that the old SdiDesk (in VB6) didn’t work. Not having VB6 on the machine (or any installers for it) I didn’t have a way to fix the problem. And anyway, I was (am) emotionally committed to getting off the Microsoft \/ VB treadmill and moving to a Python SdiDesk. (Really, I am!)<\/p>\n Six months later, though, heavily involved with GeekWeaver etc., I realized that I’d done nothing towards it. And SdiDesk was still broken. <\/p>\n I came across the new Visual Studio 2008 Express (free-as-in-beer) edition and decided to take a quick look. <\/p>\n It was s-l-o-w even on this newish laptop. And heavy, and I couldn’t make much of it. But I realized that a) while I still wanted nothing to do with VB.NET and Windows-only programming b) SdiDesk was going to go extinct pretty quickly if it couldn’t run at all. There seemed to be a closing window of opportunity to keep the original code-base and program alive. And I couldn’t quite bring myself to let it die entirely.<\/p>\n So why not find someone else, who already knows about his kind of thing (VB6 to VB.NET conversions)? Via Rentacoder<\/a> I contracted Zebo<\/a> in Faisalabad, and thanks to some dedicated work by him, the SdiDesk source is now converted to VB.NET.<\/p>\n I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this. The job Zebo did was a straight upgrade of the original VB6 code, (using the mechanical conversion and manually fixing the things the update couldn’t handle). It’s taken a while to sort out some weird security issues (eg. why the hell wouldn’t Vista let it see Today’s date<\/a>?) <\/p>\n