Doh!... it's 2:41 am... I really need to get to bed.

But coding is sooo much fun! Tonight (ummm, and this morning) I’ve been working to clean up the Solitaire application that I’ve ported to VB.NET. Of course, as I’m going through the code, I’m seeing a lot of interesting opportunities extend it. ;-)

I was looking through the existing bug list with the original C# code and decided to tackle a few of them while I’m at it. I’ve fixed several of them already (some weren’t so easy to find) and will try to fix the rest before releasing the code.

Now, some people may be asking why I’m doing this. Well, there are several reasons:

• It’s Solitaire… probably the most used application on the planet.
• It wasn’t in VB.NET, that just begged to be corrected.
• Although it’s a simplistic application from a user perspective, there’s a ton of things happening to bring it all together, and…
• It’s an application that everyone is familiar, as such…
• I plan on using it to demo various programming tasks during user group presentations. I don’t have to spend any time explaining what the application is, just jump in and start show some coding.
• The original project on GotDotNet appears to have not moved forward since last September.

Since I noticed that this project has had no movement since last September; I felt it was a good opportunity to play with it. Obviously, since I prefer VB.NET, I’d want to move forward with it using the language I prefer. The initial conversion didn’t really take all that long (probably around 2-3 hours till I had it mostly working). Tonight I spent time going through refactoring the code (renaming variables, event handlers, components) and rebuilding the forms so they match the code generated forms that VB creates instead of the hand-coded style that code looks like when converted directly from C#. Once that was completed, I started adding code so that the user settings would be persisted and fixing some of the bugs. I’ve also started adding some features (enhancements) that aren’t in the original Solitaire (minimum screen size, remember application location and size, etc.).

I’m planning on adding a few more items, but some of that will wait until after the initial release of the code. For now, it’s definitely time to get some sleep… it’s now 10 till 3am. ;-)