I'm back

Well, I've never really left.

For the last few years I have been quite busy (or rather lazy) so I didn't spend too much time on my blog or DILE. Although I was always "here", answered e-mails and fixed bugs in the code. By the way, one of the reasons why I "disappeared" is that my son was born in 2008 and he keeps me quite busy since then (although I really enjoy it :-) ).

Quite surprisingly - despite my inactivity - DILE has remained quite popular. According to SourceForge it is still downloaded 4-500 times/month which makes me really happy.

And actually it's becoming popular even among my colleagues. So I decided to continue working on DILE. I really hope that I can finish it before MS comes up with a new platform (.NET is becoming rather old as its first beta was released a decade ago).

So dear reader/DILE user, as a first step, I'd like to ask your help in making DILE a bit more bug-free. Unfortunately there are still many bugs in DILE (in fact, I've just fixed 2 bugs in the debugging-time expression evaluation code) and thus if you come across any then please submit it in SourceForge and I'll try to fix it as soon as possible.

Although I can't promise spending as much time on DILE as I used to but I'm trying to do my best. I spend weekdays with my son and try to work on DILE in the weekends after he goes to sleep. Actually, I sleep more during weekdays than weekends (yesterday I was fixing those 2 bugs until 4 a.m. :-) ).

Thank you in advance and happy DILE-ing! :-)

P.S.: Expect a few more blog entries in the near future about DILE. :-)
P. P.S.: Unfortunately spammers have found my blog so I decided to manually moderate comments. But please feel free to send comments; I'll publish them as long as they are DILE related.

A "little" change... moving to Singapore

This time another personal post.
As you might know, my wife is Indonesian. We have been planning for a while now to move from Hungary back to Asia. And after returning from our trip this June, we have started to seriously look for a job in Singapore. I am really lucky as I have managed to get one there. My visa is already approved, my contract is signed and in the beginning of December (on 4th to be exact) we'll move there.

Both me and my wife agree that Singapore must be a good place for us. For her it will be easier to live there as she can be closer to her parents and she can communicate with other people more easily (Hungarian language is quite difficult and most of the Hungarians can't speak English unfortunately). For me, it's a good opportunity to learn new things and I really like Asia and South-East Asian mentality thus I don't think it'll be difficult to adapt. However, leaving my parents in Hungary won't be easy... :-(

Of course, all this has some effect on DILE as well. Before we move I'll release a new version. No doubt, this should be the best so far. :-)
I've finished all the changes that I planned, and there are some - I believe - really useful new features. I've, for example, completely rewritten the Object Viewer and added context menu almost everywhere.
I have also spent lots of time on trying to find bugs (and fixed all of them). I think it's more stable now.

Actually, in my current workplace for the last 2-3 months most of the time I had to fix bugs and DILE helped a lot. In several cases it "saved life" because I often had to debug on servers where VS wasn't installed. I was also glad to see that some of my collegues were interested in it and tried to use it. At last, I could see where I should improve the program. I even received a feedback letting me know that DILE is a little bit complicated to use for the first time. I'm therefore planning to create some kind of Flash tutorial, but I think I'll have the time for that only after moving to Singapore.

Anyway, once everything is settled in my new place, I'll continue working on DILE. So for now, expect some break but I'll be back! :-)

P.S.: I have changed to the new beta blogger... I hope it won't crash. :-)
P.S.: Does anyone know a good, _free_ tool for recording from screen in Flash format?