my hobby : Comicster

My Hobby Project

I thought I would make a post to let people know about Comicster, a program I've been writing since an early CTP of Visual C# Express. I just released a version to run against the final .NET 2.0 framework.

It's a little freeware application to catalog a comic-book collection. There are plenty of comic-book collection-tracking programs out there, but very few free ones. I wrote this basically for myself, but others are getting use out of it, which is a good feeling.

It uses an ADO.NET strongly-typed DataSet, but it saves it compressed XML locally, rather than writing back to a database. The end-result is that users see this as just another file-based application.

What else? Hmm ... it uses an embedded WebBrowser control to display info using skins, which are made up of plain text files so you can create your own. It's deployed using ClickOnce, so it supports updates. It has a built-in sample database using an XML-file as an embedded resource.

The next big step I'm working on is an internet upload/download, so that users can create a shared database of comics based on items from their collection. I'm building the web-services with Visual Web Developer Express. That bit's not active in the downloadable version just yet.

If you're into comics, or if you are interested in seeing what's possible in C# Express (answer: pretty much everything), please take a look!

Here's the site again. Screenshots are included. Comicster

Cheers,
Matt