In an attempt to vary the type of programming I am doing, out of office I have been working on quite a few cool projects. Outlined a few below – unfortunately none are for download yet as they are still in progress.

KarovaDev Firefox extension

As Karova‘s main product is a hosted e-commerce solution, we naturally have to integrate with quite a few payment service providers. It can be a chore to test our stores with these payment service providers, having to enter dummy or real credit card details everytime. I hate monkey work so I wrote a firefox extension for the Karova developers to help in the testing of Karova stores. It’s pretty sweet, You can edit all the default data passed for each payment service providers, specify the domains or virtual directories (if installed on localhost) to test against. The final test page scans all the user’s cookies and chooses the ones that match the supplied domains etc. You can then choose your site and test to your heart’s content- saving hours of monkey work.

It was nice to work on a beefy extension again. It re-affirmed to me how good the Gecko/ XUL platform is.

Philroche Blog Tool

Most of the C# work I do in wrk is web applications running on IIS. I do some command line apps that run as scheduled tasks but I don’t have cause to develop any GUI apps. Microsoft released Visual Studio 2005 express so I downloaded it and gave WinForms a shot… easy peasy to get a nice GUI designed and built. I decided to write a simple RSS aggregator to see how easy it would be.

I haven’t written the RSS parser yet but I have the tree view and the Mozilla ActiveX control working well. I could have used the built in webbrowser (IE) component but then why would I want to do that.

I wanted to see if I could integrate with the wordpress API too to make blog posts so I turned to Xstandard (the lite version). Xstandard also have a .NET component that you can use. It is really neat and you can bet your house on the markup being valid.

Visual studio 2005 express is excellent and free too (as in beer). Also checkout SQL server 2005 express which I have used on a very beefy project already and it is ace – also free (as in beer).

Mod_Python

Since having a fairly new Dell machine donated to me by my Dad I have been feverishly using Ubuntu. I have Apache and mod_python running and have a nice little app running. Mod_python as a development platform is sweet as it is not as contstrained as TurboGears or Ruby on Rails. It is very hard to debug though.

So all in all I am getting some nice variety in my dev work, I find it can sometimes get stale if you’re doing the same thing day-in day-out, especially if it involves legacy asp sites. Is there anything you guys would recommend trying out as an antidote to work work while still being dev work (if you know what I mean). I do want to look at mono and PyGTK.