I’ve compiled a list of CHM readers for windows. It’s a surprisingly long list.
We are pleased to announce 1.9 release of SumatraPDF, a small, fast, free PDF, CHM, DjVu, XPS, CBZ and CBR reader for Windows.
The most significant addition in this release is support for CHM documents. Sumatra is slowly getting support for more and more document formats.
Robert Prouse contributed support for touch gestures (available on Windows 7 or later, if you have the right hardware i.e. touch-enabled screen).
Audio and video files linked from PDF documents are now opened in an external media player.
We’ve also improved support for PDF transparency groups.
This blog is hosted on App Engine. At first it looked that recent App Engine price hike will push my blog from free tier to a paid one.
The increase would come only because of change from charging per cpu hours to charging for instance hours.
However, after making a small change in Application Settings to set Max Idle Instances to 1, I’m back in free tier. I haven’t noticed a performance degradation.
In conclusion, App Engine still seems like a good choice for hosting small to medium sized websites for free.
Volante is a small, fast, object-oriented, embeddable database designed for seamless integration with C# (and other .NET languages). Today I’ve made a first public release.
Almost every program needs to persist some data. There are many ways to do that: serialize data as XML or JSON, use SQLite etc.
I’ve been recently writing desktop .NET applications in C# and existing (free) options didn’t meet my needs well.
The closest best solution is SQLite, but it doesn’t integrate with C# well: you have to convert your object to/from SQL tables.
If I was the world’s toughest programmer I would write an object-oriented database engine from scratch and it would be designed from the beginning for seamless integration with .NET framework.
Thankfully, I didn’t have to do that. What I needed already existed in the form of Perst project.
There was one wrinkle: while early versions of Perst were under BSD license, with version 2.50 the code was acquired by a company McObject and is now distributed under GPL and those who can’t use GPL can purchase commercial license from McObject.
Not so great for one person who doesn’t yet make money from his software.
I decided to adopt the Perst code base. I picked the latest 2.49 version that was still licensed under BSD (copyright cannot be change retroactively) and I’ve spent the last couple of months writing comprehensive documentation, writing tests, fixing bugs discovered by tests, modernizing the code base.
Today I’ve reached a point where I’m comfortable releasing this code publicly as version 0.9.
I’ve retained the BSD license of early Perst versions so the code is free to use in both open-source and commercial projects.
Volante database serves the same niche as SQLite: an embedded database engine for your desktop C# applications. Like with SQLite, the database is in a single file.
There are significant differences from SQLite.
.NET is an object-oriented framework. Volante is an object-oriented database to offer the best integration with .NET. Volante uses B-Trees to implement indexes, which allows quickly finding objects with desired properties.
Volante is extremely small: Volante.dll is only 180 KB.
I distribute Volante.dll for Microsoft’s .NET (works in .NET 2.0 and later) but it can also be compiled from sources and used under Mono.
I was dogfooding Volante from day one in my three .NET applications and it’s been performing great.
I hope you’ll find it useful too.
We are pleased to announce 1.8 release of SumatraPDF, a small, fast, free PDF, DjVu, XPS, CBZ and CBR reader for Windows.
This is a smallish release.
We improved support for PDF form text fields.
We did speed up handling of some types of djvu files.
We’ve made a bunch of minor improvements and bug fixes.