Welcome to my tiny corner of the Web. This site contains all the Freeware software I have developed over the past 15 or so years. Some of it was only released on CIX, others bits were uploaded to FTP servers like SIMTEL, and the rest hasn't seen the light of day, because I never got it to a releasable state!

Most of the stuff here is ancient and probably of no interest to you, but you never know what people find useful, hence the reason why I have included some trivial DOS programs and even my unfinished projects. It is my attempt to give something back to the development community.

Most of the 32-bit applications were developed and tested under Windows 9x and 2000 and the underlying framework started out on Windows 3.x. My aim has always been to try and keep as much compatibility with the various 32-bit OS's as possible. Nearly all the applications use the older technique of storing their settings and data in files in the application folder, a model which does not work well with Windows XP (Vista has a workaround). Consequently if you are not running as an Administrator (and you should try not to) you will need to install it to a folder other than "Program Files". I will be correcting the applications over time to detect the Windows version and behave accordingly.

Binaries are available for virtually everything and the more recent releases come with a simple setup program I wrote. The native applications are all linked statically and use my own framework so there are no additional dependencies like the VB, MFC or .NET runtimes. The only occasional dependency is on the common controls DLL (COMCTL32.DLL) of which you need at least v4.71 which shipped with IE 4.

All the Win32 applications are available as both a Release build and a Debug build. You should always follow the Binary link and download the release build, the debug build is only of use if you experience a problem and you want to help me fix it.

The Java applets are all JDK 1.1 based and should run on any JVM.

The source code is available for everything, so if you want to tinker or fix a bug then you can. Alternatively if you want to use some of the classes in your own code, then you can do that as well, but you should be aware that I do not consider this production level code. The C++ framework classes are my own and have a long heritage which predates templates (as far as Visual C++ support goes), so you will find non-STL style containers and other re-inventions of the wheel rather than use of say the Boost libraries. This is because of a number of reasons - compiler support, licensing issues, paradigm shifts and the simple fact that a good way to learn is to do-it-yourself. That said, I intend to refactor as much as possible with STL equivalents as and when I can.

The archives include projects and workspaces for Visual C++ 7.1 only. However the code is targeted for Win95 and upwards and should still compile on Visual C++ 6.x. The Java stuff comes with a Visual J++ workspace.

None of the code here is tied to any particular sort of licence. If you do find something of interest either by using one of the apps or using some of the source in one of your own apps, I would be grateful if you could drop me a line to let me know. Also, please let me know if you upload something to another site as I can then notify them of new releases.

I hope you're not looking for one, because it doesn't exist. All the code on this site is supplied without any guarantees whatsoever. If I've done a decent job you shouldn't experience any problems, but I have to cover my back and warn you that only get what you pay for :-)

Most of this software could not have been written without the time and resources of others, and so here is a big thank you to the people who have contributed to my efforts...

Ian Masters and Steve Sorrell with whom I developed the various NetWare utilities.

Mark Woolcott for a lot of technical assistance whilst writing the NetDDE Bridge and being my main beta tester on UT Cache Manager.

Graham Corless for his feedback and ideas for F.C. Manager.

Rusty Biggs for testing the localisation fixes to Task Tracker.

I am happy to receive any feedback you have, whether it be bug reports, bug fixes or suggestions for new features. My public email account is pretty overloaded with spam these days, so apologies up front if I don't reply - it probably means your email got filtered out, not that I'm ignoring you...

My email address is gort@cix.co.uk.

Chris Oldwood