CoolMon 2 : Running on Windows 10
Running CoolMon 2 on Windows 10
I decided to bring back CoolMon2 because I wanted to add CoolMon2 to my coding portfolio. I have coded a lot of things over the past couple of decades, but nothing more extensive (and important) than CoolMon2. So building my coding portfolio absolutely had to include CoolMon2, if I didn't include that I should find another line of work.
It has taken me months of work to get off the ground. I have had to rebuild the website, which might not exactly sound like a biggie but I've never been a big website creator. The original site was created by a friend (Svend Tofte) of mine and I was happy I didn't have to do it. He would no doubt be appaled by my recreation as I've complete bypassed his smart SQL approach. But that is well beyond my skills, so instead I'm recreating the whole thing in a hardcoding style. Meaning every page you see now is build by hand.
Interestingly enough recreating the website proved to be the thing that took the least amount of time. After the site, I had to run through all the CoolMon 2 program components to update them to ensure they would run on Windows 10. That was a whole different story entirely. The Coolmon2 core was pretty easy, as I decided that had to run as is. So that required only a single minor update, all in all it took less than 20 min to get up and running.
People familiar with CoolMon2 might ask but what of the Plugin Manager, Outlaw and the auto updater? Well the plugin manager was fairly simple core function core, so it did only require that I add the core to tell windows that the program be run with admin rights. Coding it only took another twenty minutes, but that was after spending hours online figuring out how to do that. I will split the Auto updater and the OutlawEd into their own paragraph, as they really require it.
I feel like starting with the Auto updater. That thing was a bitch to get back online. Getting an installer online probably wouldn't have taken a huge amount of time, neither would an autoupdater. But since the autoupdater did both it was a whole different story entirely. Updating was fairly simple to get back online, there was one issue that I had to spend a couple of days to fix. The installer had two, both of which were derived from the program being coded with the expection that the online location was always online. With the old Coolmon.org site not running, almost everything in the program failed. So getting that back online required that I added in failsafe coding. Which really took a while. And when I got to the installer I had to do the same and then I had to deal with the outdated way of updating plugins. It took ages to fix, but mostly dealing with it was coding it to deal with a new site.
The OutlawEd had proven a different challenge entirely. It should be no secret that OutlawEd has always been a dear child of mine. People that have used CM2 long enough will know that I've coded two editors prior to OutlawEd. Both of which were completely crap, not because I didn't know how to write code, but because my design skills were a bit lacking. Christopher "blert" Dilts (Rest in peace) must have thought the same, one day he told me he had something I should probably take a look at. Then he sended me a mock up program of an editor design, and asked me what I thought of it, that was OutlawEd. I was so taken by his design idea that I spend three months making his mockup into a reality. As such I still feel it is the best thing I've ever made in terms of programming. Making that thing Win10 compatible has been a big issue for me. Without that Editor there is no CoolMon in my opinion. But that program has proved the biggest challenge. It has been months going from several errors upon launch, to something that runs without issues.
While it has been months getting OutlawEd up an running there are sadly some items that I haven't been able to deal with. Mostly the way it handles desktop wallpapers. Since we coded coolmon over a decade ago, Microsoft has added three new options for showing wallpapers (fit, fill & span). Fit is what I use on my own computer and that was fairly simple to sort, meaning it only took me two days to figureout how to make outlawed function with that setting. Fill & Span on the other hand is a different story. I don't recall which is which, but one of them I was unable to work out how it perfected its calculation in terms of dealing with the wallpaper, and the other seemed like it used face recognition to determine the center of the image. So unfortunately I have to say both options are not supported by the editor. If you can ignore the wallpaper option OutlawEd still works, but if you align you config to the wallpaper shown it will not work.
I want to thank all the people involved with making CoolMon 2 a reality.
Thank you
Xander Blackstar (Christian Aaangel)
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