technical questions

[jessica]

hi Eric!

Thank you so much for all the work on romcenter!
It's really a DREAM rom manager and I'm planning to post all bugs I find here in order to improve the program.
The lastest version with tons of fixes made it my default rom manager now. I especially like the user friendly UI with colors to tell you exactly what's wrong with a file.

Am I allowed to ask some technical questions about romcenter's used technology?

- what UI framework is used?
- what SQL database is used?
- are there plans to move to .Net 5 or will .Net core will be used for the future versions? I ask this because .net core is in theory replaced by .net 5 according to microsoft
- are there plans to make it open source? I think some help from other developers could really add many features you don't have enough time for.
- is there a plugin development kit for C# planned?

Best regards
Jessica

[Wanderer]

Hello.

Wow, lots of questions. I'll answer what i can and leave the rest to Eric.

Am I allowed to ask some technical questions about romcenter's used technology?

Sure. Only ROM requests and pointers to ROM downloads is not allowed here. Everything else is welcomed.

- what UI framework is used?

.NET framework 4.0 / WPF.

- what SQL database is used?

AFAIK, Firebird.

- are there plans to move to .Net 5 or will .Net core will be used for the future versions? I ask this because .net core is in theory replaced by .net 5 according to microsoft

Don't know about that, however AFAICR, the main reason Eric used .NET 4.0 and not anything newer is that this was the only thing that could work under Linux at the time. Now, the situation with .NET 5 is not very mature yet and 6 promises to be more complete and feature-close to .NET 4.8, so i'm guessing Eric might think of upgrading it in the future but it's up to him to decide and announce anything related.

- are there plans to make it open source? I think some help from other developers could really add many features you don't have enough time for.

We've had such a discussion here in the past. Eric had decided to keep it personal for his reasons. Feel free to search around for the related posts.

- is there a plugin development kit for C# planned?

Good question. Eric?

[RomCenter]

I'm currently moving to .net 4.7.2 (rc 4.2). It compiles now, and I'm fixing breaking changes happening when upgrading all packets since .net 4.0...
Then I will fix some bugs (also in 4.1 branch) and release a 32b at 64b version for windows 10.
The main reason I have kept .net 4.0 is XP compatibility, but linux is a good reason. Maybe the new version will also work on wine...

Next plan is .net standard for romcenter core libraries. GUI will remain wpf, so no compatibility with macos or linux. But command line should work natively on these os.

About plugins, they are independant and keep working on rc 4.
I made them open source on github(https://github.com/ebolefeysot/RomcenterPlugins). There are Delphi (pascal) and c++ plugins. You can write c# as well.

Note that plugin will probably make problems with rc 64b. They have to be compiled in 64b to work. And maybe also be signed :/
Without speaking about linux and macos ?!?

[jessica]

Will software list support also be added in 4.2 or is this for much later?

[jessica]

MAybe .NET 5 is a better choice?
I have little experience with it but the goal is to be cross platform. I don't know about WPF which is used in romcenter.

[Wanderer]

I don't know about WPF which is used in romcenter.

WPF support in .NET 5.0 is Windows-only.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answer ... linux.html