Sokofan New Version Under Development

Hello,

Juan has kindly invited me to post something on his sokoban blog. He has always been an encouragement for me to persevere in the development of Sokofan and I am happy to oblige.

I am therefore pleased to announce here that I am working on the .NET (2.0) replacement of my program. You may wonder why the new version. Well, there are lots of reasons one of which is the adventure of learning a new language (C#) with a new and modern IDE (Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition). Another is to get rid of crappy code and try interesting and newly acquired design techniques like TDD, refactoring, design patterns, etc.

The final release version may not look exactly like on the screenshot here. It's mostly an empty shell at present. There are still lots to do.

The plan is to implement most of the features of Sokofan initially and release a first version as Soko Lite v1. After that however, I will try to add new features like move browser, database support, a level editor, open multiple levels in different tabs, a theme builder, etc. I said *try*. No promises. :-)

Note that Soko Lite will not support hexoban: I find it too much trouble. On the other hand, numbered sokoban (Sokomind Plus) will be kept and it is possible I will add a sliding sokoban variant (if it is not too much work!).

Please post encouragement and suggestions. I am doing things easy and I don't have a precise timetable so you will have to be patient!

Regards

Eric