Where is Traveller Tracker?

 I'll admit that I've not worked on this in far too long. Part of it is simply developer fatigue: work has picked up for me as we're in the process of converting systems, and as I work from home I don't want to spend even more time at the same place I work even if it is fun. Though I do spend evenings here when we game over Skype. And I work on these posts there as well.

Plus, the latest version I was working on uses .Net Core. It has been a race to keep up with that process as it seems every few weeks there is yet another update to .Net Core, but it looks like they actually have a publish option that can give the end user just an .exe file. So I may change the target to that version and see if we can get a basic .exe out there for anyone who even cares.

But in doing so, I am thinking I may change directions. Again, yes. Start with the actual cargo generator part. And this could even be a pure console thing, and start really small. A simple loop where the user enters the UWP and we generate the cargos. This would be the core of what the tracker was in my eyes: a thing to generate cargos. The backend would be modular so we could plug that into a GUI version later. And yes, Microsoft is also changing the GUI. I was using XAML which, though cumbersome, I think has a lot of power behind it. I think that will drive their new Windows GUI framework idea, but who knows. It is getting as bad as javascript frameworks: which one do we use this week?

Anyway, it has not been forgotten. But I also realize that there are maybe a dozen people who would use it, so it is not something anyone is actually clamoring for, not even me! The group I am with now does not want to play a trading game. So far I've had a Scout going to retrieve his Scout ship along with a scientist in his lab ship; a "let's start with you were all kidnapped and wake up on a sinking ship coming out of cold berth and good luck surviving on this planet"; and a "there is something out there we'd like you to investigate" scenarios. These were all what the SOLO Traveller rules would consider the Traveller campaign: living from job to job. Though there has been a big of cargo speculation but more for personal  rather than filling the ship cargo bay sort of thing.

I just want to keep at least a little up to date with C# and the .Net ecosphere. 

So, if I start with a console style program to use the cargo library, it would be be something like:

Enter the UWP here: A123456-7

and then it would take that, figure out the trade codes, generate the cargos that are available. Need to think about which version, and I am really thinking about getting back to having plain text files (maybe JSON) for the various lists and things rather than SQLite. But who knows - I may just continue on with what I've got :)

Sadly the Traveller Ruby project I said I'd help with I never actually helped with, and the developer is dropping it as well to get back to python development. Sad because I am finally making some progress with Rails and Ruby, learning the application we use at my work. I would have been able to actually start helping! I've even had a few small releases for work, and cleaned up some older code that did not reflect some of the newer things. As I've told them when I started picking up the Filemaker side of things, it is like pointillism: eventually there are enough dots to make an actual picture. Took me less time with the Filemaker side as that was all I did for 8 hours a day for the most part. Ruby/Rails I have now established an hour a day when I do "open programming": start a meeting on Teams, share my screen, and start working with the application. Mostly getting told what to do but at least now I know where to look for some of the things. And I can monkey-code: find a similar bit of code & use that. There is an image slowly forming finally, though I cannot say I like a lot of Rails conventions. Coming from a history of strict type checking and compiled code to the more loosely defined Ruby environment is sometimes jarring. Especially with Rails and how it "helps" you. Too many assumptions built into the framework for me. But I'm just an old, grumpy developer, and get off my lawn!