Mini-Compressor

Spring has sprung in the Saturday MP basement!

We planted some seeds in the late winter, and look what’s sprung! Version 1.4 of Mini-Compressor! Get it while it’s fresh.

Here are some of the features we’re especially proud of:

• An intelligent error message when trying to compress a non-jpeg file
• The ability to pause while compressing images
• A window from the Start Menu that reminds users to right-click to use Mini-Compressor

All of Mini-Compressor’s fabulous features and how to use it are documented in the updated Mini-Guide.

“W” was the letter of the week in Darling Daughter’s class a few weeks ago.  You know what I wished?  That Mini-Compressor would compress the wascally weeds in our Behemoth Garden.  Right-click on behemoth weeds and voila… smaller weed no long takes over space where the strawberries are and I can dig it out easier.  Nice, right?

A while ago I got an e-mail from a customer that had just bought Mini-Compressor (which I think is the best image compression software in the world but I’m a bit biased) but was getting warning from Norton when he tried to install it.  The warning he was getting was Suspicious.Cloud.5.D.  This is a low level warning from Norton that a file is suspicious but could also be a false positive.  I quickly double checked that the website had not been compromised.  To be on the safe side I downloaded and scanned Mini-Compressor with both Windows Defender and Malwarebytes.  Neither reported any errors.

My notes on upgrading Mini-Compressor from .NET 3.5 to .NET 4.0 (Visual Studio 2008 to 2010) and also upgrading NUnit and NAnt.

1. Run the automated VS 2010 upgrade process.  Appears that there are no error but appearances can be deceiving.

2. Try a compile and get errors about not being about to find NUnit.  This makes sense as I upgraded NUnit on the build machine and the path had changed.  One day I should just reference the dll via a lib folder.  Update the NUnit reference and all the errors go away but…

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My latest task has been getting Mini-Compressor to work on Windows 7.  In the end no code changes are actually required to get Mini-Compressor working on Windows 7 but the installer required a bit of work.  The amount of work was actually minimal but it turned into a big pain because I didn’t document the installer and had to relearn a couple key points.  To prevent this from happening again I thought I’d better take some notes on the problems I encountered and share them with you dear reader.  That way you won’t make the same mistakes I made twice.