 Antair Chinchilla 1.4 Postmortem and full source code July 2006 Download the Antair Chinchilla 1.4 source code Chinchilla was originally released to the public in November of 2005. It was Antair's first product. What follows is the postmortem for the project. I am also releasing the full source code to Chinchilla 1.4. You can modify the code in any way you see fit, use parts of it in your own projects or simply compile it and use Chinchilla for what it was intended. You may not, however, sell the code, or sell a compiled build of Chinchilla. The source code has been slightly modified for this release. In particular, the unit test source code has been commented out, and the demo licensing and registration logic has been removed. I also did not include the Visual Studio project or solution files - only the source code itself. If you have any questions regarding Chinchilla, the source code, or the postmortem, please feel free to contact me.  What is Chinchilla? Chinchilla generates easy-to-understand, flexible diagrams showing the relationship of all the classes in a set of .NET assemblies. You do not need the source code to these assemblies. Chinchilla uses reflection to extract class information directly from the .DLL and .EXE files of your choice. Why a chinchilla? Because they're cute, they're cuddly, and they always make a good impression. Why did you write Chinchilla? In part because I was fascinated by .NET reflection at the time, and wanted to take up a project that would let me explore the technology in some depth. And in part because Antair needed a product, and I knew that I could pull something like this together in a short amount of time in order to 'test the waters', so to speak. How long did it take to write Chinchilla? About a month. I was working for a Wall Street firm at the time (still do), and was only able to put in about two hours or so a week on Chinchilla. Overall, I spent about 10-12 hours on the project to get to version 1.0. Updates and revisions leading to version 1.4 took another few hours (and another few weeks). Was Chinchilla successful as a product for Antair? Not at all. It wasn't expected to be. Chinchilla was intended to be a lead product upon which I would be able to set up a proper framework for developing and selling future Antair products - things like a proper website, marketting leads, and a payment processor. From that perspective, it achieved its goals. But no market research went into this before development, and advertising was not aggressive. So was it worth it? Absolutely! Antair now has a proper foundation upon which Printer Friendly was released. I was also able to make contacts in the world of folks running small software companies like Antair, and that in itself is a priceless resource. Any plans to release the source code for other Antair products? I plan to release the source code to Printer Friendly when it runs its course. This will be when I am either no longer interested in developing and supporting it, or when other Antair products prove to be more valuable to the business. Copyright © Andrey Butov |