A new version of WWWinamp is coming… I SWEAR!
21 January 2008Hello Everyone!
I’m currently working on the latest version of WWWinamp after taking another hiatus from the project in order to clear my head and work on some other fun things such as the previously mentioned XNA projects 
The next version of WWWinamp will be targeted for the .NET 3.5 Framework and you will need to have it installed on your machine in order to run WWWinamp. Most of the changes in this version are behind the scenes and will probably be transparent to you, the user. BUT, some visible changes in the upcoming version of WWWinamp 4.2 will be:
- Automatic Version Checking for new releases of WWWinamp
- Ability to enable or disable Automatic Version Checking
- Ability to enable or disable Windows Vista warning message
- Improved performance under load
I know, nothing earth shattering on the horizon. “Why is this?” you might as. Well, the honest reason is that I haven’t received any bug reports with issues that weren’t related to a misconfiguration or user error. This is a good thing! It means that WWWinamp is stable and there aren’t any horrible bugs that continue to nag users. The downside to this is that because WWWinamp is pretty feature rich as is, I’m running low on ideas that could be implemented.
An idea I’ve tossed about and am thinking about trying out is creating a WWWinamp .NET assembly for user within your own Windows or ASP.NET applications developed using the .NET framework. The assembly would handle the media library and searching of the library so you wouldn’t have to code your own database and file searching routines, as well as handling the unmanaged code required to interface with Winamp (if it’s running locally on the WWWinamp machine) or communicating via WCF to a remote instance of WWWinamp running the WCF daemon.
I think that between the WWWinamp Server and my proposed WWWinamp Assembly, that’d give both advanced and novice users full control over their setup.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve moved WWWinamp into Visual Studio 2008 with Team Foundation Server. Within the latest version of Visual Studio 2008 there is a set of code analysis tools which calculate such items as Code Maintainability and Cyclomatic Complexity. I ran it on WWWinamp and it scored the following:
Maintainability Index: 83 (out of 100)
Cyclomatic Complexity: 636
Depth of Inheritance: 7
Class Coupling: 151
Lines of Code: 1,829 (!!)
After over a year, I think WWWinamp has gotten better and continues to improve with every version!
Big thanks to everyone for their support and keep your eyes peeled here for the latest version of WWWinamp!
2 Responses to “A new version of WWWinamp is coming… I SWEAR!”
January 23rd, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Any chance you can add a few more feedback calls?
Specifically shuffle feedback and repeat feedback, as well as tag information (genre, playcount, star rating, etc) I would love to be able to display this information, as well as search for it.
January 27th, 2008 at 2:51 pm
Hey Seth!
I’ll have to see about interfacing with the Library. Technically it’s not part of Winamp itself and I’d need to figure out a way to access it via the IPC.
I might be able to hack the WinAmp Media Libary manually, but I’d have to see how it’s saved. I also should probably look at the new Winamp SDK that they released for 5.5, as it might have some useful tidbits.