winprint 2.0

Ever since I started programming on an Apple ][+ in 1981, I’ve had a thing for printing. My earliest apps focused on printing and my first money-making endeavor was “Tapes”, which printed casette tape ‘J-cards’ for all the mix-tapes of great ’80s music we made for the girls. Whenever I learned a new programming language or OS, the first app I’d write was Spit, an app for printing my source code all pretty (it “spits” source code out of a printer). Over the years, I wrote Spit for AppleDOS (Apple BASIC), UCSD-Pascal, CP/M (Turbo Pascal), DOS (8086 assembly and C), VAX/VMS (Pascal and FORTRAN-77), and Mac (Pascal).

In 1988, as a college junior at the University of Arizona (Go Cats!), I decided Windows was going to win over OS/2 and I was going to work for Microsoft. I bought Charles Petzold’s Programming Windows and conned my dad into buying me a copy of the Windows 2.0 SDK (which was like $300 back then!). On my amazeballs ALR 386/33 PC I set about becoming a Windows programmer. The first useful) app I wrote was WinSpit. In a rare moment of adulting, I renamed the app WinPrint and listed it on CompuServe as shareware ($25). For over ten years I received $25 checks the mail from folks all over the world. Even better, WinPrint demonstrated to Microsoft I could actually, really write code. So they hired me.

Several times in the early 1990s I started writing WinPrint 2.0. Each time I had the basics working and realized three things: 1) Nobody cares about printing source code, 3) I’d over-engineered things, and 2) the technology I choose was already dated (e.g. MFC). Two of those abandoned efforts can be found in my GitHub archive here (1992) and here (1994).

Last year (2019) I got a wild-hair to write some code as a way of blowing off steam, and proving to myself I was still cool. It all started with Microsoft releasing the Cascadia Code font. I have a thing for fixed-pitch fonts. It’s weird. Anyway, I installed the font in Terminal and VScode but just looking at stuff didn’t satisfy me. I needed to use the font in anger! So I fixed some long-standing issues in MCE Controller (another app I wrote that nobody uses anymore).

This all led to me re-discovering my old WinPrint 2.0 source code. Reminiscing on how much time I wasted back then, and how effective it was as a procrastination tool, I just had to try again. So I did. And, just to be clear, here’s what I did:

1) I wrote a printing app in 2019-2020. Nobody prints these days. I don’t even print anymore.

2) I over-engineered it. It has a full GUI with print preview. Headers and Footers with Macros. A full command-line interface. It can syntax-highlight over 200 different programming languages. It’s cross-platform. It’s written in C# using the very latest .NET Core. It uses NodeJS and C++ under the covers. And more.

3) I used .NET and C#. Ok, this part I can defend (assuming you get past point #1 and #2): First, I know C# well and it is awesome. Second, no other modern language/app-framework can even SPELL “print”. I tried both Electron and Flutter and both suck when it comes to printing.

So, there you are: I present to you winprint 2.0 (alpha).