Dev story of one .NET utility

Once upon a time in the cold winter time…

Well, in fact, the story began around the month of August. I then worked as a developer in one large outsourcing company, in a project of one more American company. It was a matter of the next release, when testers suddenly discovered that the toolbox supplied separately from a large application was somewhat outdated and did not work. The task of updating the components of this toolkit decided to me.

Actually, the toolkit was built from some set of .NET assemblies from a shared folder into which all application components were thrown. The current version took from there not everything that was needed.

For some time, reading the manual search for the assemblies needed for one or another component of the toolkit, I was tired and decided to google the tools to automate and speed up this process. To my surprise, there was not a single useful application for solving this problem.
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Then I decided that instead of continuing this routine manual labor, it is better to spend time writing my own utility, which will quickly figure out what is missing now for launching a specific component.

For half a day, I threw in the first version, which already allowed me to quickly calculate what the attempt to launch the component would fall on now. Having a little more combed in the UI, I completed the work on the utility.

Op-la, and one tool has become more. A little later, quite a lot of free time began to appear, and, on the one hand, in order not to lose development skills, passively waiting for new “challenges”, and on the other hand, in order to gain experience of a full cycle when creating an application, I decided to finish the utility to the state of the product.

The name was born pretty quickly, and a list of tasks to be solved was drawn: error logging, graceful failure, licensing, registration in any payment gateway, website creation with the possibility of leaving questions and suggestions on functionality on it, and all the little things. It was all very interesting to do this, although the process was delayed. In mid-December, version 1.0 was ready for release. The product itself worked, the engine that issued the trial and full licenses worked (on a signal from payment gateway).


Despite the fact that in a good way it would be necessary to make a product of some kind of PR (probably buy a little Google AdWords or other contextual advertising), only a small announcement was made on Reddit in mid-February, which gave several downloads in a couple of weeks. To my surprise, a month later, a translation of our product description showed up on windowsdeveloper.de, which brought several more downloads.

The most interesting thing here is that despite the number of downloads, as measured by a couple of tens, the launch of the product with a trial license was carried out only twice. And the second - just after the publication on the German site. At first, we attributed this to the fact that Chrome considered the archive with the application “possibly dangerous” and scared potential users. But when we fulfilled all the requirements of Google, and Chrome stopped issuing such a warning, the picture has not changed: there are downloads, but there are no trial licenses issued.

Commercial benefit at the moment is slightly less than not at all, but the development experience gained from zero to the state of “can be bought” is very good. In particular, a couple of constructive comments were received on Reddit, one of which contained a proposal for expanding the functionality. Well, the morning newsletter with the download counter sometimes raises the mood.