Home > About AWZhome > The project

AWZhome is nothing else than a site to present my software projects. In the past it also used to be a collection of ressources for other developers (especially about Microsoft Visual Basic). Besides I use it to play around with my ideas in web development and web design.

Some time ago AWZhome used to be a "real" information resource for developers. Maybe it will be something like that again, but at the moment I don't have enough time to achieve this. As a historical relict the Visual Basic articles are still online.

History

The project has started in November 2000 as an experiment. Resulting from my strong interest in the development system Microsoft Visual Basic in these days I began writing articles to support other developers. Soon the new sub-project "WCGbook" (today "awzMB") started, a guestbook and weblog system that was the base for the AWZhome Guestbook Service (still online at the german site).

The site's design was still very experimental and had to been reworked in July 2001. This was the beginning of AWZhome's "heyday". In the following two years almost 100 VB articles have been published, most of them also appeared in the german web magazine "VB-Pro". Every 2-4 weeks the AWZhome newsletter was sent around. The project "Board Reader" (an offline reader for web-based forums) was started but had to be stopped short time later. Instead in 2003 I began to develop a VB-based IRC client named "awzIRC". The homepage offered information about Visual Basic, webserver configuration and PHP development.

The third version of AWZhome came online in February 2004. This was the graphically most complex design up to now. Some areas of the old homepage were removed, especially the internet development section. Everything concentrated on the guestbook service and the IRC client. Meanwhile I began to convert the originally VB-based IRC client to a .NET application. The result has never become public, but it has born a new idea of the component-oriented application framework NQ. There will be some more information about that project in future. In August 2005 the guestbook script "WCGbook" got a revival after three years of development freeze. It was renamed to "awzMB" and rewritten in big parts. However all other sections of AWZhome increasingly withered away due to lack of time.

After some hesitancy I began to carry out another plan at the end of 2006: A completely new AWZhome built up on a XML dialect and a corresponding parser. The new object-oriented PHP5 engine was able to abstract the content from design and HTML and so to make the site very easy to update. The design was completely defined using modern XHTML and CSS technology. And a very important feature was added: The support of multiple languages with translation switching on every page.

These modifications leaded to the AWZhome as you see it now. The relaunch has also brought some more reduction in content: The Visual Basic section, the votes and the newsletter have been removed or left online on the old homepage (which is still available).