UnJumble 3.0 On The Horizon
I replied about 4 months ago regarding an update to Unjumble posing several issues that I wanted to fix in a newer version. Well since getting the Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite edition from my MVP award, I began twiddling with it again in order to fix a lot of those issues, and I am here to say that most of them are resolved and a new 3.0 version will be released soon.
One of the major changes of the program is switching from the .NET 1.1 Framework to the 2.0 Framework that Visual Studio 2005 uses. This framework has several improved and streamlined functions that help boost the overall performance of the cpu intensive recursive algorithms that the Anagram function uses. What does this mean? A test of an anagram in the old UnJumble program versus the new one showed an increase in speed of 400 percent! That means something that used to take 1 minute in the old program now only takes 15 seconds. This is also including an updated function that now retains the word spacing in the anagram results, so you can actually read the return values easy instead of trying to decipher the spaces yourself, while retaining the same speed increase.
Once more important improvement is the correct use of threading. While doing a lengthy anagram solver routine, you now have a progress form that updates every second that shows the total number of matches found as well as total passes that the program has done, so there are no form freeze-ups. You can also cancel out of the anagram and have the results that were found already displayed in the results box.
There are further improvements that comes along with using the 2.0 framework, like added support for visual styles, and a better look to the menus, forms, and controls.
One last feature that I am wanting to implement (which is why it is not being released yet) is some sort of Word List editor. I want the user to have the ability to add a list of words to the current list by some sort of import, as well as giving them the option of editing current words, by adding or removing them. So stay tuned in the next week or two to see if its ready :)