Jeroens blog

Two months back I dug up the project files of BN+ Converter Pro, a .Net application I created when I was in secondary school, and did some high level refactoring to optimize it for .Net 4.0 and version 3 of my .Net class library. This was soon after I released a similar update for BN+ Brute Force Hash Attacker, another of my old .Net apps. On top of the changes I made, and a very few new features I’ve added, the code is now publicly available under the terms of the GNU General Public License v3 or later on SourceForge. I waited with releasing this since I wanted the app to be compiled with the stable release of .Net framework, which was released a while back now.

Changes in this release

* Use of BN+ Library 3.0.1
* Use of native components of .Net framework 4.0
* Implemented a new update platform
* Refactored namespaces and moved around a bunch of files
* Redesigned the about interface
* Redesigned the help menu
* Moved documentation to a wiki page
* Added ROT 5, ROT 13, ROT 18 and ROT 48 codecs
* Made the source code available under the GPL on SourceForge

Downloads

• Setup file (zip, windows installer, includes update platform)
• Executables tarball (latest version of the executables, straight from the SVN repo)
• SVN repostory

Links

• Project home
• Documentation

This is a screen shot of the previous version. This part of the interface is pretty much unchanged.

This screenshot shows the redesigned about interface.

the terms of the GNU General Public License

I finally finished the last details on BN+ Converter Pro after some extensive testing, and released the new 1.0.6 version.

BN+ Converter Pro 1.0.6

Like I wrote before, quite some features got postponed to future versions, but still a lot of new functionality has been implemented. Here you have a copy from the release notes:

New features

* Multi language functionality: You can now view the main interface in both English, Dutch, German and leet. The application will automatically detect your computer language and use it at start-up. You can disable the auto detect option via the options menu, and then choose the start-up language.

* Advanced cryptography options: Via the options menu you can change the DES and TrippleDES keys and initialization vectors, and configure the AES (Rijndael) salt, password phrase, initialization vector and iterations.

* An automated update platform: The application will automatically check for updates when an internet connection is present. When there is an update, the application will show you some information about it and provide you with the option to download and install it. You can also manually check for updates via menu -> Help -> Check for updates.

* Bug report creator: When you find a bug (typo, wrong behaviour, application crash, ect…), you can now easily report it via the build in bug report creator. You can find it in the menu, under Help: Report a bug…

* Password protection: This feature enables you to protect the application, and the settings (like RSA keys) stored in it, from other people. You can turn it on via the options, in the section utilities.

Fixed bugs

* Hashing of an empty string (This caused the application to crash in v1.0.4, and was therefore disabled in v1.0.5, but now fixed and re-enabled)

* Auto saving of text (Even when enabled in the options, this would not be done in the previous version)

Further development

These are features that are on the roadmap for future versions of BN+ Converter Pro. Every feature might or might not be implemented, varying on the demand.

* Create a plug-in system for BN+ Brute Force Hash Attacker and other relevant applications

* Add build-in help contents

* Recode the codec system to work text file based (so users can create their own codec’s and share them)

* Redesign the options menu and add live validation to it

I probably won’t work on this application for a while, and won’t release a new version before the end of 2009. The first thing I’ll do with it probably is handling the multithreading issues, as anice exercise.

Like before, the application is downloadable in 3 formats: setup, direct run and u3. I’ve also updated the legacy package (containing the old releases) and will do some effort to update the documentation soon.

If you have any suggestions please send them over.