i haven't written about mozip.NET, my pet software project, in quite a while, even when i had what to write about. mozip.NET is a small program i wrote to help with the localization of SeaMonkey, the community continuation of Mozilla Suite. mozip.NET allows localizers build a localized installer of SeaMonkey for windows, without compiling the whole thing.

Version 2.0 is based on version 2.0 of the .NET Framework, and utilizes some of it's new controls. this makes it look very nice, with 3D toolbar and an Office 2003 style menus. in addition, it gives you an opportunity to give a file you extract from the installer a new name, if a file by the same name already exists at the target folder. it also remembers your last extract folder between sessions, and the last window size (this last feature actually gave me some trouble, and was eventually introduced in a minor update, i numbered 2.0.1). other than that, there are the features already present in previous versions, of adding files, testing the integrity, and deleting files.

If you find this interesting, you can download it here.

I would have attached an image here, but for some reason Yahoo! insists on jpeg images. I guess you'll have to download it to see it then…

at first, i tought to use the existing mozip as a library, and call the relevant functions from the C# code. but since mozip is so command-line oriented, i reached a conclusion this won't be possible without serious modifications to the original code, that will in effect make it useless for the original mozip. so i decided to port mozip to C# entirely, and call all the Win32 API it uses from the C# code. this isn't so trivial, since the Win32 API is in C, but C# has a special syntax for accomplishing that, and that worked out nicely. i was even able to pass a C# function to the API C function to run.

so far i wrote the part that opens the installer and displays the moduls in it. now i have to clear the bugs from it so it actually works

while at it i found some problems in the original code, such as un-released memory, unused variables, what seems like insufficient memory allocation, one function that is never called from anywhere else, and terrible indentation. i'll sum this up and send it to piaip, the mozip creator.

mozip is a small command line utility written by Hung-Te Lin. it is used by Mozilla Suite localizers to create localized installers for Windows, because it can add and remove packages from the install program.

in the coming weeks, i plan to build a GUI version of it, so we won't need to open a dos box in order to use it. as a first step, i compiled its source with the zlib source, with no particular problems. i don't know how to create a UI for windows using the Windows API or MFC, but i do know C#, which is quite easy. since C# can use libraries compiled in C or C++, this seems like the obvious option.