Welcome to Rick Strahl's West Wind Technologies site. We build and sell software and tools, provide mentoring, training and software consulting services.

On this site you can find links to our various products and services, Rick's development weblog, an extensive archive of Rick's white papers and articles, and a support message board to have developer discussions.

Markdown Monster Markdown Editor and Weblog Publisher
Version 3.2 - January 24th, 2024
Markdown Monster is an easy-to-use and extensible Markdown Editor, Viewer and Weblog Publishing tool for Windows. It supports syntax highlighted Markdown editing, live HTML Preview, inline-spellchecking, many image embedding options, an AI image generator and gentle, optional toolbar support for embedding links, images and screen captures for user- friendly intuitive editing workflow. Easily publish your work as PDF or HTML files, or publish to any WordPress or MetaWeblog API compatible Weblog and manage your posts from Markdown Monster. There are many built-in convenience features like table editing, file browser, Git integration, integration with many shell operations and much more...
Go ahead, feed your Markdown to the Monster!
West Wind WebSurge Http Request and Load Tester
Version 2.3 - September 5th, 2023
WebSurge makes it quick and easy to create, test and save HTTP requests and replay them back either individually for development URL testing, or under load for Web application load testing. You can capture all types of Http content including HTML and asset requests, or more commonly for REST or SOAP services. WebSurge's workflow is optimized to make it easy to create new requests, test them quickly and then store and share them for later playback or testing. You can be up and running load tests in a few minutes. We include an Http Request recorder that lets you capture Http sessions quickly, and you can easily modify the captured requests if necessary. With a couple of clicks you're then ready to test either individual requests or all requests of them under load. The request viewer lets you see individual request and response traces in an easily readable and optionally result formatted display. Load tests produce simple understandable stats, that make it easy to capture and compare results between runs. Check out WebSurge and get results quickly.
West Wind Web Connection 7.0
Version 7.40 - February 20th, 2024
Create Web applications with Visual FoxPro and take advantage of a proven Web framework using the FoxPro environment you already know. Develop and test your code inside of the VFP IDE against live Web requests. Web Connection provides a core Web interface engine, and several high level frameworks for developing just about any kind of Web application you can imagine. Create server driven HTML with MVC style scripting development or the rich control based Web Control Framework, or use raw code to create low level services or data driven HTML interfaces, on top of Web Connection's core framework. You can also easily build JSON REST services to act as a front end to rich JavaScript or Mobile applications We provide HTML templates for all styles of development to make your work look good out of the box.
West Wind Html Help Builder 5.0
Version 5.38 - January 24th, 2024
Need to build online or offline documentation? Help Builder is a one stop solution for creating end-user and developer documentation. Create documentation for application or developer docs, FAQs, snippet repositories, knowledge bases, Help Desk references or a personal, organized storage for notes and other content. Using Help Builder's low friction interface to create content using the popular Markdown format, with easy tools to embed images from the clipboard, files or links, easy topic crosslinking and much more. A live preview keeps your text and the rendered output synced so you can always see what your output looks like. Help Builder generates a professional, mobile capable Web static Web site, or you can produce a CHM Help file or PDF or Word documents. For developers, Help Builder can import class and database documentation from .NET types, SQL Server databases, FoxPro code, Web Service definitions and data and COM objects. Documentation doesn't have to be a chore - let Help Builder help!
West Wind Internet and Client Tools for Visual FoxPro
Version 7.33 - June 12th, 2023
West Wind Client Tools is a suite of utility classes that provide Internet functionality including SMTP & full featured HTTP Web access, FTP, SFTP and low level TCP/IP access to your Foxpro applications. Utility classes include object based data access to SQL Server and Web Data, a light-weight business object framework, a powerful .NET Interop helper component, JSON and XML serializers, several configuration management classes and a rich library of utility and API functions useful in everyday Visual FoxPro development.
User Security Manager for Web Connection
Version 1.10 - May 13th, 2020
Need to add a full authentication system to your Web Connection application? User Security Manager for Web Connection is a drop in interface to provide user authentication, profile management, account validation, password recovery, a user menu widget and an administrative user management interface. The library is a drop in wwProcess class, along with a set of page templates that can be customized to your application's UI and feature set.
Web Service Proxy Generator for Visual FoxPro
Version 1.70 - December 7th, 2020
Need to call SOAP Web Services with Visual FoxPro? This tool makes it quick and easy to call SOAP 1.x Web Services. The tool creates a FoxPro Proxy via a .NET bridge interface to provide a reliable service interface. It automates the .NET service client and FoxPro Proxy class generation that you can just call from FoxPro with a few lines of code.
West Wind Web Monitor
Version 3.60 - April 26th, 2023
Web Monitor can help you monitor your Web sites or any URL for failures or changes, and notify you when the URL fails or changes. Get notified on failures via email, or execute a URL or a local application in response to a failure. Why use expensive online services, when you can run your own, easy to use solution using Web Monitor in-house for a fraction of the cost?
West Wind Globalization for .NET
Version 2.0 - June 23rd, 2015
This library provides a database driven ASP.NET Resource Provider and .NET Resource Manager for localizing resources via a SQL database. We support Sql Server, MySql and SqLite out of the box and others can be easily added. Use either the provided Web based interactive resource editor, .NET code using our Localization data manager class, or simply manipulate data directly in the database to enter and update resources. The Web interface can import and export resources to and from RESX resources, so you can easily get your existing resources into the tools, edit and then when ready to deploy export back to RESX. Alternately simply run with resources directly out of the database.
Technical Support
Got stuck in your project and need a helping hand to get unstuck? We can help with technical and code support for issues large and small. We specialize in all aspects of Web development and Web architecture on the Microsoft platform and JavScript clients. We can also help with Windows and IIS Server issues, and of course anything related to .NET. We also still support FoxPro clients using our Web Connection framework and those working with and integrating with Web Services.
Mentoring and Project Bootstrapping
Sometimes you just need a hand, to get your project started or to understand how to integrate with a particular technology. We can provide one on one mentoring and pair programming to help you grok technology more quickly, or to simply get a lift from peer reviewing the work you've already done. And if necessary we can get you started with new technology by implementing skeleton frameworks or new base projects that you can build on top of.
Training
Have a team of developers and need to get them up to speed on the latest technology? We can provide remote or onsite training for your developers in most aspects of .NET, Web and client side JavaScript development. We also partner with CODE Training for additional areas that are outside of our area of expertise.
Full Service Consulting Services
West Wind Technologies is a small shop, but if your consulting needs call for a bigger team of developers to staff your project, we are partnering with Code Consulting to provide full service consulting and developer staffing services. West Wind Technologies has long partnered with Code Consulting in publishing the popular CODE Developer Magazine, but we are also sharing development resources for projects of all sizes.
CODE Magazine
West Wind Technologies is a co-founder CODE Magazine together with EPS Software. CODE Magazine has delivered relevant developer content for nearly 25 years now and the print and online magazine only continues to get more popular as it is one of the last developer magazines still standing while most publishers have gone to online publishing only. CODE excels at advanced, in-depth developer content with Microsoft centric but not exclusive content. And you can also frequently find frequent content from your's truly in an issue once in a while. If you're a Software or Computer Infrastucture vendor looking for a place to advertise your products or services we can also provide you with a great resource to reach thousands of developers every other month.