Introducing...

It's been a very long time since I worked on EEShell. Very long... as in, Windows 7 was current.

EEShell2 was never meant for modern Windows. I wrote it for Windows 2000, and it worked (mostly) under Windows XP, but Vista and later, well... let's just say it's... suboptimal.

Now, the Explorer shell under Windows 7 and 10 is pretty decent, as long as you're running a decent computer. (Under 8, it's... well, it's Windows 8.) But Windows 11? It's an absolute disaster. As I'm sure you can imagine, I hate it.

So. Time to restart EEShell. In fact, it's time for

EEShell4

(In case you're wondering what happened to EEShell3, look through the news archive, but the short version is, it never really happened.)

EEShell4 will be written in a modern-ish language. EEShell2 was written in Visual Basic 6 and PowerBASIC, and while PB is good (and I might continue to use it for the behind-the-scenes stuff), VB6 is literally old enough to vote, and in terms of software development, that's... not good. Right now I'm working in VB.Net, specifically VB2022, using code I imported into the original VB.Net something like 20 years ago and never did anything with. Needless to say, it's going to take a lot of work to clean everything up and get it working, but in the end, I think it will be worth it.

(To be clear, EEShell4 is being specifically written for Windows 11. I expect it will probably work under Windows 10 just fine, and maybe even previous Windows versions, but I will only be targeting Windows 11.)