Xenu's Link Sleuth

Appendix 4: Story of Xenu's Link Sleuthâ„¢ (for fellow software developers)

In April and May 1997 my employer assigned me on an out-of-town job, because another department needed a guy with MFC experience. So from monday to friday I was away, and on the evenings I was bored to death. Every week-end I was back home, and I usually checked my web site for broken links with WebAnalyzer. Sadly the software had a lot of bugs, and their support was ignoring my e-mails, and I was mad as hell, as I had spent quite a lot of money on a product that wasn't worth it. My job was also the first contact with VC++ 4.2 (previously I had only worked with VC++ 1.5, because our customers have a lot of 16bit systems), which had some easy-to-use Internet access classes. I had already experience with WINSOCK programming, but these classes would spare me a lot of time evaluating HTTP result headers and other annoying stuff. On an evening after an excellent italian food with a good chianti I took some hotel letter paper and wrote down a concept for checking links. A month later I took some time to install the development software on my computer and started working, with the help of that hotel-room concept. The work was done on some evenings, but mostly on week-ends, when I had more time.

My philosophy on software development has always been "smaller, simpler, cheaper", long before the NASA realized this (in May 2002 I was told that the actual NASA philosophy was Faster, Better, Cheaper - oops!) Because of that, I need no fancy (but totally useless) graphics like in WebAnalyzer. Just results. And they'd better be 100% correct or I'd have to kill myself :-)

[Visual C++ icon]The application is written in Visual C++, and uses the MFC classes as much as possible: CDocument, CView, CListView, CObArray, CMapStringToOb, CArchive, CInternetSession, CHttpFile, etc, etc. That saved me a lot of time!