About XtractPro
XtractPro (pronounced like "extract pro") is a free online software development magazine, with in-depth technical articles on a very hot topic: extract any kind of end-user data, metadata or other type of information from all existing available resources - web pages, databases, components and files from your local computer...
For this very specialized niche, we'll usually start with background articles, presenting file formats and their historical evolution. We'll continue with simple open source prototypes, that may offer you base classes and infrastructures for a broad range of applications. And we will end with detailed useful applications on extracting and presenting data in various ways.
All our projects are open source, so you can download the code, decompress it into your local projects folder, load it and adapt it in your IDE (Integrated Development Environment), to eventually create better and more robust end-user solutions. Most our first projects use .NET version 2, C# programming language and Microsoft's Visual Studio 2005, Visual C# 2005 Express or Visual Web Developer 2005 Express. This is because .NET and its Framework Classes is very user friendly and popular, and the Express Editions of Visual Studio are today freely available to the developer. But we'll also present programming code in VB.NET, JavaScript, Java and other languages.
Our goal is to offer you easy to follow and complete modular solutions to different data extraction and transformation problems. The amount of information for software development on the web is already huge, but we hope you'll find in our specialized magazine solutions you are not able to find somewhere else. Any article and project we present here is original, they have not been published anywhere else. It is very possible for some solutions to be inspired from or similar to others, presented elsewhere. But we do our best to not duplicate someone else's work and at least present everything in an easy to follow manner.
We really want you to be efficient. We try not to waste your time with articles that bring nothing new or are not worth reading. For many projects presented here, we included small online live demonstrations. For instance, you'll be able to instantly run several routines with your own data, before decoding whether or not you may want to download a local version of the project on your local computer.
The code must be taken AS IS, with no guarantees it is bug-free or complete. It is not our goal to present robust and complete ready-to-sell end-user applications. In fact, we often deliberately avoided error handling and more user-friendly interfaces for the sake of simplicity. It's more important to us for you to understand small and useful sequences of source code, with specific functionality, than providing fully-featured solutions you might want to use in a different manner. It's up to you to adapt and complete the code with your own extensions.
