Today I want to say a few words about the future of SharpApp as the successor of Debotnet. And above all, what is the future of Debotnet? I have been asked this question very often now. It's time for enlightenment.
I pushed the first public release of Debotnet on 23 December 2019. Not that long ago. Since then the application has been downloaded over 350 thousand times. I have to admit to myself it was very successful, if not my most successful app in this short period. It was and still is a fast, small app, written in VB (yes, really!), born out of frustration over Windows 10 and a little boredom. The development was easy (I remember 2 days), but it wasn't always fun for me. I was dissatisfied with several technical implementations (no PowerShell automation access and only redirecting of console output "cmd.exe") and partly also with the GUI (i love beautiful and minimalistic UI design).
I couldn't and didn't want to work anymore on something I didn't enjoy and that was "dead" (the development language VB classic and in the "not-too-distant" future also VB.Net). And the most important aspect for me was that an app, that should provide security and data protection should also be able to offer current security standards (starting with the programming language), so I decided to rewrite the application from scratch.
Furthermore I was also unhappy with the name. It should not be a Debotnet 2.0 and no parallels should be drawn either. It should be something new. First, it was the PimpApp (to pimp sth. up, derived from a category from Debotnet). The name almost caused a scandal (I am of course exaggerating somewhat) which led to a renaming of the app. SharpApp was born!
Today, I have decided first to pause the development of Debotnet (critical bugs I would still close if necessary) and focus completely on SharpApp as successor. Debotnet will not get updated script files for the upcoming Windows 10 versions, 20H1 and 20H2 and it will be in second step abandoned this year.
I would recommend all users at this point to switch to SharpApp. It takes many things from Debotnet and simplifies them several times.
Questions about the differences between these two apps have been asked several times, so I would like to bring them together here.
| Debotnet | SharpApp |
| One checkbox tick = one enabled option | Bundled scripts (called templates). One Template = Several enabled options |
| Based on simple scripting engine | Frontend for (simple and complex) PowerShell scripting |
| 32-bit ONLY | Full 64-bit support |
| Installer service (Ninite.com) based upon script files | Fully integrated Ninite support |
| Bloatware removal based upon script files and without app detection | Fully integrated apps detection and removal of installed apps only |
| No telemetry blocking via hosts/firewall | Integrated blocking of telemetry via hosts file and firewall through community rules |
| No Unicode support | Full Unicode support |
| No localization support | Initial Localization support for templates. GUI localization is in the pipeline. |
| Simple GUI | Minimalistic GUI (UWP alike) |
| No DPI support | High DPI support |
| Portable | Portable |
I hope you enjoy the new "SharpApp" as much as I do and look forward to your support and feedback.
You can follow the development of SharpApp here
Choose one of the download links below
Follow SharpApp on GitHub
