Convert.NET is an unusual desktop translator

Convert.NET is a free (for personal use) text processing toolkit with maybe the most bizarrely mixed-up feature set we’ve seen.

Choose "Language Translation" from the list top-left and it seems reasonably normal. Type or paste text into the box, enter a URL, choose one or more files, select your source and target languages and the program translates them for you via Google, Bing, Yandex or Excite.

But then there’s also a C# to VB.NET converter, which again can be used to process pasted text or an entire set of project files.

An Encrypt/ Decrypt module allows you to create encoded text messages using AES, Rijndael, DES, TripleDES or SHA.

An Encoding/ Decoding module converts text and files between various encoding schemes (Base64/ HTML/ URL/ URL-js/ ESCAPE-js).

There’s also a LINQ tester, a regular expression tester, and -- just in case you needed one -- an HTML/ JSON/ XML browser thrown in as well (we’re not sure what they have to do with "converting", either).

Each module is easy enough to use manually, but Convert.NET also has a command line interface to automate running tasks from your own scripts.

Do you need all this? Almost certainly not. But the language translator and C# <> VB.NET converter are worth having, the encryption/ decryption and decoder modules could be useful occasionally, and there’s no adware or other penalty to pay for trying it out.

Convert.NET is available now for Windows XP and later.