Visual Studio

Been a while since I wrote on my blog, need to do this on a more regular basis...

So, at work we've finally started the move towards Visual Studio. It will be a long process to do, since all our software is written in the Borland IDE. I'm normally not a fighter for a specific compiler environment, but I can say that I do not like the Borland environment at all.
Perhaps it's Delphi, perhaps it's Borland itself. But I can never get the IDE to do what I want it to do, and the debugger in Borland is lacking when comparing it to the Visual Studio one.

The biggest challenge now will be to create the same functionality in Visua Studio that we had with the Delphi components from Borland. Although we will not achieve the same "lazy-mode", I'm pretty sure we can fine-tune our own DLLs and use then inside the .NET framework to make new cutting-edge applications.

This new Visual Studio 2010 looks promising. The new look&feel makes it more enjoyable to work in it then the previous versions. Only downside for me at the moment is the lack of intellisense in the C++ environment. During the Beta2 it was not present, and this is severly lacking for some operations. I really hope Microsoft puts it back in at some point.

I've also made some changes to my Blog. No more Anonymous comments from now i'm afraid. Too much moderation work of spam and unwanted ads on the blog. So if you wish to comment, you'll have to make an account I'm afraid.

Money grubbing World

So,

I've gotten in some sort of mess at the moment.
I'm someone who makes decisions based upon his feelings. I always try to think things rationally through, but in the end after putting everything on a single line, I let the final call be made by my guts.

So in a rash moment I decided to resign my current position and apply elsewhere. This "elsewhere" was with Epsilon Minded, because the guy I spoke with gave me a good impression. When I announced that I would resign at BigBrother; we had a series of conversations and long chats and in the end decided that i'd stay.

BigBrother Security is a company that cares about it's employees. That listens and is open for input. This is something I learned out of this and it makes me feel good that I'm appreciated inside the company.
Epsilon Minded on the other hand doesn't seem to understand this. Although I have signed the contact, I asked for a termination with mutual consent. But this doesn't seem to be much of an option. Apparently there are people out there who don't care about the feelings of their employees or other person's and only care about $.

Don't take me wrong, i'm not as naive to think that we live in a pink world with rainbows. The truth is far from it. But I personally find it sad that we live in a world where a Company takes legal action against a small person instead of simply terminating the contract mutually and end up as friends for possible future partnerships.
No, they go after whatever money they can smell.

A sad example of how human society has evolved....if you can call it evolved. Just looking at television or the news demonstrates how sad we as human beeings are. Human civilisation's highest peak? Trust me, we are far from it. We are a sad species that preys upon each other.

Windows API Calls

Right,

so at the moment I'm working as a Junior C++ software Engineer. Really enjoying the job, but that's not what todays post will be about.

Currently I'm working on a project that should be able to fetch all the Drives on a system and display the VolumeName and FreeSpace on those Drives.
To make this as fast as possible, I'm using direct API calls to the Windows API. According to alot of people and sites this should be the fastest way to get the information I need, but it is still taking up to 14 seconds before I even get a response from the application.
I understand that there could be a small delay due the act I have 2 network drives that need to be accessed and that this could take up time.

To test this I made a VCL C++ version and a Visual C++ .NET application to test this. When I run the code from the .NET application on my laptop this goes instantly. If I run the same code on the development PC this also takes a long time to complete. So at the moment I still blame the Network Drives.

The code I'm using at the moment is the following:

// Fetch the Drives from the System
array^ allDrives = DriveInfo::GetDrives();
// Iterate through the array and check if the drive is ready.
// If it is ready then create a display string and add it to the listbox.
for(int i = 0; i <>Length; ++i)
{
if(allDrives[i]->IsReady)
{
String^ drive = allDrives[i]->Name;
drive += " [";
drive += allDrives[i]->VolumeLabel;
drive += "] , ";
__int64 size = allDrives[i]->AvailableFreeSpace / (1024 * 1024 * 1024);
drive += size.ToString();
drive += " GB available.";
// add the drive to the listbox.
lstDrives->Items->Add(drive);
}
}

So I'm still a but clueless as to why the real slowdown is occuring in this code on my development PC (Windows Server 2003) opposed to my laptop (Windows XP).....

Staying up to date...

Since the technologies constantly keep evolving, I've started to read up on books regarding these new technologies. I've ordered the following book on Amazon.com to keep up regarding the latest ASP.NET technologies, "Professional ASP.NET 3.5 In C# and VB".

This "little" book contains 1600 pages about the .NET 3.5 technology for ASP.NET pages. I hope to get through it at a reasonable pace and understand what's beeing discussed in it. I don't foresee much problems with it, because it's in my field of interest and I really wish to devote myself to the .NET technologies.

During my interview with Digipoint (that's http://www.digipoint.be for those interested) I learned that .NET 4.0 is already in the make and that I appear to be running behind reagrding technologies. This only motivates me to learn the technologies faster and keep up to date regarding the .NET framework.

This book however is not enough for me. There's alot more technologies from the .NET framework that I wish to learn. Silverlight, Sharepoint and WPF to name a few. I know roughly what to expect with these technologies and what they're for, but the finer details currently elude me due lack of experience. I hope to start reading up on those books pretty soon so I can use this knowledge in future jobs and job interviews.

Back to the roots

...which means back to Belgium for me.
Been in Belgium now for a couple of days, as of thursday 29th of April to be exact, and I miss things from Germany. On the other hand I'm glad to be back in Belgium as well.

Today's post won't be about those things though. I'm currently semi active, looking for interesting positions but I honestly don't have a clue what to do. Going back to University all sounds great, but several people close to me said that experience is more valuable then knowledge, while other people say the exact opposite.

Personally I want to work with the C++ language, but I'm hearing from all sides that it's a dieing language in the current industry and that I should focus on the .NET environment. I personally have no problems with the .NET evironment, but I'm afraid that if I focus too much on working with the .NET technologies, I will lose my skills and knowledge regarding the C++ language, and that it will become a disadvantage when I finnaly have the required experience to apply for the positions in the gaming industry.

Which brings me to my second point. Alot of people mentioned that I should make small games myself or programs related to games. All nice and well, but I really don't see myself making such a things, due the fact that creativity isn't my strongest point. I don't mean to say I can't think up stuff, as I can be pretty scary in that, I just lack the design skills to make myself some images or 3D stuff. And I honestly don't see the point of starting up a small team just to get stuff going. The trouble it brings isn't really worth the effort at the moment.

Been trying to build up a modelviewer for WoW to analyze the files, but it's so difficult finding information regarding the way Blizzard build their files, and I honestly don't expect them to tell me how they did it...