suriname360 - Visit Suriname from the comfort of your own home!

After many months of hard work I today finally launched suriname360 - a website that features high resolution 360 degrees panoramas and interactive virtual tours of places in Suriname. I’ve had the idea for this website for a few years now but due to other priorities it wasn’t until March of this year that I could start working on this project. And I did so mostly in my free time while also working on other projects for clients of mine (after all, the bills don’t pay themselves ).

Most of the websites that promote tourism in Suriname focus too much on text and on information. But nothing is capable of attracting people more than nice and interesting visuals. People don’t like to read; they want to see and experience things. People remember 80% of what they see, and only 20% of what they read. So there was a need for a website promoting tourism to Suriname that focuses on strong visuals and the experience of visiting Suriname. And so with suriname360 I’m hoping that I’ve filled a gap and that the website will deliver a significant contribution to the development of the tourism industry in Suriname.

I’ve enjoyed working on this website and I hope you’ll enjoy viewing the content that’s available so far. I’ve invested a lot of time, money and other resources in this website and I’m hoping I’ll be able to continue to further develop this website in the future. There’s a lot more content coming up and I have a lot of very exciting (long term) plans for suriname360 that I hope to be able to share with you soon.

Visit the suriname360 website and take a look. A good place to start is the tour of the City of Paramaribo.

Timeless Stare

Today I launched my new website after spending almost 3.5 months working on it in my spare time. The previous site was launched in 2007, so a refresh was necessary. Along with some updated information about the services that I offer I have also updated all my portfolios and there’s a lot of new work to see. I’ve also finally written some more about my background and there are some testimonials from people I’ve worked with over the years to give you an idea of what it’s like to work with me. I’ve gotten feedback from clients in the past who mentioned that I had to “sell myself more” and talk more about my work. I could totally understand them, I’m not one to go out and promote myself or boast about my work. I find that very difficult to do, but at the same time I also realize that sometimes I have to act like a salesman in order to sell my services. So instead of me talking about my work, I choose to have some of my clients giving their opinion about their experiences in working with me.

I’m still doing a little tweaking in the background but the site is now essentially complete. In the near future, as time permits, I’ll also be updating my blog to match the design of my new website more closely. Head on over to take a look and if you have any feedback whatsoever, just leave a comment on this blog post.

My new website has just been launched at www.kareldonk.com. Feel free to take a look. It contains the latest information about the services I have to offer as well as updated portfolios. I’ve been working on the site in my spare time for about 2 months now, and it was about time I could finally have my own work-related website to direct potential customers to. Until recently, I didn’t even have my own businesscard. This also partly explains the lack of frequent updates on my blog for the last 2 months.

Any feedback that you may have is ofcourse very welcome.

Have you ever used a (software) product that just felt and/or looked like it wasn’t finished? That had kindof an unpolished feel to it, rough around the edges and minor or even major issues? One that you knew had great potential because you enjoyed using some of its features and could have been a big winner if not for those shortcomings?

Well that is what life feels like to me.

Before I continue, I’d just like to make it clear that for the rest of this post, I’m going to assume that god exists and that I’m going to look at certain things from the perspective of the bible.

With that out of the way, let me state right away that I think god has got to be a very lousy designer and engineer. I’m not sure how they refer to his occupation in heaven, but I’m going to simply compare it to an engineer to make the comparisons I’m going to make easier.

You see, the way I see it, is that god is like one of those smart arrogant programmers who think they created this incredible program that is a testament to how much of a genius they are. They obviously put a lot of work into it, spent days wrestling with some difficult problems, came up with some very clever solutions and finally managed to make it all work. And although the program works, and works well, it is far from ready from an end-user perspective. It only works as intended when you follow the exact procedures given by the programmer in the exact same conditions the programmer expected it to work in. For example, if you press some buttons in the wrong order, or click some menu options you weren’t supposed to click at a given point (even though they were enabled, leading you to think it was okay to click them), the program explodes, possibly in a very spectacular way and in the worst case bringing the whole operating system down with it in the process.

What is clear from this example is that even though major functionality was already implemented by the programmer, from a usability and end-user point of view it still needed work. And depending on the type of program, that could still mean quite a lot of work. It also has to be tested in various situations, all the features have to be tested when used in various sequences and possible combinations etc. Basically everything an end-user might try to do with it. The program also has to protect the end-user from himself by not allowing (disabling) functionality that should not be used at a given moment, especially when you know it might cause unexpected behavior inside the program and cause a lot of inconvenience to the end-user. The smart arrogant programmers don’t like to work on these kinds of ‘unimportant’ and tedious things. If something breaks, obviously the user didn’t follow the right procedures (even though the program actually allows the user to try all the wrong procedures possible).

So with that in mind, when we look at life, there are so many problems to point out from an end-user point of view, us being the end-users. Reality is just full of problems and unexpected and undesired behavior, or just bugs, if you will. For example, sometimes the weather acts up and produces storms causing a lot of destruction to the work of end-users. This, ofcourse, is not normal behavior as the weather is expected to be nice all the time by the end-user, and the bugs just happen sometimes under certain conditions. The same can be said about floods, tsunamis, earthquakes etc. The end-user expects it to rain, yes, and normally it just rains enough to keep life going, but sometimes, under certain conditions, a bug causes too much rainfall causing floods that destroy the work of end-users. In severe cases it even takes the lives of end-users, which, I think, is the worst possible bug a product can have. Imagine the class-action lawsuits that would have been filed if it was possible to sue god. Ofcourse that’s not possible since he can’t be held accountable, which enables him to keep the arrogant attitude of “you’re just going to have to use it as is, and I’m not fixing anything.” Having a monopoly in life also helps. I mean, if we end-users could go to another provider for life, that’d give god some incentive to improve the life he offers, right? As it is now, we’re pretty much stuck with what he offers us.

But okay, I’m moving too far away from the subject. I was talking about the various bugs in life. You often hear people talk about what kind of genius it would take to design something like the human body for example. And yes, I have to admit, it takes a lot of genius to design and build something like the human body. But once again, it is far from finished. There are numerous bugs and even security vulnerabilities. Sometimes bugs cause women to give birth to disabled children. Bugs cause people to get cancer, suffer and die. Due to security vulnerabilities, viruses, for example, are able to install themselves in the human body and cause all kinds of diseases, disabling major functionality, causing system instability and possibly leading to a complete system failure. Etcetera, etcetera. I’m sure you can name thousands of bugs yourself, all of which shouldn’t be part of the user experience, and only cause inconvenience to the end-user. Had god taken the extra time to do some extensive testing before deploying life, we’d probably not be experiencing all of these problems. And I haven’t even mentioned design issues yet. Have you ever heard the joke that asks, with regards to the human body: “What kind of designer would put a waste dumping area next to a recreational area?” Need I say more?

And like any end-user facing such issues with a product, we’re trying to find solutions and work-arounds to the various bugs, but there are limitations to the things we can do as end-users. For one, we do not have the source code to life. It would sure make things easier if we had that. So we’re stuck having to try and reverse engineer as much as we can of life to see how things work, and try to come up with solutions to the bugs we’re having to deal with everyday. It might be difficult for us end-users to repro such bugs and find actual causes, but I can imagine that god almost certainly is able to debug reality and find what is causing all the issues very easily. Not necessarily because he is smart, but simply because he has the tools and the source code. Ofcourse, being as arrogant as he is, and having a monopoly, we shouldn’t be expecting him to put any effort into it.

You see, what actually happened in god’s case, is the worst thing that can happen to one of those smart but arrogant programmers who don’t like to work on the small ‘unimportant’ and tedious things. God created this really great product, started boasting about how he’s so cool and smart, and how incredible life is going to be, when the product wasn’t even tested yet. In addition, god designed life with the intention to be very scalable, but never actually did any tests to make sure it would scale well to billions of users. What he did was do an initial deployment in a very small environment (Eden) with only two users (Adam and Eve) who just followed the exact operating procedures and used life exactly the way god intended it to be used, at least in the beginning. And as we all know end-users are very unpredictable, and given the possibilities to use a feature or combination of features in a given way that makes sense to them, they’ll do it and expect it to work properly.

So after the initial deployment, things worked well in the beginning, and god was proud of himself, boasted about how big of a genius he was, how he was almighty etc. But then the users got more experienced and didn’t feel like constantly reading the manual anymore. And as we all know at this point, then things started to get more interesting. In addition to that, more users started to use life, and the weaknesses became more evident as the number of users grew. The growing amount of users made it necessary to expand the deployment of life beyond Eden and to the rest of the world, which brought along other problems with it. You see, it’s one thing to do a small deployment of a product on 2 computers for example, but it’s an entirely different story to deploy to an enterprise with thousands of users around the world in various locations. And in god’s case, it was far, far, faaaaar worse, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Imagine the technical support nightmare god created for himself. Just imagine the scale of it. When was the last time you called for support, or prayed, and actually got an answer from god? He doesn’t even have an answering machine! And he’s supposed to be almighty? With billions of people, and who knows what other creatures, calling in for help at any given moment because of the countless issues with their life, it should be easy to imagine why god never answers.

So what can we learn from all of this? Apart from the fact that one can clearly see that I have way too much free time, we can also see that it can sometimes be easy to make mistakes. Sometimes we even knowingly make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes are because of our own stupidity. Sometimes we make mistakes, but have too big an ego to admit it and correct it. Everyone makes mistakes, but the important thing is to be able to realize you’re making a mistake as quickly as possible, as early as possible, and have the guts to immediately admit to it, and having done that do everything possible to correct it or minimize the damage done by it.

If god had admitted to himself and all his users that life wasn’t ready for universal deployment, and had he then stopped the deployment to work on fixing issues when it was already clear there were issues during the initial smaller deployment in Eden, we would not have this mess today. Instead, he was arrogant, didn’t want to admit that the problems existed, and went ahead with the deployment. Now it will take a much greater effort on his part to fix the user experience for the billions of users he has today. This is ofcourse assuming he will admit that life as it is now sucks, and that he will listen to his users. A service pack to this version of life is long overdue in my opinion.

But I have to admit that when I look at life, I see great potential. I see a runaway hit. If only god would work on fixing the bugs and polishing it a bit more so we could have a much more improved overall user experience…

Let me just jump right in and say that I was absolutely delighted to find out that Microsoft would keep the Express editions of the Visual Studio tools free. I had written about this a year ago, and although I was way too early with that, it is good to see Microsoft now really doing it. When they launched Visual Studio 2005, they first said that the Express editions of the tools would be free for only one year, but now they’ll be free permanently.

I can’t even begin to explain how devastating this is going to be for the competition on various levels. Not only on the short term, but most importantly on the long term. Visual Studio Express has now been downloaded over 5 million times. And I’m willing to bet most of those downloads are from young programmers and students who are just starting out to learn programming. When these people are going to look for a job in a few years, in what environment do you think they will write their applications? That’s right, .NET and Visual Studio. Which database are they going to be using? SQL Server ofcourse, because they’ve been used to writing their applications for SQL Server Express all those years. I know the tools for Linux are also free, but there are two issues I can immediately think of there. Linux is nowhere near as popular as Windows. If you are starting to write programs and you want to show off your application to as many people as possible, you’re going to be choosing Windows (sadly, this also applies to virus writers). And secondly, the tools available for Linux don’t come even close to the functionality, ease of use and integration Visual Studio offers.

With all those young programmers starting to check out Visual Studio and .NET now, think of the long term implications. This is one of the most important reasons now why Java is destined to lose from .NET as a platform, and why SQL Server is going to continue to gain marketshare in the future.

On the short term, you will see many applications being released by young programmers who are starting out and are experimenting with Visual Studio Express and things like Windows Live. This is so beautiful it brings tears to my eyes. Not only do Microsoft release all these cool new technologies and toys, they now also release the development tools free of charge so people can download them and just have at it. And most of this is beautifully and almost seamlessly integrated. Imagine what this will do for the richness of the .NET and Windows (Live) platform especially with regards to software. Google should be worried.

I could go on and on. But since this is a quick post, I’ll save that for a future longer article. I now want to talk about Windows Vista briefly. The last part of Paul Thurrott’s Windows Vista February 2006 CTP review generated quite some discussion on the Internet. Basically Paul says that he’s not very happy, and indeed a bit disappointed with Windows Vista at the moment, all while cleverly leaving an opening to change his mind in the future. While Paul does bring up some valid points, most of them are inherent to beta software and I don’t know why one would give such an in dept review and complain about things in a beta version of a product, as if it was already the final thing. Such is the case with for example the fact that you can’t know which window has the focus because they all look the same. I’m sure Microsoft is aware of that, Paul, don’t worry. They are still working on it, you know.

I haven’t posted anything on Windows Vista for a long while now since my first post, and this is precisely the reason why not. I also worked with the February CTP version, and yes it was slow, yes I didn’t have the drivers for the videocard on my laptop so it sucked and yes there are bugs. But it’s business as usual for a beta and complaining about it in public doesn’t make much sense. One thing I do have to say is that I feel that the quality of the beta releases has been a bit lower than previous versions of Windows, especially with the first Beta 1 release. But this could be related to the major rewrites of many low level parts of Windows like the kernel and networking stack.

I do agree with Paul when he complains about the many features that were promised, but were taken out, and are probably still being taken out. The most important one being WinFS. Still, there are a lot of really good changes, most of them under the hood, that I can be very excited about. I think it is too early though, to give my opinion on Windows Vista as a product, so you’ll have to wait for that until I’ve been able to install a near RTM version on my systems.

I recently was unfortunate enough to have installed Visual Studio 2005 on one of my computers and attempt to use it for my primary development work. As soon as I installed it and opened one of my existing projects, it automatically deleted all project files. Luckily I had a backup which I could quickly restore and try again. It deleted all files again. Physically deleted from my hard disk. It just opened an empty project. So I thought perhaps there’s something in my project that makes it act that way. I created a new test project, added a new source file, typed ” void main(” and as soon as I wanted to type the “)”, I got a BSOD. I reset my machine, and found out that my hard disk could not be detected anymore. After 2 hours of messing around I got it to boot again to the desktop. I started Visual Studio again and it started using 200% CPU. I kid you not. Perfmon was showing me that Visual Studio was using 200% CPU time. I don’t know how this is possible. Then as I was trying to investigate a dialog showed up stating “Visual Studio 2005 is now formatting your hard disks, please wait…”. There were no “OK” or “Cancel” buttons. Just a progress indicator. At about 20% (yes, all I could do at that point was stare at the screen wondering what the hell was going on), the PC automatically restarted, and as I’m sure you can imagine, couldn’t boot anymore.

Ok, I’m just kidding.

After all the stories appearing about Visual Studio and SQL Server 2005 on various websites, which I’m sure you’ve seen, I couldn’t resist. I’ve been using Visual Studio 2005 for a while now, and personally have yet to run into a bug or have it crash. And no, I’m not just writing “Hello world!” programs, although that seems to be enough to crash the IDE for some people. I will admit that it does feel slower than Visual Studio .NET 2003 but that is to be expected. I can still remember the day I installed Visual C++ 6 and how I complained about it being so much slower on my machine compared to Visual C++ 5. At that time I also didn’t own a really fast machine. One of the things that made Visual C++ 6 slower was, I believe, the introduction of IntelliSense in the IDE. But as time went by I got used to it, got faster PCs and now I can’t imagine working without IntelliSense. So I think we’ll get used to Visual Studio 2005.

But others do seem to be having some problems with Visual Studio 2005, and there do seem to be bugs in the IDE which you can occasionally run into. It should be noted that some “bugs” can also occur when people fail to completely uninstall previous beta versions of Visual Studio 2005, and that they should make sure they’ve installed on a clean system before they start complaining about having to deal with weird problems. This is one of the issues I have with the CTPs Microsoft is doing. It’s a good idea to release early builds to developers and consumers, but they have to make sure these can be completely and easily removed, and not cause issues when the user installs newer or final versions of the software.

Let’s also not forget that the concept of bugs in the Visual Studio IDE is not new. Visual Studio .NET 2003 has a lot of IDE bugs, some of which I’ve had to deal with almost daily for years now. And it still is one of the most popular IDEs available right now. However, this should not be seen as some kind of comfort for Microsoft; being the best and ahead of others should not mean that you should want to get away with less quality in your products. If there are issues, they should be fixed as soon as possible, and the best thing is always to avoid those issues in the first place and release quality code to customers.

Seeing Somasegar’s recent comments, I’m confident things will get better for the next release. There’s already one service pack planned for Visual Studio 2005 in 2006. That sure is much faster than the service pack for Visual Studio .NET 2003. I’m still wondering why they couldn’t release an update for Visual Studio .NET 2003 earlier.

As for SQL Server 2005, did anyone else notice how Oracle released a free express edition of their database just a few days before the release of SQL Server 2005? Do you think that’s a coincidence? It seems to me that Oracle is beginning to react to SQL Server. They appear to be taking it a little more serious now. And seeing the improvements that went into SQL Server 2005, its quite understandable. Soon they will have to lower their prices as well as SQL Server finds its way into enterprises more and more. Even the express edition is quite powerful and sometimes I still can’t believe it is provided for free. I remember the day I found out about MSDE (the previous version of SQL Server 2005 Express Edition), and searched everywhere to verify licensing information for MSDE and the fact that it was free.

In a previous article I had mentioned that Microsoft would be releasing the express editions of the Visual Studio tools free of charge. While this wasn’t yet announced by Microsoft, and was just based on my own thoughts, I was very glad to see Microsoft actually offering the tools for free so everyone can download and start developing, just like with SQL Server 2005 Express Edition. Right now they’ve said that the tools will be free for just one year after the release date. My thoughts are that they probably want to give them away for free even after one year, but perhaps are afraid of legal issues. I believe that keeping the simple express editions free is the right thing to do, both for Microsoft and all the young developers out there.

I’ll save my opinion about .NET Framework 2.0 for another post, but I am still not satisfied because of the lack of a clear roadmap with regards to the technologies that will be supported going forward. It’s still not very clear what is going to happen with MFC for example. All we know right now is that it is still supported in Visual Studio 2005 but no significant improvements are being added, and MFC’s role in the managed world is not very clear. There’s no clear replacement for MFC for the managed world. I know Microsoft is looking at these things right now, but it is important that they release their plans for at least the coming 5 years so developers know what they will be up against. The .NET Framework 2.0 is certainly an improvement over the previous version, but I still think things will get really exciting when WinFX gets released with Windows Vista.

I’ve uploaded one of my old projects that I worked on about 10 years ago. It’s a fighting game based on ASCII characters. You can read more about it here.

With the lack of a clear roadmap for MFC it hasn’t been very clear for me and a lot of developers what the future of MFC will look like. For example, when I examine the statistics from my website, I see that a lot of people find my website by entering strings like “Longhorn and MFC” and “MFC not developed anymore” on a search engine.
We’ve been hearing things like “Managed code and Windows Forms are the future, you should move over to it as soon as you can”, but the .NET Framework still lacks a lot of features that MFC has. In addition we’ll soon have Avalon, so moving to Windows Forms may not be a good idea for the long term. And all Microsoft has been talking about recently are Windows Forms and Avalon, with little information being released about the future of MFC.

I contacted Somasegar, Corporate Vice President for the Developer Division at Microsoft, and asked him about the future of MFC. I’ve also been told that more information will be provided soon on the MSDN website. Below is Somasegar’s response:

With Visual Studio 2005, we have made some very significant investments in MFC. Our focus for this release has been three fold:

• Security
• .NET integration
• Quality

Security
One of the key features coming from the libraries team this release is the secure CRTs. The updated runtimes now eliminate many of the potential attack vectors found in previous versions of the libraries. We have replaced all of the unsafe usages of the CRT from within MFC with the safe versions of the at-risk functions.

In addition to using the SafeCRT from within MFC, we have also “fusionized” MFC. Fusion substantially solves many problems related to the classical “dll hell” situation. By fusionizing MFC, we now support side-by-side installations of MFC. Fusion also enables us to much more effectively service these libraries.

.NET Integration
MFC now fully supports the use of .NET from within any MFC application. Not only can one compile any C++ code to .NET and leverage any .NET api from within MFC, but, we also now support hosting of WinForms components and windows within MFC. Developers can now leverage the advanced WinForm’s designers and the productivity of the .NET frameworks with the advanced features of MFC.

Quality
We have fixed and addressed more defects in this release of MFC than we have ever done in any release of MFC. Building on MFC today will not only yield more secure applications, but more reliable and stable apps as well.

Future of MFC (beyond Visual Studio 2005)
MFC continues to be the most popular C++ library in use to day (by far). It is unique in its feature breadth as well. There remains many features in MFC that aren’t found in other frameworks (including .NET). With Visual Studio 2005, we have made it possible for the C++ developer to leverage existing C++ code, the strengths of MFC, and the strengths of .NET all within a single application.

Going forward, we expect to continue to enhance the integration between .NET and MFC. As Longhorn releases to the market, it is our intention to continue to support Longhorn’s advancements in MFC. Developers can look forward to seeing MFC updated to leverage the latest native and managed API’s and frameworks.

As an MFC developer, you have more access to more frameworks than any other type of developer on the platform. You can leverage the best from all worlds as it makes sense to do so from a business perspective. We fully expect to support this capability into the foreseeable future.