Once again I missed a Sunday to do a post. Oh well. These of you who actually read ma post should know, that, even I am posting on each Sunday, I only make an interesting post every three weeks, or so.

Today, I have news from the VISlib: the VISlib is now finally released as version 1.0!

With that, the VISlib reached her final development state. We will only continue to fix bugs, based on that release, but we will not introduce new functionality. Instead we implement The.Vislib.Legacy-Project in the trunk of the repository of the VISlib. This project is a step-by-step migration towards TheLib.

Whenever you work on a software, which is not trivial or small, than you have to work with legacy code. I talk about old codes. Either one wants to re-use them or one does not. Regardless, however, you always have to marry the new codes with the old ones, and that is never easy. I gets especially hard when have interfaces to the outside world, i.e. other software using at least parts of the software one is working on. Facing such tasks separates the men from the boys. :-P I am not talking about programming. Programming is easily learned and teached. I talk about software development, design, and architecture.

Current, I work with friends on the creation of the THElib, as successor and replacement of the infamous VISlib. The VISlib has several design errors which we cannot fix due to strong dependancies with other software projects. Of course, we are not rewriting THElib from scratch. She is based on large portions of the VISlib, streamlined and corrected. But here we face a huge foundation of legacy code we need to cope with. It is simply not simple.

The year 2012 is almost gone. Let’s use this opportunity to reflect on what’s happend. Ok, ok. No one likes annual reviews (me neither), but still…

Early this year I defended my dissertation, and finished my Ph.D. With this, I also finished my work at the Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart. And I mean “at”, not “with”. I still continue working with the “guys from Stuttgart”, and we have some pretty exciting ideas under development.

Then I moved to Dresden and started working at the TU Dresden in the project VICCI. It’s a great city and a great group working here at the computer graphics lab. I really enjoy working and we have some fascinating science projects going on here.

What else? TheLib started. Together with two friends and ex-colleagues from Stuttgart, we decided to fix the design issues of the VISlib, by creating a new, clean library. It is a lot of work, but it is worth it.

And, of course, there is my private game project: Springerjagd (Knights Hunt). Although, I already started to work on the rules last year, it was this year that the game finally got it’s name. And it’s webseit, although there is not much to see there. But this project is something I will be definitly going to continue.

And, with this we reach the New Year’s resolutions (although it’s 1-2 days early): basically, I only want to do what I can to make 2013 as successful as 2012 was. No, I will make it even more successful. However, I believer there is no need for more detailed plans :-)

And, because I do not plan to post again at New Year’s Eve, I wish you all:

“A happy new Year!”

The TheLib Project was started 22. March.

It is the follow-up project of the VISlib, an openly available library of Totally Helpful Extensions for C++ and C# with focus on scientific visualization. TheLib is created in a cooperation betweent the Visualization Research Center of the University of Stuttgart and the Computer Graphics and Visualization lab of the University of Dresden. Source code and error tickes are hosted at SourceForge.

I am eagerly waiting how the project is going to develop.