4 years, 9 months and 7 days. Or 1,741 days if you prefer. That's how long MST Software has been on hiatus.
Why? Well, there are many reasons. Rather than create software, I created two beautiful children and as any parent knows, the first few years are traumatic to say the least. On top of my 2nd child being born in January 2011, we also moved house. This terrifying experience can only be described as a direct copy of the film 'The Money pit' starring Tom Hanks. If you've seen that film, you'll understand the house I bought.
I can say with complete honestly that during this period, I've had ideas and light bulbs appear over my head and I thought that was the right time to get MST back on it's feet. Only for another problem with the children (and there have been many) or another leak in the house.
So what's different now?
As crazy as it sounds, the first thing that has changed is that I have my own office now. Since 2006 my office has been a small desk, in our bedroom. Not the ideal setting for writing software.
I'm in a better place, technically speaking than I was before. In 2004 when LanView was being developed, I had little knowledge of the .net framework, or the power it offers. Theses days, I love .Net and cannot believe I achieved all of what LanView Server did, receiving often hundreds of UDP packets every few seconds on one single thread. Now days, I would use multi threading without a second thought.
What about the donations issue?
I admit, I spat my dummy out a few times when it came to donations - or lack of. Don't get me wrong, MST had a great following and some wonderful people donated a great amount of money which went towards the hosting of the site. It didn't cover the hosting towards the end, and eventually I had to drop the hosting package to the lowest level.
The thing everyone has to remember is that LanView was written by me, for me (originally at least). LanView 2 was very limited in it's availability (I think just two schools used it). LanView 3 however, went fully available and took off tremendously. Did I worry about donations at that point? No. because I was still developing it for my use in the school I worked in. It was a benefit to me. I started LanView 4 in 2006 I think, and at the time of release, I was just moving jobs from a school to somewhere where I couldn't use LanView any more. So I quickly found out, all the constant requests for updates, changes and new features was not benefiting me, only bogging me down. So I publicly asked for donations and openly explained that without donations, the project will cease. I had a great response and those donations covered the hosting for one more year which was great - but it didn't offer any benefit to me. After-all, my 1st child had just arrived and I had little time and no enthusiasm to continue the project.
The day I decided enough was enough was when I received a donation of £0.01. At the time, I felt worthless and I admit, very angry. That's when the site went offline and I left a stroppy message on the site. I literally deleted the SQL backend database and the entire CMS content from the site. A decision I would later regret I might add.
I tried various restarts in the following years, including a re-write of HWMS and a new tool called Project Control - a tool I still use today. However, family and work life all took it's toll.
What's the future?
Well, you have probably guessed by the logo on the MST website, a new project is in development and yes - it's LanView 5. You may be asking why I've chosen to re-write LanView 5. In my day job, I work around networks all day, every day. Someone pointed out recently that there isn't an Administrators tool to see a live snapshot of the network, what computers there are and who is logged in - in real-time and so on. That got me thinking. Since 2001 when the original goal of LanView was to do just that, there has never been a good, free (or at least cheap) tool, to give a real-time overview of the network. Still! We are in 2012 for goodness sake!
So what can I say about the plans for LanView 5? Well, all will be revealed in future blog posts, but for the moment I can say that it is a complete re-write, using the .Net Framework. I'm hoping it will be just .Net v3, but I won't know for sure until the product is near completion when I'll know what features of .Net i'll be using.
I have started already. I have the multi-threaded UDP communication mostly written with just a few bits to tidy up.
The LanView 5 Server will be a service - not an application. This means you have one server designated as a LV Service. You then have a LanView 5 application which offers similar functionality to the previous versions. Each device will still require a Client, although from LV5 - the client will now be known as the Agent.
There will be no more Scanbot. Unfortunately, my mate Scanbot will not be resurrected in this version. The dynamics of getting the stations on the network will change and there will be no need to scan for devices.
Can I promise LV5 will be completed? Not at all. This is again done in my own time, outside of work. It'll be a slow development and I will be asking for help from testers as before. But LanView is my passion so all I can promise is that I will work hard to develop it and make it the product you all know and love.
That's about it for the time being. There will be more updates in the coming months.
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