Troels Knakkergaard

Welcome to the Homepage of Troels Knakkergaard, B.Sc.E.E

A brief presentation
    After receiving my degree in electronics engineering, I chose to return to my long-lasting interest in computer programming. Having done rather extensive hobby-programming in Pascal, assembly-language, Basic and Comal in my teens, on, among others, a CP/M-compatible, Z80-based home-computer, I began to miss compilers during my student time, where the computer-courses merely whetted the appetite. To me, the clean design-type-compile approach in the long run appealed more than the messy design-"now, who took the last op-amp without reordering"-solder approach.
    I have specialized in PC software development. Starting out with last decades favorite (mine also), Borland Pascal, I managed to get my hands on the very much more mature and universal, all-purpose language(s), C/C++, that have proven to be of good utility in almost any kind of programming task imaginable. Having the utmost dislike of segmented memory considerations, de-facto memory extension schemes and other passing, counter-productive x86/MS-DOS-specific nonsense, I have more or less voluntarily ended up doing a lot of Win32 GUI programming. Creating source targeting Win32, portable via WinNT - and WinCE - to architectures other than x86, is very liberating, compared to living with the distractions from shaky, single-tasking, real mode MS-DOS. I hope to get to do more low-level (and not so portable) systems programming in Win32 later on.
    Today I'm working at Lyngsø Marine, who develops alarm- and control-systems for ships. See below.

Primary interests (technology)
My interests include - as mentioned above - 32-bits Windows, language-syntax/compiler technology and, last but not least, reusable code libraries: Huge, object-based toolboxes never ceases to fascinate me, i.e. totally portable zApp, which I unfortunately haven't used, or MFC, which I for various reasons prefer for my present time projects. I believe that [relative] portability, [relative] timelessness (a.k.a. maintainability) and few lines (a.k.a. maintainability) is high on my list of code qualities, hence my preference of huge, evolving libraries of high-quality and really "soft" software.
My preferred computer periodicals are MSJ, DDJ and IEEE Software. I also read some general 'industry watch'-material on a regular basis, primarily Computerworld (DK) and, until it's sad demise, Byte.

Work functions at Lyngsø Marine
Custom hardware, embedded software and Windows software makes up the company's primary product, UCS/UMS 2100. I spend most of my time at Lyngsø developing and maintaining the larger Windows-based application, the EAD. Naturally it's based on MFC and developed using Visual C++, so I'm tangled up in MFC and C++-objects every single day - I know my way around MFC. The EAD core is now 100K+ lines of .cpp, divided into manageable, logical subsystems (.dll's), for maintainability - and faster (partial) builds :)

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My data

My opinions on tools, OS'es and the trade

My thesis (and some of my friends', in Danish)

Code snippets

You are guest no. since march 26th 1998.

A view from my window at Lyngsø.