The Story: Exploring the edges
Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf.
Rabindranath Tagore
For me, it has always been about making a change and exploring edges. I didn’t have the entrepreneurship skills, but I had the mindset of a knowledge entrepreneur. Make a change, grow your capital (Knowledge) and make it happen. Impossible was impossible to exist in my mind, so I had to challenge every one or thing that will say you can’t.
The Developer Studio challenge was good, inspired by the Visual Studio tool and being restricted from installing the 2012 version because my computer was slow and it couldn’t support Windows XP SP3 so I chose to make my creation look like it and do what could any IDE do. The pascal edition included IntelliSense or what it is known as (code completion), supporting syntax highlighting, source code compilation, unit discovery, multiple file editing and so much more.
The tool was definitely better than TPW and DevPascal and all of this was in 2011–2012, so I focused on polishing the design. With the DevComponents DotNetBar tool, it was possible to clone the Visual Studio 2012 UI and running the application on the .NET Framework 2.0.
Of course, this doesn’t look like Visual Studio 2012, but I needed to tell you what’s next before I show you the picture. So I told myself, if you can do it for pascal, so why not other editions. To resume, Developer Studio was maintained from 2011 till 2014 versioned respectively 2012–2015. There was various editions which are:
- Developer Studio Pascal Express Edition / Developer Studio Pascal Edition (2012, 2013, 2014)
- Developer Studio Pawn Edition (2013)
- Developer Studio Arsslen Language Express Edition (2013, 2014)
- Developer Studio Express Edition (2013)
- Developer Studio Professional Edition (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014)
The Pawn edition came to life after spotting the need for a Pawn IDE in a project conducted in summer 2013 which I will be talking about later.
For now, I will suspend the talk about Developer Studio to talk about the project of the year 2011–2012, in that period Developer Studio was a side project, because all the focus was redirected towards one particular project that was quite interesting.
I am talking about Kavprot, of course you never heard of it and the term relates to KAV (Kaspersky AntiVirus) and with that information in mind i guess you know the topic. It’s computer security!!!
Back in November 2011, I noticed that there is no antivirus engine written in managed language so I wondered why? Then my curiosity started to push me. Why not make one? Why not be the first one to do it? and that was the trigger: Greed!
I started looking and googling terms like, how an antivirus works? Components of antivirus? Managed antivirus? Virus scanner… I found very few resources talking about the mechanism of action one of them is Symantec, the giant behind Norton. Through time I learned about, virus scanners using digest signature, pattern matching, heuristical analysis with code obfuscation, Sandboxing and behavior analysis of executables… I also found out how to continuously watch files, even intercept file modification using a file system filter driver (using the Windows Driver Kit). To add this was my first experience with C/C++ hoping to make a firewall and a file-system filter driver. The achieved results were acceptable and within range, I ended up with a product that evolved into a smart security suite that included:
- Network protection: Firewall, Parental Control with proxy/interception using Fiddler, packet scanner using WinPCAP.
- System protection: File system filter driver, file system watcher, process protection, multiple scanners.
- Virus database that included 4 million definitions.
- Pattern matching, signature and heuristic scanners that support compressed and executable files with automatic unpacking capabilities.
- File encryption and backup.
- Sandboxing and behavioral analysis.
For the first time, I thought why not put it as an open-source application, then I got contacted by someone called Willian Diego, he was interested in the project and warned me about putting it to the public.
I deeply thank him for his support and feedback, the Kavprot initiative reached its end by the end of summer 2012.
Something else got my attention, it is what’s driving engineers crazy these days (AI).
