History of IConstructions BV

IConstructions BV is the consulting company of Nico Vuyge. Although founded in 1997, our involvement with software development dates back more than 20 years, starting with Basic development on the legendary Commodore 64 in 1985, followed by Pascal and C development on the Atari ST. At this time, if you wanted to use a computer, you were almost obliged to write your own software. Our initial experience writing GUI applications started in this period, using Gem on the Atari ST.

In the early nineties, we switched to the PC platform and Windows software development on Windows 3.0, largely skipping the DOS era. At this time, we also switched to C++, and kept developing with this language for a decade until .NET was released.

Nico Vuyge graduated as 'burgerlijk elektrotechnisch ingenieur, richting zwaktroom, optie informatica' (the Belgian equivalent of a masters degree in electronic engineering, see thesis) in 1992, marked the beginning of our full-time professional software development, starting with a Foxbase database project on DOS/Windows/Macintosh.

In 1993 we decided to switch from using Borland C++ to Microsoft Visual C++. Since 1994, we've almost exclusively used Visual C++ and Microsoft related technologies. In this period, we primarily developed Win32 GUI applications using MFC and SQL Server as database backend via ODBC and we did our first COM development. Later on, we started focusing on (multi-threaded) server applications, only occasionally doing GUI client work.

After a short interlude with Smalltalk, IConstructions BV was founded in 1997. We spent the next years developing Windows NT/2000 based server software for the wireless communication industry. This gave us a chance to build up experience with a lot of interesting technologies, like COM/ATL/DCOM, MAPI, TAPI, OLE DB, MSMQ, X.25, TCP/IP and Windows CE, and a number of technologies specific for the wireless industry. This was also the period where we got our Visual C++ and SQL Server certification, resulting in an MCP and MCSD certification.

In 2001, we started working with Oracle and COM+, followed shortly by .Net. We primarily wrote C# client code and COM+/ATL/STL server component code.

From 2007 on, we mainly developed large-scale internet solutions using ASP.NET/MVC

The pandemic of 2020 brought us a long sabbatical and an opportunity to study AI, Python and Rust. As of today, we're focussed on developing an AI-powered photography solution using Rust.

You can check our MCSD/MCTS certification transript at the Microsoft MCP validation website. Contact us to at nicov@iconstructions.be to get the Transcript ID and access code to validate Nico Vuyge's MCSD certification.

View the latest transcript here (PDF or XPS).

Patents: Co-inventor of US patent 20050132019, see also this link

IConstructions BVBA is a registered Microsoft partner