Thrive for Developers by Microsoft is “a one-stop community hub that offers job postings, technical content, and community resources. So whether you’re seeking new ways to differentiate yourself on the job, or you need to re-tool your skills for that next big role, Thrive has the resources to help you get there faster.” Looks and sounds interesting, but remains to be seen where it will go…
Archive for the 'Software Development' Category
18
Sep
09
Thrive for Developers
18
Sep
09
CppDepend
Found an interesting post on Edge of Chaos | Agile Development Blog (done by TargetProcess people) titled Lean and Kanban Software Development Digest and containing links to really interesting articles about the topic, and Kanban vs Scrum comparison among them.
05
Aug
09
Undocumented C#
Interesting (though useless) undocumented C# keywords (and corresponding IL instructions) described in Calling printf from C# – The tale of the hidden __arglist keyword on Bart De Smet’s B# .NET Blog.
02
Aug
09
Threading in C#
Joseph Albahari, the author of C# 3.0 in a Nutshell, C# 3.0 Pocket Reference, and LINQ Pocket Reference as well as LINQPad, has very nice Threading in C# article (well, it is 77 pages long and available in PDF format as well). As the author says, “[it] tackles difficult issues such as thread safety, when to use Abort, Wait Handles vs Wait and Pulse, the implications of Apartment Threading in Windows Forms, using Thread Pooling, Synchronization Contexts, Memory Barriers and non-blocking synchronization constructs.”
28
Jul
09
PostSharp 1.5 RTM
28
Jul
09
Exceptions in C++
In Google C++ Style Guide they state that they are not using exceptions in C++ code at Google. They have reasons for it (“historical” mostly, as usual), but I do not necessarily agree with their view on it. Anyway, exceptions are quite a controversial topic in C++ community, and a must-read C++ Exceptions: Pros and Cons article at CodeProject goes deeper into the subject.
Personally I think that exceptions are really great, although I see how people can get things messy/wrong when using exceptions in inappropriate contexts and/or in inappropriate ways. Recipe to avoid problems? My own short list:
- Use exceptions when they are really needed, i.e. when something exceptional happened
- Understand Exception guarantees AKA Abrahams guarantees (see more at Exception-Safety in Generic Components – Lessons Learned from Specifying Exception-Safety for the C++ Standard Library by David Abrahams)
- Follow Resource Acquisition Is Initialization AKA Resource Initialization Is Acquisition (or RAII/RIIA in short) principle
28
Jul
09
Today’s Sites/Blogs
- Ask the Performance Team (Thoughts from the EPS Windows Server Performance Team) – in their own words “… the Performance team covers a broad range of seemingly unrelated areas such as Core OS Performance, Printing, WMI and Terminal Services. Simply put – we’re a bit of a “catch-all” team. [...] Because we cover such a wide spectrum of technology, we see many different types of issues – some more frequently than others. So we thought we should share with the broader technical community. We’ll be sharing troubleshooting tips and technical information on areas of our specialty that we cover.”
- 45+ Excellent Code Snippet Resources and Repositories – it is what it says it is.
Needed Flash and/or Silverlight web-page video players for our web site, and found Silverlight – Video Player (at CodePlex) and Flowplayer – Flash Video Player for the Web. Both look really good and are fully customizable.
In his Styling A ScrollViewer/Scrollbar In WPF article Sacha Barber explains how to do exactly what the article’s title claims. :)
Threadsafe Events article at CodeProject explains problems one might encounter with .NET events in a multithreaded environment (not necessarily stating the absolute truth but still). Unfortunately, no-one has figured out the perfect solution, and we will have to choose “the best from all bad solutions” for some time still.
Asynchronous Callback Contexts article by the same author shows possible solution for event cancellation, particularly during object disposal: end-users do not expect components to raise events after they have been disposed or after they have unsubscribed from these events. The author refers to his Nito Asynchronous Library as a way to solve this issue.
27
Jul
09
Unattended .NET Installation
We needed to do unattended .NET 3.5 SP1 installation for our project, and at the same time we wanted to reduce the hard disk image size, so, after some Internet “crawling”, we found Silent .NET Maker synthesized – [a] script [that] builds custom .NET unattended, switchless, multimode installers/nLite addons, supporting all latest .NET framework versions, all its hotfixes and langpacks for win 2K/XP/2K3 x86 up to date. The thing really works, and we managed to get the size of full .NET 3.5 SP1 installer with all hotfixes down to something like 43MB (packed with 7-Zip) for 32-bit Windows XP. Not bad reduction! Aaron Stebner has also something to say about this topic.
DebuggerVisualizers – Boost C++ Libraries has nice introduction to custom Visual Studio debugger visualizers.
26
Jul
09
Today’s Sites/Blogs
- Started to “bump” into the Smashing Magazine quite often nowadays. Usually it collects interesting Internet resources related to web development (notably CSS, HTML, AJAX, etc.) and design (user interfaces, fonts, new ideas, etc.), and also has some tutorial-like or how-to-like posts (e.g. about PNG optimization, common mistakes, etc.). Really nice! Webdesigner Depot, Line25 Web Design Blog, and Presidia Creative all have similar concept.
- Windows Presentation Foundation SDK by Windows Presentation Foundation SDK writers and editors. Might be more interesting, but OK nevertheless.
- Expression Blend and Design – The team blog of the Expression Blend and Design products
40+ Essential Front End Web Developer Cheat Sheets lists essential cheat sheets for the most common web technologies, including both client-side (e.g. HTML, XHTML, CSS, javascript, jQuery, etc.) and server-side (php, ASP.NET, etc.) markup and development.
19
Jun
09
Font Burner
Font Burner makes it possible for you to use new fonts on your website, even if the end user does not have your chosen font(s) on his computer. There is nothing to install, neither on your computer nor on the end user’s, and the thing is free. The archive of offered fonts is really big (more than 1000 fonts). Really cool!
The only caveat is that, as it is using sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement, see more info) to change the fonts, it is likely rather impractical to use it for anything bigger than headings. Basically it hides the text and puts a Flash file in its place, and that Flash file is able to render the chosen font.
Nice collections of tips:
While searching for a solution to DRM-related troubles with film2home.fi video on demand service (gosh! no wonder that VoD purchasing rate is abysmal over here!) I have bumped into a Windows Media Player: WMP mini FAQ – an absolutely great collection of remedies to all kinds of Windows Media Player problems. Did not manage to solve my (in fact, film2home’s) problem though… :)
31
May
09
Today’s Sites/Blogs
- TomasP.Net blog by Tomas Petricek, author of Functional Programming for the Real World: With Examples in F# and C# (have not read this book yet, so no idea how good it is), features plenty of interesting information about functional programming in general, and in F# in particular.
The Top 10 steps to optimize data access in SQL Server article series at CodeProject, despite some mistakes and arguable things, is not that bad starter’s guide for the SQL Server optimization question:
- Part I: Use Indexing
- Part II: Re-factor TSQLs and Apply Best Practices
- Part III: Apply Advanced Indexing and Denormalization
- Part IV: Diagnose Database Performance Problems
- Part V: Optimize Database Files and Apply Partitioning (is on the way)
30
May
09
Security: Banned C Functions
memcpy() Is Going to Be Banned article at InfoQ talks about dangers of memcpy (and other memory/string related functions). Microsoft has more in-depth explanations as well as the list of Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Banned Function Calls at MSDN. Also available from Microsoft is banned.h header file that, once included, will produce warnings for all the banned functions. Alternatively one can use the /W4-C4996 compiler option.
Adobe did something I think all other smart software companies should do – started Adobe Flex Builder 3 Professional for unemployed developers program. The program is open worldwide and targets all unemployed developers.
01
Apr
09
WPF: Data Virtualization
WPF: Data Virtualization article at CodeProject shows a different approach to the data virtualization for WPF ItemsControls – a collection class providing data virtualization with large data sets.
03
Mar
09
Win32/C++ Resources
A “healthy set” of Win32 and C++-related links (related stuff, anyway):
- MVP Tips, Techniques, and Goodies by Joseph M. Newcomer has a lot of C++ and Win32 topics, covering all “gray” areas like asynchronous operations, synchronization, threading, memory leaks, optimizations, various Windows APIs, device drivers, etc. For example, there is An introduction to memory damage problems that goes thoroughly through the topic, or absolutely fantastic The n Habits of Highly Defective Windows Applications that nicely enumerates ugliest “no-no’s” one should avoid in his code if he wants to sleep well :)
- C++ In Action, book by Bartosz Milewski. Cool thing is that there is a web edition of the book. Additionally, on the C++ Resources page there is Windows API Tutorial, RSWL: Free Windows Library, and some other papers and presentations, including topics on Resource Management, something called auto_vector ;) , and rather interesting Dealing with Software Complexity presentation.
- Win32 samples has a lot of samples for Net*() APIs, as well as for LSA, NTFS streams, processes, security
02
Mar
09
Quince – UX Pattern Explorer
Found Quince – UX Pattern Explorer (UX stands for User Experience – a “modern” hype-replacement word for the now “old fashined” UI) some time ago and decided to save it. It is what it claims to be – the explorer of the user interface patterns. It is one of the few things that Infragistics ever got right, perhaps the only one.
