General Development Archive

Given the nature of open source software, many Linux applications are distributed in a "tarball" containing source code that you must build before you can run the application. Larger applications can take several hours to build. This article shows how you can use the distributed C compiler, distcc, to speed up the compilation of these sources so you can start using them sooner.

Today the Eclipse Foundation announced the availability of the royalty-free 3.0 release of the Eclipse Platform, adding enhancements that improve flexibility, scalability, interoperability and responsiveness. Eclipse is an award-winning universal platform for tools integration, software modeling and testing that has been broadly adopted by commercial vendors, academic institutions and open technology developers. With release 3.0, Eclipse now extends its sophisticated object-oriented development technologies to support a rich-client platform (RCP) that enables construction of desktop applications.

Christoph Schittko discusses various techniques for diagnosing common problems that occur when converting XML to objects and vice versa with XML Serialization technology in the .NET Framework.

Ximian's Jeffrey Stedfast blogs on algorithm optimisations on binary search trees. Update: More of this.

Neural nets, also known as artificial neural networks, mathematically model bioelectrical networks in the brain. Massively parallel and more inductive than deductive, they are used for everything from voice and character recognition to artificial intelligence. Python developer Andrew Blais introduces you to the simplest of the neural nets, the Hopfield -- and his net.py application gives you a hands-on opportunity to explore its ability to reconstruct distorted patterns.

This chapter is a short, casual introduction to Subversion. If you're new to version control, this chapter is definitely for you. We begin with a discussion of general version control concepts, work our way into the specific ideas behind Subversion, and show some simple examples of Subversion in use.

This article gives an overview of Visual SourceSafe, Microsoft's version control technology, and provides a look at where this technology is headed in the future.

This whitepaper from esteemed Linux author and TimeSys product manager William von Hagen discusses the productivity advantages that graphical development tools can bring to embedded Linux development. It uses TimeSys's Eclipse-based TimeStorm tools by way of example, but the material presented is largely vendor-neutral.

There has been a lot of commentary recently about Gnome, and a common source of confusion seems to be Gconf - what is it, how does it work, and so on. Some people even seem to confuse Gconf with the registry database in Windows. I will attempt to clear some of this confusion and give an overview of Gconf, and why it looks the way it does.

common language runtime objects, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Structured Query Language (SQL). Content controls like Button and listable ItemsControls like ListBox have built-in functionality to enable flexible styling of single data items or collections of data items. Sorting, filtering, and grouping can be applied to the data. Read the articles here.

Though not mentioned on the main Eclipse website yet, Eclipse 3.0RC1 is available for download on their main download site.

This second of a three-part article series explains how to write, install, and debug your own tasks to enhance what is possible to build with MSBuild.

Example: You have the Linux 2.4.26 kernel source. Fact: You want to install the newest 2.4.xx kernel. Problem: You have GCC-3.4.0 installed. Solution: Temporarily install GCC-3.3.3. Here's where relink comes in!

For all you developers, click in and vote for your favorite Version Control System!