General Development Archive

I spend a great deal of time with XML data transfers, and use XSLT on a regular basis to transform, conform, or calculate the XML into formats that I can use. Originally, I used the mapping tool within Microsoft's BizTalk Server 2002 for complex XSLT. Although it had limitations, the tool presented everything in a visual manner that made editing quick and much less painful.

This article is intended to give you a practical recipe for creating a simple Web Control and extending Visual Studio with support for the control. The control itself is a basic Country Code drop down list such as you would find on many profile entry pages.

GCC 3.4.0 was released (mirrors) and it includes numerous new features, improvements & bug fixes.

The future of CVS, Subversion 1.0.2, is now available in the source releases area.

For years the development scene has been dominated by the C family of languages, primarily C itself and its immediate successor C++. Recent years have given rise to other C-descendents, however, such as Sun's Java and Microsoft's C#.

Fans of the C# language will find much to like in Visual C# 2005. Visual Studio 2005 brings a wealth of exciting new features to Visual C# 2005, such as generics, iterators, partial classes, and anonymous methods. While generics is the most talked-about and anticipated feature, especially among C++ developers who are familiar with templates, the other new features are important additions to your Microsoft .NET development arsenal as well. Read more here.

In this installment, David looks at Python's two standard modules for unit testing: unittest and doctest. These modules expand on the capability of the built-in assert statement, which is used for validation of pre-conditions and post-conditions within functions. He discusses the best ways to incorporate testing into Python development, weighing the advantages of different styles for different types of projects.

If it's a good idea to learn proper memory management skills, as Cameron Laird has suggested in his series, then you'll need to gain skill at using the tools that help you do so. In this article, you'll learn how to use a free memory debugging utility and find out how easily it can help you solve memory problems.

In this episode, learn how to make use of some new features added to Visual C++ in Visual Studio 2005. These include adding OpenMP to your application, optimizing your application with Profile-Guided Optimization, and building a 64-bit application.

Delivering an API that is data aware by using ANSI C/C++ compilers' ability to type check function arguments.

The O'Reilly Network has put online a few interesting development articles with subjects of Java & Lisp, Python on OSX and managed C++ on .NET.

The Zero Install system makes software installation not merely easy, but unnecessary. Users run their applications directly from the Internet from the software author's pages. Caching makes this as fast as running a normal application after the first time, and allows off-line use.

The F-Script project released a new version of F-Script, which is an open source, interactive and scripting environment built from scratch for Cocoa, the native Mac OS X object model. F-Script allows interactive exploration, testing and use of Cocoa-based objects and frameworks. It can be used stand-alone or embedded into other applications. This new version comes with many new features, including greatly improved graphical tools for manipulating Cocoa objects.

"To the surprise of few, Apple's Hypercard passed away quietly this week, after life support was finally withdrawn by the company. It had a run of over 16 years - though the last were in circumstances of at best benign neglect. Not a bad duration for a software product, but it still hurts to see it go, since I had some part in its gestation." Read the interesting atricle at PacificAVC.