General Development Archive

This essay is a manifesto about software for collaboration -- why the world's future depends on it, why the current crop of tools isn't good enough, and what programmers can and must do about it.

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.

Eclipse is one powerful IDE. I've been using it for a few weeks and in this article, I will be reviewing a few of the features that make it such a wonderful tool.

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.

Here is an introduction to the style of Objective-C Cocoa and some reasons why the author at Kuro5hin hopes more programming will be done in this style in the future.

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.

This tutorial will show you how to create custom widgets using PyQt.

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.

What is C99? Who needs it? Is it available yet? The author discusses the 1999 revision of the ISO C standard, with a focus on the availability of new features on Linux and BSD systems.

Have you ever been using an Open Source application and noticed something horribly wrong? I have and as a skilled maintenance programmer it really tickles my fix-it bone. I know I could fix it if I wanted to but it's just so much effort. Usually it's only when a bug really annoys the hell out of me that I'll even go to the trouble of downloading the source code (or even finding out where I can download the source code from). In the rare moments that I have taken on the feat of fixing someone else's code I've found myself exercising my most mad maintenance programmer skills and I decided to make a little list.

March's LinuxGazette.net and 100th issue includes interesting articles like "Programmer's Toolkit: Profiling programs using gprof", "Python Generator Tricks" and "Fvwm and Session Management".

Zaval's dual licensed LwVCL provides the same API solution for both Java (J2SE & J2ME) and .NET (.NET & Mono). This means that the same API, the same components set, the same functionality, and at last the same look and feel work on both architectures.

This document is the result of various discussions with Mono and MonoDevelop users on their needs to build, package and distribute their software by using Mono Develop. Elsewhere, Eclipse 3.0 M8 has been released. It features many fixes, improvements and new features inlcuding a minor UI facelift.

Those following the evolution of the Reiser4 filesystem will be interested in learning that it has become "fairly stable for average users", so much so that Namesys is soon planning to push patches to 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton. Once the two remaining known bugs are fixed, the warnings against using reiser4 on a production system will likely be removed, KernelTrap reports.