General Development Archive

This guide is aimed at CVS users who want to know more about the new features in Subversion, but it is also useful for someone familiar with source control systems who wants to find out what Subversion offers. Mike Mason is talking about the philosophy and design behind Subversion, how it improves upon CVS, and how to get started using it.

The first release of the Mono port of SharpDevelop, MonoDevelop, is up, here are the release notes (additional screenshots 1, 2). There are no binaries yet for it, but gtksourceview-sharp rpms have been put onto the Mono Red Carpet channel. You will also need the latest version of Mono built with ICU support and the latest GTK#.

Before beginning, I must offer my profuse apologies to Shawn Gordon and the rest of theKompany crew. Shawn sent me the Black Adder software several months ago; however, my schedule ballooned beyond all believable bounds and has stubbornly maintained that ludicrous pace; unfortunately. I have not had an opportunity to write this review until recently, so I am sorry for my tardiness. And now to answer the most obvious question; what is Black Adder?

Metrowerks CodeWarrior for Windows is a C/C++ compiler with code-generation for SSE2 and 3DNow!. Support for GCC compiler extensions. Here are some of its updated features:

A small but growing software company is rolling out a major upgrade that lets developers build standards-based Java and .Net applications with no coding. Kinzan Inc. this week will release Kinzan Studio & Server 4.0, a development and deployment environment that lets developers build enterprise applications through an assembly model by simply linking components in a drag-and-drop format.

Threads can be thought of as lightweight processes, offering many of the advantages of processes without the communication requirements that separate processes require. Threads provide a means to divide the main flow of control into multiple, concurrently executing flows of control. This sample chapter will teach you how to "think multitasking" -- and improve your apps in the process.

Karl Fogel from the Subversion project announced the release 1.0.0 of the CVS replacement version control system which we introduced a few days ago. Developers are recommended to try it over CVS.

CVS is a tool to record, manage and distribute different versions of files. In other words, CVS is a version control system. It allows easy collaborative work, as each of the contributors can work in his local copy at the same time, without fear of overriding each other modifications. It allows the recovery of past versions (useful for tracking bugs), the creation of branches (for experimental development or for releases) and more.

An article about the Visual Component Framework was posted on DevChannel (here and here) a few weeks ago that developers on Slashdot might be interested in. It introduces the Visual Component Framework, a relatively new (project has been in progress for around 3 years) C++ application framework. Built to target Win32 systems first, it is now in the process of being ported to linux (using GTK) and OS X (using Carbon).

Microsoft is moving ahead with plans to deliver its XML programming language to programmers inside and outside the company. Recently OSNews posted an exclusive first look to the Xen language.

With the hype growing to a feverish pitch about the public announcement of Xen, I thought I would share some insight into the knowledge I've had of the language for almost a year and a half. I'm still under orders not to post the video demonstration I have back to my blog (not because the subject matter is Xen, but because apparently the demonstration is internal to Microsoft... I still don't understand this (expecially now that the cat is out of the bag), but it certainly doesn't stop me from sharing some of the information contained in it. This will be an ongoing post as the demonstration is over an hour long, with lots of code samples to boot.

PROMELA is not a programming language. PROMELA is a language for building verification models. As a result of this specialization, PROMELA contains many features that are not found in mainstream programming languages. These features are intended to facilitate the construction of high-level models of distributed systems. Gerard Holzmann provides an overview in this chapter from his book, "The SPIN Model Checker: Primer and Reference Manual."

David LeBlanc introduces a C++ template class that helps reduce the chances of incurring integer arithmetic errors in your code. The code is fast, flexible, and easy to use. Get a handle on optimizing floating-point code using the Microsoft Visual C++ (v8.0) method of managing floating-point semantics. Create fast programs while ensuring that only safe optimizations are performed on floating-point code.

Is there something fundamentally misguided about the way we write programs today? Why is it so difficult, if not impossible, to write bug-free programs that contain more than 20 to 30 million lines of code? Do we need a radical new paradigm shift in programming? If so, what might it look like? One response came from Sun's Victoria Livschitz, a senior IT architect and Java Evangelist who has an interesting history.