General Development Archive

The use of inheritance in VB.NET requires you to make several extra design decisions. This chapter from "Building Applications and Components with Visual Basic .NET" will help you learn how to make those decisions.

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.

On Monday, the Subversion project is scheduled to release version 1.0 of their version control system, under development for several years now. Subversion was intended from its inception as the CVS replacement and it comes with many important features previously found only on commercial VCS like Perforce. It was designed for better remote performance, and it is multi-platform with a GUI/CLI front-end.

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).

Recently GCC 3.3.3 was released. Slackware is one of the first distros offering it in its unstable branch. Also check the short article "Debugging Tools for C on Linux Platform" at LinuxGazette.com.

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.

It's easy to get lost in the world of "little languages" -- quite a few have been written to scratch some itch of a company, individual, or project. Rexx is one of these languages, with a long history of use on IBM operating systems, and good current implementations for Linux and other Free Software operating systems. Rexx occupies a useful ecological niche between the relative crudeness of shell scripting and the cumbersome formality of full systems languages.

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.

Get the latest DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli, and WebSphere Linux code from IBM on DVD, for free. This is the fastest way to get access to all of IBM middleware that has been ported to Linux. The package contains almost 8 GB of IBM tools and products at no charge, including Rational Rose and PurifyPlus, WebSphere Studio Site Developer, WebSphere SDK for Web services, WebSphere Application Server, DB2 Universal Database, Tivoli Access Manager, and Lotus Domino Server.

Chris Sells begins his "Longhorn" Solitaire project at the ground floor, exploring the initial decisions developers will make when building new applications targeting Longhorn. Elsewhere, Microsoft Research released the source code of the "Allegiance" 3D game.

Hans Reiser of the ReiserFS project created benchmarking tests designed to be fairly representative of the file-size distribution of most users. "Reiser4 does quite well on all benchmarks," he said. "With , we took five different technical gambles, and all of them worked. The result is very high.

The canvas widget in the Tk toolkit is a powerful free software tool for creating and manipulating structured graphics.

Memory management is scary. It should be: A lot can go wrong—often very wrong. But a moderately experienced C or C++ programmer can learn and understand memory hazards completely. Once you have that knowledge, you should feel only confidence, not fear. Read the article here.

Learn the basics of transformation, coordinate systems, the role of coordinate systems in the transformation process, and transformation functionality using GDI+ with C#. Find out how to distinguish among global, local, and composite transformations, how to use the Graphics class transformations in applications, and how to translate, scale, shear, and rotate graphics objects.