General Development Archive

NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) is a tool that allows programmers to create such installers for Windows. It is released under an open source license and is completely free for any use. After almost two years of development the NSIS 2 Team is happy to announce the release of NSIS 2.0.

ACMQueue has four interesting articles on developer's collaboration and distributed development: "Building Collaboration into IDEs", "Culture Surprises in Remote Software Development Teams", "The Sun Never Sets on Distributed Development" and "Distributed Development Lessons Learned".

This guide mainly focuses prime issues that are involved in writing professional code, which is very efficient both in terms of space & time as well as be easily ported to other systems with small changes.

Threads strike fear into the hearts of many programmers. UNIX's process model is simple and well understood, but it is sometimes inefficient. Threading can often allow for substantial improvements in performance, at the cost of a little confusion. This article demystifies the POSIX thread interface, providing practical examples of threaded code for consideration.

A service domain applies autonomic computing principles for aggregating Web services and grid services. The service domain technology provides a service grid and can create, filter, discover, cluster, organize, select, route, recover, and switch Web services and grid services autonomically. Using service domain objects enables you to implement business solutions easily and quickly. In this article, we discuss how to invoke and access a service domain to start the operational phase.

Every C++ program -- and every networking app -- needs a good logging mechanism. ACE provides you with more than one way to handle such things. Consider your application and how you expect it to grow over time. Your choices range from the simple ACE_DEBUG macros to the highly flexible logging service. Regarding .NET, exception handling is more than just throwing and catching objects. There are many design elements in providing a robust system, and providing a sound exception handling, logging, and tracing schema are among the first steps. In this chapter from ".NET Patterns: Architecture, Design, and Process" book, you'll learn best practices for determining when to throw, catch, and log your errors.

CVS, part of the glue that holds open source development together, shows its age. Many competitors have emerged recently, fixing misfeatures and adding new ideas. Shlomi Fish (of the version control comparison fame) explores several current open source version control systems that may be better than CVS for your needs. Email Shlomi on how to add info for your favorite VCS on his comparison page.

Anders Hejlsberg, the lead C# architect, talks with Bruce Eckel and Bill Venners about C# and Java generics, C++ templates, contraints, and the weak-strong typing dial.

Rumors were that Microsoft had shelved its fledgling X# programming language. Instead, the company is forging ahead with it.

There are a few pieces of information on Xen floating around the Web. Some characterize Xen as "the hypothetical extension of C#." Others describe Xen as an amalgamation of Microsoft's Common Language Runtime (CLR), XML and SQL programming language.

This MSDN episode covers the thinking behind the designs of the Windows Schemas and how you can extend the schemas that ship with Windows, create your own schemas, and extend WinFS. Media Player for Win & Mac or the win32_codecs package under Linux/Unix are required to view the video.

theKompany.com announced the availability of BlackAdder 1.0-040112, a Windows/Linux UI development environment for Python based on Qt. BlackAdder combines a visual design environment with debugging, syntax highlighting, ODBC interfaces and extensive documentation into a comprehensive platform for developing Python applications with PyQt.

Roberto Alsina writes: "Tired of long, carefully crafted tutorials trying to show you the quickest way to write a program? Here I take another approach. I just went and did a program (and the tutorial) while checking the clock." And so here you have it: the app, the tutorial, and the timeline.

This article discusses a small-scale benchmark test run on nine modern computer languages or variants: Java 1.3.1, Java 1.4.2, C compiled with gcc 3.3.1, Python 2.3.2, Python compiled with Psyco 1.1.1, and the four languages supported by Microsoft's Visual Studio .NET 2003 development environment: Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual C++, and Visual J#. The benchmark tests arithmetic and trigonometric functions using a variety of data types, and also tests simple file I/O. All tests took place on a Pentium 4-based computer running Windows XP. Update: Delphi version of the benchmark here.