General Development Archive

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.

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".

After 13 years with Borland, Hejlsberg joined Microsoft in 1996, where he initially worked as an architect of Visual J++ and the Windows Foundation Classes (WFC). Then, Hejlsberg was chief designer of C# and a key participant in the creation of the Microsoft .NET Framework. Today, he leads the ongoing development of the C# programming language. On July 30, 2003, Bruce Eckel, author of Thinking in C++ and Thinking in Java, and Bill Venners, editor-in-chief of Artima.com, met with Anders Hejlsberg in his office at Microsoft. Check out the entire eight-part interview here.

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.

FHS 2.3 include important changes like /media, /svr etc. The filesystem standard has been designed to be used by Unix distribution developers, package developers, and system implementors. However, it is primarily intended to be a reference and not a tutorial on how to manage a Unix filesystem or hierarchy.

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.

This article demonstrates how to use the Architect edition of Borland Delphi 8 for the Microsoft .NET Framework, and specifically the functionality found in the Borland Enterprise Core Objects section, to design an Object Model that is made persistent inside the DB2 UDB SAMPLE database.

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.

This paper by veteran real-time instructor David Kalinsky provides an introduction to the subject of task scheduling, from the perspective of novice embedded systems software developers. It begins with a survey of simple "home-made" task schedulers. Then it introduces the concept of preemption and priority-based preemptive schedulers, as used in off-the-shelf real-time operating systems. It ends with a glimpse into deadline scheduling for hard real-time systems.