General Development Archive

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.

For Windows codenamed "Longhorn," Microsoft is investing in the development infrastructure for industry partners, as well as investing in technologies and innovations that continue to expand the PC capabilities and experiences for end-users—including support for advancing technologies such as PCI Express, new storage technologies, and robust advances for both wired and wireless networking. This site provides pointers to technical information for hardware, driver, and firmware engineers who are planning and creating new products that will run Windows "Longhorn."

This whitepaper by a veteran real-time trainer David Kalinsky provides an introduction to the subject of Priority Inversions and Mutexes, from the perspective of embedded systems software developers using a real-time operating system. It discusses unbounded priority inversions, including a detailed example. Then it surveys the differences between mutexes and “classic” semaphores, and the use of priority promotion, priority inheritance and priority ceiling protocols. More articles here.

HAL is a hardware abstraction layer aiming to provide a live list of devices present in the system at any point in time. Version 0.2 was just released. Read more about it in our recent interview with its author.

Borland JBuilder X has been touted as Borland’s most significant release in these two years. Building on the stable foundation of the previous releases, Borland JBuilder X Enterprise Edition introduces support for newer application servers, along with enhanced performances and better overall user experience. With JBuilder X, Borland is taking application development into another level. Read on to find out more.

Subversion is a version control system which aims to replace CVS by incorporating a modern architecture and needed features currently not found on CVS. The latest interim bugfix release of Subversion is ready. This release is to correct for the problems in the 0.35.0 release and affects Windows users only: fix: file handle leak (r8048), fix: UTF-8 path problem (issue #1660).

PythonLabs released the Python language 2.3.3 yesterday. This is a bug-fix release.

If you have a promising young programmer in the family, you might want to take advantage of the extra time together during the holidays to teach a little programming. Michael Norton wrote this tutorial for his fourth grade son, and offers it to Mac DevCenter readers and their children. In just seven easy lessons your child can program a fun drawing program ... and I'm sure that will be just the beginning.

Interchange, though not as well-known as other open source projects like Linux and Apache, nevertheless forms the backbone for many companies' technology efforts, large and small. After being absorbed by Red Hat, then cut loose as that company narrowed its focus, its development community has continued to expand the project, and released version 5.0 yesterday. Read the announcement and the release notes. If you need to build a customized, database-driven web application, check it out.