General Development Archive

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.

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

Here is the sixth lesson in MacDevCenter's ongoing Cocoa tutorial series.

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.

SciTech Software, Inc. today announced that Open Watcom 1.2 has been released and is now available for download from its website. This release contains a large number of new features, product enhancements and several fixes designed to bring Open Watcom to a higher level of quality and compatibility. SciTech, the official maintainers of the Open Watcom project, have also announced the availability of an updated Open Watcom CD, complete with SciTech’s installer for DOS, OS/2, and windows. Support for the update will be handled exclusively through the Open Watcom website.

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.

The C programming language defines two standard memory management functions: malloc() and free(). C programmers frequently use those functions to allocate buffers at run time to pass data between functions. In many situations, however, you cannot predetermine the actual sizes required for the buffers, which may cause several fundamental problems for constructing complex C programs. This article advocates a self-managing, abstract data buffer. It outlines a pseudo-C implementation of the abstract buffer and details the advantages of adopting this mechanism.

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."

The Microsoft eMbedded Visual C++ 4.0 tool delivers a complete desktop development environment for creating applications and system components for Windows CE .NET-powered devices.

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.

CMake is a project that aims at being a replacement for the GNU Build System (Autoconf, Automake and friends). DevChannel asked Andy Cedilnik, one of CMake's core developers, a few questions about the project's philosophies. UPDATE: Part II of the article here.

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).

A brief thread on the lkml discussed whether or not Reiser4 would soon be stable enough to be merged into the 2.6 kernel as an 'experimental filesystem'.

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.