General Development Archive

C# is a flexible programming language with a rich set of data types. In this sample chapter, you'll learn the basics of this .NET-centric language (accompanied by instruction in an open source .NET competitor, Mono), with comparisons to other programming languages you may already be familiar with.

In nearly all secure programs, your first line of defense is to check every piece of data you receive. If you can keep malicious data from entering your program, or at least keep it from being processed, your program becomes much harder to attack. This article shows how to validate input -- one of the first lines of defense in any secure program.

"In an ideal world, whenever a program cannot perform a function it exits with a useful error message, giving you enough clues to fix the problem. Unfortunately, we do not live in an ideal world -- at least, not all the time. Sometimes when an application encounters an error, you are none the wiser." Read the article at DevChannel.org by Gerard Beekmans.

ActiveState today announced the release of Visual XSLT 2.0 at the Microsoft PDC. Visual XSLT 2.0 addresses customer's demands for a flexible debugger and a Visual Schema Mapper. The Just-In-Time de-bugger doesn't need source code and automatically senses and debugs code; it is the first of its kind for XSLT. The solution also includes a Visual Schema Mapper that has "drag and drop" functionality.

"Mike Benoit recently posted a link to results from his new and improved file system shootout, using better hardware and running more tests. Using two benchmarks that are designed to measure hard drive and file system performance, Bonnie++ and IOZone, he's compared a number journaling filesystems found in the 2.6 kernel." Read the report at KernelTrap and the actual benchmarks here.

LLVM is a new infrastructure designed for compile-time, link-time, runtime, and "idle-time" optimization of programs from arbitrary programming languages. LLVM is written in C++ and has been developed over the past 3 years at the University of Illinois. It currently supports compilation of C and C++ programs, using front-ends derived from GCC 3.4. New front-ends are being written for Java bytecode and CAML.

"There's a significant shift afoot in storage fundamentals, and it's not storage area networks (SAN) or network attached storage (NAS)-- although both will have critical roles in these new fundamentals. The shift involves the facilitating role that metadata will play in abstracting the specifics about data and where it's stored from the applications, end users, and operating systems requiring access to it." Read the article at ZDNews.

GCC 3.3.2 includes numerous new features, improvements, bug fixes, and other changes. Grab it here. Additionally, this interview at WindowsForDevices is with a young Russian programmer who earlier this year launched a project to port the open source GCC C/C++ compiler and supporting tools (library, manager, linker, etc.) to Windows CE and the Pocket PC platform.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software giant said it is working through ECMA International, the Geneva-based standards organization, to push the development of a standard set of language extensions that will create a binding between the International Standards Organization (ISO) standard C++ programming language and Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure (CLI).

This article shows how to develop a plug-in that embeds the HSQLDB pure-Java relational database server into the Eclipse Workbench. Although not as powerful as DB2 and not as popular as MySQL, HSQLDB can satisfy the needs of a wide range of Java applications, because of its extensibility and low memory/processor requirements. NewsForge also has an article about Eclipse.

In the dawn of the renovation of freedesktop.org's web site, David Zeuthen announced the release of HAL 0.1. HAL is an implementation of a hardware abstraction layer, as defined by Havoc Pennington's paper. It encompasses a shared library for use in applications, a daemon, a hotplug tool, command line tools and a set of stock device info files. Carlos Perelló Marín also announced the design of a similar concept, but it is expected the two projects to merge. More people are encouraged to join this innovative project. Elsewhere, Gnome's Seth Nickell is giving us a first taste of his effort to replace the Init system.

LinuxGazette features interesting articles on their issues for August and September, including an article introducing the assembly language.

Grid computing represents a big step in the world of computing. The technology is still fairly nascent, but at the developerWorks Grid computing zone, they're publishing a steady stream of new articles, tutorials, resources, and tools. Many visitors interested in Grid computing are asking some very basic questions: What do we do with all of this stuff? Where do we start? How do the pieces fit together? What comes next? This page provides an overview for readers who want to learn about Grid computing but don't know where to start. It places the basics of Grid computing into their proper context and ties together relevant developerWorks articles, tutorials, and tips.

Rafeeq Rehman and Christopher Paul explain how to use compilers and assemblers productively in a development environment.