General Development Archive

The MIM Visual Development Environment simplifies software programming by turning it into an intuitive visual environment for novice and experienced programmers. Maz Lab claims this is a huge innovation. They sent us --exclusively-- three mockups of their upcoming product (shot 1, shot 2, shot 3). Read more for the full press release.

If you've read 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' and its sequels, you probably remember the Vogons, the incredibly ugly, disgusting, and bad-tempered aliens charged with destroying Earth to clear the path for an intergalactic highway.

"Rumors of a new .NET language have been circulating around the cyber-grapevine for the last year or so, but have picked up speed as of late. The fire was fed by Mary Jo Foley's (columnist, Microsoft Watch) recent news story Add F# To the Alphabet Soup. Strangely enough, there hasn't been a peep from Microsoft. The only published information I can find is hosted on the Microsoft Research (MR) site. So, I donned my thinking cap, and proceeded with reckless abandon. Here begins the tale…" Read the article at ExtremeTech.

Microsoft is offering to Visual Studio .NET 2002 Professional, Enterprise Developer, and Enterprise Architect customers a corresponding upgrade to a Visual Studio .NET 2003 product for only $29 USD. This offer is open until September 30, 2003 and is indeed one of the first signs of yesterday's news that Microsoft is cutting down the prices like crazy in order to beat the rising competition. The original price for the PRO upgrade was about $480 USD (Enterprise and Architect upgrade versions were even pricier).

The most powerful synergy in Microsoft Corp.'s technology portfolio is between its powerful platform services and its reasonably priced, highly capable tools. Wooing developers with seductive ease of use, Microsoft's tools then pave a path of least resistance toward the adoption of each new wave of Windows features. Read the review of Visual Studio.NET at eWeek.

Borland Software last week unveiled the latest update of its flagship Java IDE, JBuilder 9, and disclosed plans for an upcoming line of development tools for the .NET Framework. Version 9 of Borland's venerable JBuilder development environment adds Web services support enhancements and a new integrated solution for developing mobile and wireless applications to run on many devices.

Welcome back to Part 2 of Cocoa 101: Object-Oriented Programming for the Masses! I received a lot of great feedback on my previous article, and I'm looking forward to sharing with you once again what I've learned about Cocoa and the Objective-C language. If you missed Part 1 of this tutorial, read it here.

Only after learning what is under the hood can your programming skills blossom; so, look at how computers first worked and how they have evolved through the years. Read the article at InformIT.

Avoid the overhead of large numbers of very similar classes with the Flyweight pattern. Learn how to recognize instances that are fundamentally the same except for a few parameters, move those variables outside the class instance, and pass them in as part of a method call. There is more development articles for C, C++, Java etc to read, here.

ActiveWin features a review of Visual Studio .NET 2003 development suite. They cover feature-set, usage, installation, pricing and what's still missing.

GCC 3.2.3 is a bug fix release only; there are no new features that were not present in 3.2.2. Changelog.

In this first installment in a series of excerpts from 'Practical Unix & Internet Security', 3rd Edition, you'll find tips and general design principles to code by that will help you avoid security-related bugs.

Conquest is a new filesystem which uses memory to store all metadata, small files (currently based on a size threshold), executables, and shared libraries, leaving only the content of large files on disk.

Andrei Alexandrescu discusses smart pointers, from their simplest aspects to their most complex ones and from the most obvious errors in implementing them to the subtlest ones -- some of which also happen to be the most gruesome. Also, learn how to throw an exception, how to associate handlers, or catch clauses, with a set of program statements using a try block, and how exceptions are handled by catch clauses, exception specifications, and design considerations for programs that use exceptions.