General Development Archive

"Software security is a major concern for the high-tech industry, and the most feared and misunderstood software vulnerability is the buffer overrun. Today, the mention of a buffer overrun is enough to make people stop and listen. All too often, the technical details get lost in the transcription, and the general public comes away with a rather alarming view of a rather fundamental problem. To address this problem, Visual (unmanaged) C++ .NET introduces security checks to assist developers in identifying buffer overruns." Read the rest of the article at MSDN.

WinTasks 4 Pro is a Windows adminstation utility developed by LIUtilities in Sweden. It runs on all major flavors of Windows, however, it is mostly recommended for use on NT/2000 and XP systems. WinTasks is able to list the processes (tasks) on your running system and allows you to manipulate them according to your needs.

IBM WebSphere Developer Domain just came out with a high level comparison of WSAD and Visual Studio.NET. Instead of debating benchmarks, the article examines the major differences and how each company supports Web services.

"In this document, you learn about the differences between class inheritance and interface implementation. Inheritance supports the creation of hierarchical frameworks of increasingly specialized classes that share some code and also add their own customizations. Interfaces allow multiple unrelated classes to share predictable sets of methods and properties. Both interfaces and inheritance provide polymorphism, allowing generic procedures to work with many different kinds of objects. You also saw how object composition allows you to reuse and extend implementation code without inheritance, and how it can be combined with interfaces to support polymorphism. All these techniques enable you to create and revise complex software systems by helping you add new functionality, with minimal need to dig back into old working code." Read the rest of the article at MSDN.

"According to Anders, generics (parametic polymoprhism) is one of the directions in which C# would evolve. Microsoft already has a prototype of the runtime in generics. "The trick is to proceed with caution," he advises." Read the rest of the interview with the creator of C# at TheRegister.

Yet another excerpt (previous articles here and here) from the well known "Modern Operating Systems" book at InformIT (free registration required): "When a page fault occurs, the operating system has to choose a page to remove from memory to make room for the page that has to be brought in. This sample chapter from Modern Operating Systems looks at a variety of page replacement algorithms designed to tackle this problem." InformIT also features two more excerpts this week: "Multithreading and the C++ Type System" from the "Modern C++ Design" book and "Solaris: Cluster and Complex Design Issues" from the "Designing Solutions with Sun Cluster 3.0" book.

"Intel's C++ Compilers for Linux and Windows smoke GNU C and MS Visual C++ in number crunching benchmarks" the article at Open-Magazine suggests. We are not surprised at all, as we already talked about this on OSNews, months ago.

"First of all, there is no a clear winner, XFS is better in some aspects or cases, ReiserFS in others, and both are better than Ext2 in the sense that they are comparable in performance (again, sometimes faster, sometimes slightly slower) but they a journaling file systems, and you already know what are their advantages... And perhaps the most important moral, is that Linux buffer/cache is really impressive and affected, positively, all the figures of my compilations, copies and random reads and writes. So, I would say, buy memory and go journaled ASAP..." Read the rest of the 8-pages long article.

Good news for the Krusader fans, as version 1.0 was released today after 1.5 years of development. Krusader is a KDE/QT-based file manager and being similar to Norton or Midnight Commander it should already have lots of friends among the Linux users. Krusader seems to be today the only real & viable alternative to Konqueror or Nautilus today under a Linux desktop. In a related note, Gnumeric 1.0, the Gnome Office spreadsheet was released recently.

There is a new version for the unstable build of mySQL 4.01, WindowMaker 0.80 (with some nice new features), GCC 3.03, while KDE released version 2.2.2 for FreeBSD and Solaris operating systems.

Eclipse, IBMs open sourced development tool donation (which is now supported by an organization of a number of companies), just got a little stronger as the released their first plugin sub-project. The C and C++ IDE for the Eclipse platform, with focus on Linux development and deployment. On a similar note, developerWorks is offering a trial download for WebSphere Studio Application Developer for Linux which is a pluggable tool-development and integration platform that incorporates the technology found on Eclipse.

The New Order web site, recently published two interesting articles. One is a nicely written BASH programming tutorial, and the other one is an introduction article to ActiveX and its surrounding technologies. Wether you are a Unix geek or a Microsoft newbie developer, a visit to New Order's web site would be time well spent.

The new version of the PHP programming language, PHP 4.1.0, includes several other key improvements: A new input interface for improved security (read below), Highly improved performance in general, Revolutionary performance and stability improvements under Windows. The multithreaded server modules under Windows (ISAPI, Apache, etc.) perform as much as 30 times faster under load! We want to thank Brett Brewer and his team in Microsoft for working with us to improve PHP for Windows. Versioning support for extensions. Right now it's barely being used, but the infrastructure was put in place to support separate version numbers for different extensions. The negative side effect is that loading extensions that were built against old versions of PHP will now result in a crash, instead of in a nice clear message. Make sure you only use extensions built with PHP 4.1.0. Turn-key output compression support. Lots of fixes and new functions.

"I'm going to be honest. For this article, I was planning to show you how to get ext3 up and running on your system. Although that's what I said I'd do, I'm not going to do it. Andrew Morton's excellent "Using the ext3 filesystem in 2.4 kernels" page already does a great job of explaining how to ext3-enable your system, so there's no need for me to repeat all the basics here. Instead, I'm going to delve into some meatier ext3 topics, ones that I think you'll find very useful." Part 8 for this great series of articles. Get links for the previous articles here.