General Development Archive

From DaemonNews: "François Jacques and Jean-Claude Batista have an article on macadamian.com on writing a tiny version of the MSN messenger client on Windows and FreeBSD . The example is available in source code form for free." Our Take: It feels a bit strange to have software compile for the .NET Framework under FreeBSD. It is definately a welcoming addition to FreeBSD, but it still feels a bit strange. We'll get used to it, I guess.

This article over at MSDN explains the different models of threading — single, apartment, and free — and the use of each model. It also introduces a code sample in C# that uses threading to help you write applications that will take advantage of threading. The article also discusses important issues involved in multithreading code.

With the 2.4 release of Linux come many new filesystem possibilities, including Reiserfs, XFS, GFS, and others. These filesystems sound cool, but what exactly can they do, what are they good at, and exactly how do you go about safely using them in a production Linux environment? Daniel Robbins, CEO and president over at Gentoo Linux (and creator of the sophisticated Portage packaging system) answers these questions by showing you how to set up these new advanced filesystems under Linux 2.4. In this final installment (Part 10/10), Daniel shows you how to get XFS up and running on your system and explores some of XFS's more advanced features. Recommended reading is also the previous article, Part 9, exploring XFS's features over the other Linux filesystems. In a similar recent article, Bert Scalzo for Linux Jounral, benchmarks ReiserFS, JFS and ext2/3.

Microsoft Windows' next version will feature a database-like file system. However, something similar was done years ago, at BeOS' BFS. (BeOS experienced) journalist Andrew Orlowski from TheRegister interviewed Benoit Schillings and Dominic Giampaolo (of the BeOS fame) about BFS and the database-like file systems in general.

Many are the developers who prefer Perforce in favor of CVS. There is a new player in the field now though. It is called Vesta and it is a replacement for both CVS and 'make'. It handles source revision control and automated construction. It is the result of over 10 years of research and development at the Compaq/Digital Research Center. Just last August Compaq gave the 'ok' to LGPL Vesta and since then the 4-member team worked hard to finish up the port to x86 Linux (prior to that, Vesta only worked on Alpha and Tru64 systems). Now, the first Free version is available for download. For a summary of some of the features that make Vesta interesting, see this page.

"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.

"One of the great advantages of Cocoa is getting a lot of functionality with little code. There are classes in the Cocoa Framework that handle much of the necessary work in creating applications that have multiple documents. NSDocumentController, NSDocument and its closely related cohort NSWindowController combine to give you a powerful starting point when building your own multiple document applications. The best way to illustrate the power that these classes offer is with an example; that's how HTMLEditor.app was born. HTMLEditor is a basic text editor that has file associations for HTML. No big deal right? Well, over the next month or so, HTMLEditor will be extended to include a number of additional features, forming the basis of a series of articles." Read the rest of the MacOSX Cocoa/Project Builder step-by-step tutorial at StepWise.

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 Ed's previous column, he focused on socket programming and performance within a single system. In a future column he will pick up where he left off, but his topic this month is management of threads and processes in Linux and Windows systems. He walks through the differences between processes and threads, shows how to create and destroy them, and writes a program you can use to study thread management on your systems." Read the intersting aricle at IBM DeveloperWorks.

"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.

Borland on Friday will ship a new software development tool for C++ programmers. The new version, Borland C++ Builder 6, features support for Web services, allowing developers to build software that is accessible over the Internet via PCs, cell phones and other handheld devices. The cost is $2,999 for the enterprise edition, $999 for the professional edition and $69 for the personal edition. In other development news, Rational Software on Tuesday introduced a new software development tool that is compatible with software from Microsoft, IBM and Sun Microsystems. The software company, which has worked mostly with Microsoft in the past, announced Tuesday that its new XDE Professional v2002 product will work with Microsoft's Visual Studio.Net development tools and IBM's rival WebSphere Studio development tools. The XDE, or extended development environment product, has also been designed to support IBM's Eclipse IDE, software based on Sun's Java technology.

"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.

"Ruby. Perhaps you've heard of it? "Oh, yeah, I think it's one of those new object oriented scripting languages", you say. I know a lot of you might be thinking "Not another new language! I'm perfectly happy with (COBOL/C/cshell/awk/Perl/...); why does the world need another programming language?!", while a few others are thinking 'Cool, a new language to explore'." Read the rest of the article, an introduction to the Ruby programming language, at FreshMeat.

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.