.NET Junkies Blog

Ajaxian

Ambilight Sample; video and canvasSergey Chikuyonok gets his Philips Ambilight foo on as he created a HTML5 video + canvas sample that mimics the TV effect. As the video runs, a snapshot is sent over to JavaScript land where colors are worked out: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   function getMidColors(side) {         var w = buffer.width,                 [...]
» 12 Mar 2010, 3:30 am

YQL Geo library – all your geo needs in pure JavaScriptI just finished doing some talks on geo hacking (slides are available here) and how to use some of the Geo technologies Yahoo and Google provide as part of a University gig in Atlanta. As a lot of the students liked the idea of APIs like GeoPlanet and Placemaker but had a hard time getting [...]
» 11 Mar 2010, 7:04 am

SVG Wow!Erik Dahlström and Vincent Hardy have put together a cool website, called SVG Wow!, that showcases SVG doing things you didn't expect SVG can do: There are alot of unique demos on there. One of my favorites uses SVG, HTML5 Audio, Web Fonts, and YUI to play music accompanied by flying animated lyrics (Chrome and Safari only): There [...]
» 11 Mar 2010, 2:35 am

Ext JS 3.2 beta: stores, components, transitions, and themesThe Ext JS team have announced the 3.2 beta which includes new components and goodness. Take the animated DataView transitions for example: On top of that, the release includes: Multiple sorting and filtering on Ext.data.Store Composite Fields Slider improvements Toolbar plugins: ToolbarReorderer and ToolbarDroppable New Accessibility Theme: compliant with Section 508 of the Disabilities Act. Quality Assurance: Unit Testing: over 180 bug [...]
» 10 Mar 2010, 10:12 pm

CSS3 Please! Instant results… Thank YouPaul Irish and Jonathan Neal have created a fun example of various CSS tweaks that you can make, and see the results instantly. CSS3, Please! lets you play with fancy new rules such as: border-radius box shadow gradients rgba support in backgrounds transforms font-face Really nice way to make tweaks inline in the page..... nicely done. Hope to see some other examples out [...]
» 10 Mar 2010, 5:39 am

HTML MinificationGood old Kangax has been playing with HTML minification and has shared his new tool in an early stage. What does it do? Kangax has forked John Resig's HTML parser which parses the HTML and sends that into the Minifier. This has rules that do things like whitespace optimization, comment removal, and collapsing boolean attributes (e.g. disabled="true" [...]
» 10 Mar 2010, 3:14 am

Harmony: Canvas Drawing ToolHarmony is a new drawing tool, a HTML5/Canvas experiment with great potential. It provides some unique brush styles, and can produce some great-looking charcoal pencil style sketches, among other things. Better to try it out than explain it in words. Creator Mr. Doob (Richard Cabello) explains how he used Canvas to make it darker the [...]
» 10 Mar 2010, 1:50 am

Spectrum Visualization with the HTML5 Audio Data APIThe HTML5 specification introduces the and media elements, and with them the opportunity to dramatically change the way we integrate media on the web. The current HTML5 media API provides ways to play and get limited information about audio and video, but gives no way to programatically access or create such media. We [...]
» 9 Mar 2010, 3:20 am

modulr: a CommonJS module implementation in Ruby for client-side JavaScriptmodulr is a CommonJS module implementation in Ruby for client-side JavaScript Ruby? what does that have anything to do with it? Ah, its from one of those Prototype guys isn't it.... Yup, Tobie is at it again, this time with modulr: modulr accepts a singular file as input (the program) on which is does static analysis to [...]
» 8 Mar 2010, 3:28 am

Friday fun: Let’s translate YUI3 to jQueryI just came across this wonderful Gist on gitHub: PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT:   var $; YUI().use('*', function(Y){   $ = Y.get;   for(var p in Y) {       $[p] = Y[p];   } });   // test $('body').append("boo!");   In case you want to use YUI3 but really really like jQuery syntax :) OK, it breaks the whole sandboxing idea of YUI3, but that's a small price to [...]
» 5 Mar 2010, 5:52 am

Firefox gets hardware acceleration in early stageBass Schouten is a cool name, and the Mozillan has presented Direct2D hardware acceleration. You have to grab Firefox nightly, do the about:config / gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled game, but then you get to see it in action. IE9 showed off how they will support hardware rendering, and I am sure we will see more at MIX, but it is [...]
» 5 Mar 2010, 3:25 am

ASP.NET

ASP.NET MVC 2 RTM Now AvailableASP.NET MVC is a free, fully supported framework to quickly build powerful, standards-based Web sites. Read our What's New in ASP.NET MVC 2 document or visit our ASP.NET MVC section to learn more.
» 10 Mar 2010, 9:00 pm

ASP.NET and Silverlight Conference with Scott Guthrie and Visual Studio 2010 Launch!Hear Scott Guthrie and key speakers talk about Silverlight 4, ASP.NET 4.0, MVC, AJAX etc - and see how it’s all supported in Visual Studio 2010! We'll even throw in the global Launch of Visual Studio 2010! Early bird ends March 8!
» 26 Feb 2010, 9:00 pm

Enhance Your Web Application with Components from the ASP.NET Control GalleryAdd social bookmarking, time and weather, file and folder browsing, and more to your web applications with the newest components in the ASP.NET Control Gallery!
» 24 Feb 2010, 6:00 am

New Articles and Updates to the ASP.NET WikiExpand and share your knowledge about Provider Factory, Xml Serializer, ASP.NET Chart, and more in the ASP.NET Wiki. Earn Community Recognition points by contributing!
» 22 Feb 2010, 9:00 pm

Listen to Four New PodcastsDon't miss The Misfit Geek's chat with Silverlight Geek Jesse Liberty, plus new podcasts from Hanselminutes, .NET Rocks!, and Coding QA.
» 21 Feb 2010, 9:00 pm

Get Popular Web Applications with the Windows Web App GalleryThe Windows Web App Gallery provides instant access to the most popular FREE web applications available today. With just a few clicks you can install any of the over 20 popular web applications such as CMS, blogs, wikis, e-commerce and more. Be up and running in just minutes. For more information or to browse the Application Gallery, please visit the Web Application Gallery page.
» 17 Feb 2010, 12:00 am

Microsoft ASP.NET: Create Dynamic Web ApplicationsAttend an upcoming live webcast or download the on-demand sessions and learn about the improvements in Microsoft ASP.NET 4. Hear about new controls and templating capabilities that enable rich Web development for applications using a variety of server-side technologies, new features of ASP.NET AJAX 4, and enhancements being made to server controls. Dive in and explore this content today.
» 15 Feb 2010, 9:00 pm

New Additions to the ASP.NET Control Gallery!Add GIS, multiple file uploading, image resizing, and additional capabilities to your web applications with the newest additions to the ASP.NET Control Gallery.
» 11 Feb 2010, 9:00 pm

ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidates Now Available!Download ASP.NET 4 RC and Visual Studio 2010 RC which are now available with "go-live" licenses that allow you to use them on production machines. To learn more about this release, read Scott Guthrie’s blog post.
» 10 Feb 2010, 9:00 pm

Download ASP.NET MVC 2 Release Candidate 2ASP.NET MVC is a free, fully supported framework that enables developers to quickly build standards-based, SEO-friendly Web sites by offering complete control over the HTML and URLs. Learn more about this release, and provide feedback to the team.
» 4 Feb 2010, 9:00 pm

New Articles and Updates to the ASP.NET WikiExpand and share your knowledge about the AJAX Control Toolkit, ASP.NET Open Source Projects, Web Services, and more in the ASP.NET Wiki. Earn Community Recognition points by contributing!
» 3 Feb 2010, 9:00 pm

Code Project

Building Better Buttons in Expression BlendA beginner's guide to building robust, scalable, and easily editable buttons.
» 13 Mar 2010, 9:29 am

Windows Ribbon for WinForms, Part 11 – DropDownGallery, SplitButtonGallery and InRibbonGalleryIn this article I'll present how to use the ribbon drop down gallery, split button gallery and in ribbon gallery controls.
» 13 Mar 2010, 6:16 am

An S/MIME Library for Sending Signed and Encrypted E-mailSend signed and encrypted e-mail in accordance with RFC 2633
» 13 Mar 2010, 4:53 am

Embed Python in MFC DialogDemo to show use of Python Interpreter to evaluate methematical expressions
» 13 Mar 2010, 4:47 am

Automatically Install Multiple CAB Files to a Windows Mobile/Pocket PC DeviceA solution that uses threading and ActiveSync to automate the process of installing multiple CAB files to a Windows Mobile or Pocket PC device
» 13 Mar 2010, 4:46 am

Truncate Log File in SQL Server 2005A tool that facilitates the truncation of SQL log file
» 12 Mar 2010, 9:22 pm

BigInteger LibraryA .NET 2.0 library for the 64 bit optimized handling of very large integers, up to 10240 binary digits or approximately (safe to use) 3000 decimal digits
» 12 Mar 2010, 3:49 pm

Create singleton with parameters in constructorThis article describes how you can create singletons which uses a constructor with one or more parameters.
» 12 Mar 2010, 2:29 pm

Your First Step to the Silverlight Voice/Video Chatting Client/ServerWhat you should to do to Create your own Silverlight Voice/Video chatting system
» 12 Mar 2010, 2:25 pm

C# Date Time ParserParsing date and (or) time from a string.
» 12 Mar 2010, 12:55 pm

Site Map Web Part for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS)Displays the site structure in a hierarchical tree that is expandable and collapsible
» 12 Mar 2010, 12:52 pm

Coding Horror

The Non-Programming ProgrammerI find it difficult to believe, but the reports keep pouring in via Twitter and email: many candidates who show up for programming job interviews can't program. At all. Consider this recent email from Mike Lin: The article Why Can't Programmers... Program? changed the way I did interviews. I used to lead off by building rapport. That proved to be too time-consuming when, as you mentioned, the vast majority of candidates were simply non-technical. So I started leading off with technical questions. First progressing from easy to hard questions. Then I noticed I identified the rejects faster if I went the other way – hard questions first – so long as the hard questions were still in the "if you don't know this then you can't work here"
» 22 Feb 2010, 2:41 am

Welcome Back CommentsI apologize for the scarcity of updates lately. There have been two things in the way: Continuing fallout from International Backup Awareness Day, which meant all updates to Coding Horror from that point onward were hand-edited text files. Which, believe me, isn't nearly as sexy as it … uh … doesn't sound. I am presenting and conducting a workshop at Webstock 2010 in New Zealand. This is a two week trip I'm taking with the whole family, including our little buddy Rock Hard Awesome, so the preparations have been more intense than usual. On top of all that, according to the program, I just found that my presentation involves interpretive dance, too. Man. I wish someone had told me! My moves are so rusty, they've barely improved from E
» 12 Feb 2010, 11:03 pm

Cultivate Teams, Not IdeasHow much is a good idea worth? According to Derek Sivers, not much: It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. To make a business, you need to multiply the two. The most brilliant idea, with no execution, is worth $20. The most brilliant idea takes great execution to be worth $20,000,000. That's why I don't want to hear people's ideas. I'm not interested until I see their execution. I was reminded of Mr. Sivers article when this email made the rounds earlier this month: I feel that this story is important to tell you because Kickstarter.com copie
» 25 Jan 2010, 12:00 pm

The Great Newline SchismHave you ever opened a simple little ASCII text file to see it inexplicably displayed as onegiantunbrokenline? Opening the file in a different, smarter text editor results in the file displayed properly in multiple paragraphs. The answer to this puzzle lies in our old friend, invisible characters that we can't see but that are totally not out to get us. Well, except when they are. The invisible problem characters in this case are newlines. Did you ever wonder what was at the end of your lines? As a programmer, I knew there were end of line characters, but I honestly never thought much about them. They just … worked. But newlines aren't a universally accepted standard; they are different depending who you ask, and what platform th
» 18 Jan 2010, 12:00 pm

A Democracy of NetbooksAs a long time reader of Joey DeVilla's excellent blog, Global Nerdy, I take exception to his post Fast Food, Apple Pies, and Why Netbooks Suck: The end result, to my mind, is a device that occupies an uncomfortable, middle ground between laptops and smartphones that tries to please everyone and pleases no one. Consider the factors: Size: A bit too large to go into your pocket; a bit too small for regular day-to-day work. Power: Slightly more capable than a smartphone; slightly less capable than a laptop. Price: Slightly higher than a higher-end smartphone but lacking a phone's capability and portability; slightly lower than a lower-end notebook but lacking a notebook's speed and storage. To summarize: Slightly bigger and pricier th
» 10 Jan 2010, 12:00 pm

Responsible Open Source Code ParentingI'm a big fan of John Gruber's Markdown. When it comes to humane markup languages for the web, I don't think anyone's quite nailed it like Mr. Gruber. His philosophy was clear from the outset: Markdown is intended to be as easy-to-read and easy-to-write as is feasible. Readability, however, is emphasized above all else. A Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions. While Markdown’s syntax has been influenced by several existing text-to-HTML filters — including Setext, atx, Textile, reStructuredText, Grutatext, and EtText — the single biggest source of inspiration for Markdown’s syntax is the format of plain text email. I
» 29 Dec 2009, 12:00 pm

Building a PC, Part VI: RebuildingI can't believe it's been almost two and a half years since I built my last PC. I originally documented that process in a series of posts: Building a PC, Part I: Minimal boot Building a PC, Part II: Burn in Building a PC, Part III: Overclocking Building a PC, Part IV: Now It's Your Turn Building a PC, Part V: Upgrading Now, lest you think I am some kind of freakish, cave-dwelling luddite, what with my ancient two and a half year old PC, I have upgraded the CPU, upgraded the hard drive, and upgraded the video card since then. I also went from 4 GB of RAM to 8 GB of RAM, but I didn't happen to blog about that. Normal computers age in dog years -- every year they get seven years older -- but mine isn't so bad with all my upgrades! I s
» 17 Dec 2009, 12:00 pm

International Backup Awareness DayYou may notice that commenting is currently disabled, and many old Coding Horror posts are missing images. That's because, sometime early on Friday, the server this blog is hosted on suffered catastrophic data loss. Here's what happened: The server experienced routine hard drive failure. Because of the hard drive failure, the virtual machine image hosting this blog was corrupted. Because the blog was hosted in a virtual machine, the standard daily backup procedures at the host were unable to ever back it up. Because I am an idiot, I didn't have my own (recent) backups of Coding Horror. Man, I wish I had read some good blog entries on backup strategies! Because there were no good backups, there was catastrophic data loss. Fin,
» 14 Dec 2009, 12:00 pm

Microformats: Boon or Bane?I recently added microformat support to the free public CVs at careers.stackoverflow.com by popular demand. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. The official microformat "elevator pitch" tells us nothing useful. That's not a good sign. It doesn't get much better on the learn more link, either. I'm left scratching my head, wondering why I should care. What problem, exactly, do microformats solve for me as a user? As a software developer? There's lots of hand-wavy talk about data, but precious little in the way of concrete stories or real world examples. But I have a real world example: a CV. To some human resource departments
» 10 Dec 2009, 12:00 pm

Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It AnywayI've been unhappy with every single piece of software I've ever released. Partly because, like many software developers, I'm a perfectionist. And then, there are inevitably … problems: The schedule was too aggressive and too short. We need more time! We ran into unforeseen technical problems that forced us to make compromises we are uncomfortable with. We had the wrong design, and needed to change it in the middle of development. Our team experienced internal friction between team members that we didn't anticipate. The customers weren't who we thought they were. Communication between the designers, developers, and project team wasn't as efficient as we thought it would be. We overestimated how quickly we could learn a new technology.
» 3 Dec 2009, 12:00 pm

dZone

24 Beautiful Web Designs Across the Color SpectrumSeveral weeks ago a series of posts on color in website design was completed. Each week some inspiring website designs that primarily utilized a certain color were examined. Today, we examine the best of the bunch and highlight 3-4 favorites in each color.
» 13 Mar 2010, 9:40 am

Latency, Requests, CSS Sprites, and YouDid you know that often times the slowest part of loading a web page for the first time can be attributed to the inherent latency from multiple requests? In fact, most modern web pages consist of much more than a single html file. Most pages also have an external css file, sometimes a js file or two, and multiple images. It's not uncommon to see over 20 files altogether necessary for just one web page.
» 13 Mar 2010, 7:51 am

Daily Dose - ASP.NET MVC 2 Has ArrivedASP.NET MVC 2 was just released, along with Google's new test runner for it's browser testing tool, Sputnik.
» 13 Mar 2010, 7:50 am

10 Reasons Why Microsoft Bing Is Gaining on GoogleNews Analysis: Although Google still controls a significant portion of the search space, evidence suggests that Bing is gradually gaining ground on the search giant. It still has a long way to go. But if things keep up as they are, Bing may prove to be a formidable competitor for Google in a few short years.
» 13 Mar 2010, 7:26 am

30 Useful jQuery TechniquesjQuery is a lightweight cross-browser JavaScript library that emphasizes interaction between JavaScript and HTML. It was released in January 2006 at BarCamp NYC by John Resig. Used by over 27% of the 10,000 most visited websites, jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library in use today.
» 13 Mar 2010, 6:06 am

CodeIgniter 2.0 Is BakingJust when I was loosing all hopes about CodeIgniter, yesterday EllisLab announced about their move to assembla and mercurial, in that there was a small but significant news about CodeIgniter 2.0.
» 13 Mar 2010, 5:30 am

HTML5 appsLet's re-brand standards-based mobile websites and applications, definitely including W3C Widgets, as “HTML5 apps.” People outside our little technical circle are already aware of the existence of HTML5, and I don’t think it needs much of an effort to elevate it to full buzzwordiness.
» 13 Mar 2010, 4:29 am

Using C++0x Lambda Expressions in Microsoft Visual StudioIn this C++ tutorial, learn how to utilize Lambda expressions in your C++ Applications.
» 13 Mar 2010, 4:25 am

The Java Memory ModelIn this first blog entry of the Java OutOfMemoryError series I start to explain the fundamentals and architecture of the Java Memory Model.
» 13 Mar 2010, 3:30 am

Dynamic Charts with HTML5, Canvas, and Flotr for PrototypeHumbleFinance is an HTML5 data visualization tool written as a demonstration of interactive graphing in HTML5. It is similar to the Flash tool on http://finance.google.com/. The tool itself is written entirely in JavaScript, using the Prototype and Flotr libraries. It can be used to display any two 2-D data sets of real numerical data which share an axis.
» 13 Mar 2010, 12:23 am

Mono, C# Simple RSS readerSimple RSS reader
» 12 Mar 2010, 11:31 pm

Java.net

Scala Recognition Continues to GrowTwo years ago, a java.net poll asked Have you tried Scala? At that time, 38% of respondants had no idea what Scala was. This past week's java.net poll suggests that recognition of Scala has grown considerably in the past two years. A total of 416 votes were cast in the poll. The exact question and results were: What's your view of Scala's future? 17% (72 votes) - Scala will become a widely used mainstream language 27% (112 votes) - Scala will have a devoted user community long into the future 19% (79 votes) - Scala will never see widespread use 12% (50 votes) - I won't know until I try out Scala (which I plan to do) 11% (46 votes) - I don't know 14% (57 votes) - What's Scala? In one sense, you could say that these numbers (remembe
» 12 Mar 2010, 9:31 am

Prognostications: What Will Programming Look Like in 2035?Prognostication is always fun, whether you're thinking up your own predictions, or reading someone else's. As apparently a great many people have noted, "prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." (Was that Yogi Berra? Niels Bohr? Einstein? Mark Twain? Is it an ancient Chinese proverb?) This reality does not faze Bruce Eckel, who just posted Programming in the Mid-Future. What's the "mid-future"? About 25 years from now. Bruce starts out with: In 25 years or so, we'll look at the current morass as only a small step above assembly-language programming. An interesting way to look at this is to think back to the state of programming 25 years ago, in 1985. If you take that state, compare it to today's state, then "project"
» 11 Mar 2010, 9:34 am

James Gosling: JavaOne Call for Papers Closes Soon!James Gosling sent out a reminder asking people to Submit your JavaOne abstracts! Yes, JavaOne is indeed happening, and if you want to participate via presenting a session, you only have until Sunday night (US Pacific time) to submit your proposal. In James's words: [In] case you hadn't noticed :-) despite the recent transition, JavaOne is indeed happening. The call for papers went out a while ago, and it's it's about to close, so submit your proposal today!. It promises to be a giant year with JavaOne being just a few blocks from Oracle OpenWorld. That few blocks should provide a gap of sanity (opportunity?) between the Geeks and the BizTypes. San Francisco will be bursting at the seams. I expect this year's JavaOne to have m
» 10 Mar 2010, 6:10 am

Kirill Grouchnikov Introduces Trident 1.2In his latest post at Pushing Pixels, Kirill Grouchnikov talks about what's New in Trident 1.2. The Trident animation library has as its objective providing "a powerful and extensible animation library for Java applications." The library is available under the BSD license. Java 6+ is required for using the library, both at compile time and at runtime. Here is Kirill's introduction to Trident 1.2: The Trident animation library was born in February 2009 out of the internal animation layer used in Substance look-and-feel over the last three years. A year after, it is nearing its third official release which focuses mainly on stabilizing the API and ironing out the existing bugs. The major milestone for this release is moving Substance
» 9 Mar 2010, 5:35 am

In Fond Memory of Our Friend, Felipe GaúchoBy now, probably many people in the java.net community are aware that we have -- completely unexpectedly, and out of the blue -- lost one of the most enthusiastic, bright, and kind members of the java.net community: Felipe Gaúcho. Clearly, there are many people in our community who knew Felipe better than I did; and clearly there are many who never had any personal contact with him, but who read his blogs and articles; and there are undoubtedly many people who are reading this who have no idea who Felipe was. I will tell you a little story. Because, indeed, my contact with Felipe was minimal. Yet, those brief contacts made an enduring impression on me. Such that, when I came home late Saturday night, turned on my computer, brought up my
» 7 Mar 2010, 11:07 pm

Poll Result: a Range of Views on Backward-Compatibility for JavaWhile a diverse range of views was expressed in comments posted to this past week's java.net poll, almost half of the voters considered five years to be the best duration for maintaining backward compatibility. This poll was submitted by java.net community member cowwoc (Gili Tzabari), and it was indeed a very successful poll: 562 votes were cast, and people took the time to post 11 comments. Here's the exact question and results: How far back should Java retain backwards-compatibility? 19% (108 votes) - Across minor releases (Java 1.6) 48% (271 votes) - 5 years back (Java 1.5) 16% (89 votes) - 10 years back (Java 1.3) 12% (69 votes) - As far back as possible (Java 1.1) 4% (20 votes) - I don't know 1% (5 votes) - Other Backward c
» 5 Mar 2010, 11:13 am

New Article: Rethinking Multi-Threaded Design PrinciplesWe've just published a new article, Dibyendu Roy's "Rethinking Multi-Threaded Design Principles". Multi-threaded software engineering continues to gain attention from new audiences as the developer and management communities come to recognize the significance of the Multicore Challenge. The history of software and hardware has been one of ever increasing speed, memory, and software capability. The speed aspect is where we now face a problem. Increases in speed were historically tied to new technologies that enabled successful utilization of ever thinner chips. The problem today is that we're down to a rather small number of atoms. Since we can't shrink atoms themselves, it's a considerable technological challenge to make an individual ch
» 4 Mar 2010, 5:38 am

It All Depends on What the Meaning of Equals EqualsI found Joseph Darcy's recent post "Notions of Floating-Point Equality" interesting, informative, and even entertaining. If you've done scientific programming, you're probably familiar with the problems of floating point uncertainties, significant digits, divisions by zero that really wouldn't happen if you were doing the calculation with pencil and paper, tests of whether the values stored in two memory locations are equal, etc. It's a pain in the neck, really, dealing with these issues in a program. So, what does the == operator really mean? I'm kind of reminded of a famous quote from a former United States president. When asked a particular question, his response was: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." So what is the m
» 3 Mar 2010, 9:06 am

JUG-AFRICA Promotes Continent-Wide CollaborationYesterday and today, I've featured the first two blog posts by Jean-Francois Bonbhel on the java.net home page. Jean-Francois is the founder of JUG-AFRICA, an umbrella for Java User Groups located in Africa. The objective behind JUG-AFRICA is to help African JUGs "collaborate globally in ways that will ultimately benefit Java developer communities locally." As he says in his latest post, "Did you say JUG ? Java User ... What ?", Jean-Francois is a relative newcomer to Java User Groups: Is it still possible to ask this question in 2010? Isn’t the answer obvious? Well no! It was the question I was asking myself three years ago, even though I had been working as a consultant and Java trainer for seven years. In 2007, my ex-colleague Éric
» 2 Mar 2010, 5:44 am

In the Spotlight: LWUIT Featured App GalleryThis week's java.net Spotlight is the LWUIT Featured App Gallery, and along with it, Shai Almog's related post, "Latest & Greatest In The LWUIT Featured Apps Gallery". If you haven't visited the featured app gallery before, it provides multiple screenshots of about 80 different LWUIT applications. LWUIT, in case you're not familiar with it, is the Lightweight UI Toolkit. It's a project hosted on java.net. Here's the project preface: Writing appealing cross device applications today in Java ME is challenging. Due to implementation differences in fonts, layout, menus, etc. the same application may look and behave very differently on different devices. In addition much of the advanced UI functionality is not accessible in LCDUI and requires t
» 1 Mar 2010, 8:48 am

Joel on Software

Facebook / LinkedIn importersNew StackOverflow developer Kevin Montrose (6,878 reputation) added a neat feature to the career site that makes it a zillion times easier to file a CV if you’ve already put in your job and education history on LinkedIn or FaceBook. Try it out. Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
» 18 Feb 2010, 6:05 am

Raising money for StackOverflowA few people heard me on This Week in Startups (starting at 15:45) asking Jason if we should take money from the first VC who fell into our laps, or spend time doing the Sand Hill Road rounds, meeting more VCs, and doing a road show for the other firms that might be interested in investing. Jason (and his guest James Segil) both agree that we should take more time picking the right partner. We’re going to be in bed with these guys for years, they say, and we have to approach this like picking a spouse. Anyway, people emailed me in shock and surprise that we would even consider VC, considering the things I’ve written. flickr.com/photos/niznoz / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0Why are we seeking venture capital for StackOverflow? Almost ten yea
» 14 Feb 2010, 6:21 pm

HeadcountIn the early days of a technology startup, you tend to have a lot of software developers, and you feel like you could never have enough. If you hire sales and marketing staff too early, they don’t really get much traction, and you may start to think that sales and marketing are a waste of time. This led me, in the early years, to believe that a healthy software company should have a lot of real software developers and maybe no sales and marketing. At one point I entertained the quixotic and, retrospectively, stupid idea of requiring every employee at Fog Creek to be a programmer... even the receptionist would have to have done some BASIC programming in high school to qualify. In the US Marines everyone, even the cooks, is a rifleman. Of
» 11 Feb 2010, 7:12 pm

Why testers?My sister got her kids a little puppy, and they’ve been trying to train it. To live with a dog in the house, you need to teach it not to jump on people, not to poop in the house, to sit on command, and to never, ever, ever chew on the iPad. Never. Good girl. With dogs the main trick to training is that feedback has to be immediate. If you come home to discover that, hours before, the dog tipped over the garbage can in the kitchen, it’s too late for training. You can yell at her but she just won’t get what you’re going on about. Dogs are just not that smart. For programmers, getting better at what you do requires quick feedback, positive and negative, on what you’ve just done. The faster you get the feedback, the faster you’ll
» 26 Jan 2010, 1:04 pm

Rocket Surgery Made EasySteve Krug has written a follow up to his usability classic Don’t Make Me Think. The sequel, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, is a terrific, short, concise, fun guide to running simple “hallway” usability tests to improve the usability of your software and websites. Highly recommended.   Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
» 25 Jan 2010, 1:21 pm

A little less conversation“As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a ‘keep everyone on the same page’ problem. But often what they actually have is a ‘stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something’ problem.” From my latest Inc. column: A Little Less Conversation   Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.
» 22 Jan 2010, 12:33 pm

Secret languageMicrosoft Careers: “If you’re looking for a new role where you’ll focus on one of the biggest issues that is top of mind for KT and Steve B in ‘Compete’, build a complete left to right understanding of the subsidiary, have a large amount of executive exposure, build and manage the activities of a v-team of 13 district Linux& Open Office Compete Leads, and develop a broad set of marketing skills and report to a management team committed to development and recognized for high WHI this is the position for you!” This is ironic, to use the Alanis Morissette meaning of the word [NSFW video]. The whole reason Microsoft even needs a v-team of 13, um, “V DASHES” to compete against Open Office is that they’ve become so insular tha
» 30 Dec 2009, 7:01 am

MySQL Performance Blog

How many fsync / sec FusionIO can handleI recently was asked how many fsync / sec ( and therefore durable transactions / sec) we can get on FusionIO card. It should be easy to test, let's take sysbench fileio benchmark and run, the next command should make it: ./sysbench --test=fileio --file-num=1 --file-total-size=50G --file-fsync-all=on --file-test-mode=seqrewr --max-time=100 --file-block-size=4096 --max-requests=0 run PLAIN TEXT CODE: Operations performed:  0 Read, 922938 [...]
» 4 Mar 2010, 8:09 am

Maximal write througput in MySQLI recently was asked what maximal amount transactions per second we can get using MySQL and XtraDB / InnoDB storage engine if we have high-end server. Good questions, though not easy to answer, as it depends on: - durability setting ( innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 0 or 1 ) ? - do we use binary logs ( [...]
» 28 Feb 2010, 10:53 pm

MySQL 5.5-m2 scalabilityOracle recently announcent MySQL-5.5.2-m2 milestone, and I have a predition that MySQL-5.5 will be announced as GA on MySQL UC 2010 in April. So let's make quick on scalability characteristics we should expect from new release. I made sysbench oltp benchmarks on 10 mln rows (worth 2.5GB of data), on our Dell R900 system ( 16 cores, [...]
» 28 Feb 2010, 9:48 am

Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratioI have not caused a fist fight in a while, so it's time to take off the gloves. I claim that somewhere around of 99% of advice about tuning MySQL's key cache hit ratio is wrong, even when you hear it from experts. There are two major problems with the key buffer hit [...]
» 28 Feb 2010, 9:34 am

Index lock and adaptive search – next two biggest InnoDB problemsRunning many benchmarks on fast storage (FusionIO, SSDs) and multi-cores CPUs system I constantly face two contention problems. So I suspect it's going to be next biggest issues to make InnoDB scaling on high-end system. This is also reason why in benchmarks I posted previously CPU usage is only about 50%, leaving other 50% in idle state. [...]
» 25 Feb 2010, 4:33 pm

Missleading Innodb message on recoveryAs I wrote about 2 years ago the feature of Innodb to store copy of master's position in Slave's Innodb tablespace got broken. There is a lot of discussions at the corresponding bug report while outcome of the fix remained uncertain for me (the bug is market duplicate while the bugs it [...]
» 15 Feb 2010, 7:03 pm

READ-COMMITED vs REPETABLE-READ in tpcc-like loadQuestion what is better isolation level is poping up again and again. Recently it was discussed in InnoDB : Any real performance improvement when using READ COMMITED isolation level ? and in Repeatable read versus read committed for InnoDB . Serge in his post explains why READ COMMITED is better for TPCC load, so why [...]
» 11 Feb 2010, 1:27 pm

Blob Storage in InnodbI'm running in this misconception second time in a week or so, so it is time to blog about it. How blobs are stored in Innodb ? This depends on 3 factors. Blob size; Full row size and Innodb row format. But before we look into how BLOBs [...]
» 9 Feb 2010, 10:54 pm

Introducing percona-patches for 5.1Our patches for 5.0 have attracted significant interest.  You can read about SecondLife's experience here, as well as what Flickr had to say on their blog.  The main improvements come in both performance gains and improvements to diagnostics (such as the improvements to the slow log output, and INDEX_STATISTICS). Despite having many requests to port [...]
» 9 Feb 2010, 9:03 pm

Introducing tpce-like workload for MySQLWe have been using tpcc-mysql benchmark for long time, and there many results published in our blog, but that's just single workload. That's why we are looking into different benchmarks, and one of them is TPCE. Yasufumi made some efforts to make TPCE working with MySQL, and we are making it available for public consideration. You [...]
» 8 Feb 2010, 9:30 am

Ruby Inside

How To Find Ruby User GroupsRuby User Groups (RUGs, for short) are typically informal organizations put together to encourage Ruby developers with certain areas to get together, share ideas, and, often, to have some fun. If you're lacking for inspiration or want to get to know some Rubyists within certain parts of the world (or just around the corner, if you're lucky), heading to a Ruby User Groups' meeting can open a lot of doors. But how can you find them?
» 9 Mar 2010, 6:31 am

Vagrant: EC2-Like Virtual Machine Building and Provisioning from RubyVagrant is a Ruby-based tool for building and deploying virtualized development environments. It uses Oracle's open-source VirtualBox virtualization system along with the Chef configuration management engine along with lots of Ruby goodness to automate the creation and provisioning of virtual machines for development purposes.
» 8 Mar 2010, 1:52 pm

In-depth JRuby Q&A: What Makes JRuby Tick in 2010?JRuby is undoubtedly the most mature of the alternative Ruby implementations. Supporting Ruby 1.8.7 and 1.9.1 (mostly!) and JIT compilation, JRuby is already in use in mission critical Ruby apps and runs scarily fast on the JVM. In this interview with JRuby core member, Charles Nutter, we dig deep into what makes JRuby tick.
» 2 Mar 2010, 8:00 am

New Relic RPM Officially Supports Rack and Sinatra – Finally!New Relic's RPM, an application performance monitoring and reporting system, has today announced it has added full support for Sinatra and Rack-based Ruby applications to its traditionally Rails-centric service. It's been possible to hack in support for non-Rails apps into New Relic before, but this move brings them officially into the fold with all of the features only Rails apps used to be able to take advantage of.
» 24 Feb 2010, 5:50 pm

Building A Well Formed Number Handling Class From ScratchOver on the Ruby Best Practices blog, Robert Klemme walks through the process of building a new numeric class from scratch in Ruby - taking into account all the gotchas and considerations that pop up along the way. Robert's task is harder and more involved than you'd initially suspect.!
» 24 Feb 2010, 5:21 pm

How Ruby Manages Memory and Garbage CollectionGarbage Collection and the Ruby Heap is a presentation given by Joe Damato and Aman Gupta at the recent LA Ruby Conference. You only get the slides for now (all 70 of them!), but they're very detailed and can almost work as a standalone concise e-book on Ruby's garbage collection system.
» 23 Feb 2010, 4:33 pm

5 Chapters of O’Reilly’s Ruby Best Practices – Free!Ruby Best Practices is a book by Gregory Brown (and published by O'Reilly) that looks into the "Ruby way" of doing things in the Ruby language and, specifically, why Rubyists tend to write Ruby the way they do. It's an engaging book and we took a look at it and interviewed Gregory Brown about it just over a year ago.
» 23 Feb 2010, 3:03 pm

Harmony: JavaScript And A DOM Environment In RubyHarmony, from Martin Aumont, is a new Ruby DSL for executing JavaScript and DOM-using code from within Ruby apps. Why's that cool? Well, it enables you to build your own Ruby-level unit tests for JavaScript code within your Web applications - everything can be under one set of test suites!
» 16 Feb 2010, 5:37 pm

Ruby Quicktips: A Tumblelog of Quick Ruby TipsRuby Quicktips is a Tumblr-powered tumblelog (think of a blog but in bite-sized chunks) by Daniel Pietzsch that presents a growing array of Ruby related tips and interesting code snippets. Daniel seems keen for you to contribute, and you can do so on its submissions page. There's an "about us" post if you want to learn more in general.
» 12 Feb 2010, 3:31 pm

11 New Ruby Delights (For If/When You’re Tired of Rails 3.0)Sick of Rails 3.0 yet or still enjoying your Sinatra, Rango, Ramaze, Cramp, or totally non-Web-based development? OK - I've sniffed out 12 new, interesting Ruby related libraries or blog posts just for you! with no Rails whatsoever!
» 11 Feb 2010, 2:40 pm

Switch on the Code

C# Snippet Tutorial - Determining if Aero is EnabledRecently I was working on a project and the UI required minor tweaks depending on whether or not Aero was enabled. Fortunately, I came across an MSDN forum topic with the solution, so I thought I'd share.
» 25 Feb 2010, 6:23 am

WCF Snippet Tutorial - Overloading MethodsThis snippet will show you how to add overloaded functions to your WCF service contracts.
» 22 Feb 2010, 7:30 am

Notepad++ Subversion Plugin adds RevertToday we've release version 1.2 of our Notepad++ Subversion Plugin. We received a comment asking for revert and since it was a pretty straight-forward thing to add, it has been added.
» 18 Feb 2010, 8:30 am

Python Snippet - Random NumbersProgramming, the final frontier......ok, so maybe programming is not really the "final" frontier, but it sure is close. Final frontiers aside, a couple weeks ago we had our second installment into pygame. It was fun, and we added some cool new features. However, after looking over what I wanted to add for the third installment, I decided to go over something in python itself.
» 8 Feb 2010, 4:58 pm

Pygame Primer, Mark 2 - MovementA long time ago, in a tutorial far away... Ok, so maybe it hasn't been that long since our last foray into the world of programming, but it sure seems like it sometimes. On a more serious note, however, a while back we did go over some very basic things involving Python and a library known as Pygame. Today my friends, we will be continuing on this path, and adding to what we build that fateful December day.
» 15 Jan 2010, 8:31 am

2,000,000 Visits and GrowingAnother year has come and gone here at Switch On The Code and that means it's time to look back at 2009 and how we did. First I have say it was a great year and we really did a lot of new things here. We started podcasting, doing video tutorials, and much more. A new version of the site was launched built completely in Drupal just about 1 year ago exactly. Now I really hope that this year will bring just as many goodies.
» 14 Jan 2010, 10:13 am

Rose-Hulman CSSE Unconference Video - Save the Code, Save the WorldThis talk will cover some basic tools that you can start using now that can save you a lot of time on your work. Some of these tools include version control, build systems, static analysis, debuggers, profilers and IDEs.
» 16 Dec 2009, 12:34 pm

Flex Datagrid Percentage Width ColumnsI have a multitude of tutorials on the Flex Datagrid here at Switch On The Code and none of them show you how to use percentage widths in your Datagrid. Now at the surface this seems really easy, but the way they implemented it in Flex is very unintuitive. So, today I am going to show you how to quickly get percentage based columns in your datagrid.
» 15 Dec 2009, 8:45 pm

Rose-Hulman CSSE Unconference Video - Interviewing CompaniesMost conversations about interviews involve how to land the job. What happens when you land the job and you don't love it. The job interview isn't just a one-way experience. Find out how to make best use of job interviews for yourself in the video below.
» 11 Dec 2009, 8:05 am

C# Tutorial - Using the BackgroundWorker ClassIt's a rule that should never be forgotten - don't ever perform work that takes a non-trivial amount of time on the UI thread. Of course you're now wondering, "Where do I perform tasks that take a non-trivial amount of time?". The answer is simple - on a different thread. There are lots of ways to get your work onto another thread, which can include directly creating a Thread or using the ThreadPool.
» 10 Dec 2009, 8:21 am

The Daily Python-URL

#20yearsago I created Python.Guido van Rossum: #20yearsago I created Python.
» 1 Jan 2010, 4:23 am

People Using PythonSteve Holden: People Using Python ["The Python Software Foundation has embarked on a mission to find out more about Python users. We want to know as much about the organizations that use Python as possible. If you want to give us information about any Python usage at all (even organizations other than the one you work for) please fill out this form. We don't even need your details, and we'll filter for duplicates."]
» 11 Aug 2009, 4:07 am

So you want to learn Python?Guido van Rossum: So you want to learn Python?
» 27 May 2009, 10:43 am

Beards of PythonAndy Smith: Beards of Python
» 29 Mar 2009, 9:20 am

Python 0.9.1p1Andrew Dalke: Python 0.9.1p1
» 28 Mar 2009, 10:45 am

One Laptop Battery Later And I'm A Django FanZed Shaw: One Laptop Battery Later And I'm A Django Fan ["One laptop battery later, and I've completed teh django tutorial. Man django is *very* nice."]
» 20 Mar 2009, 3:02 am

Longest common subsequenceThomas Guest: Longest common subsequence ["In this episode we’ll discuss an elegant algorithm which solves our particular problem as a special case. On the way we’ll visit dynamic programming, Python decorators, version control and genetics."]
» 12 Mar 2009, 10:17 am

Help Publicize PyConSteve Holden: Help Publicize PyCon ["It's going to be difficult to get PyCon to exceed last year's numbers given the parlous state of the economy. One way you can help is to male yourself a part of its publicity campaign."]
» 15 Feb 2009, 9:52 pm

Giant, Python Powered Robots.Simon Wittber: Giant, Python Powered Robots. ["These are the robots I've been working on for the last 12 months. They each weigh about 11 tonnes and have a 17 meter reach. The control system is written in Python, with small sections of C which run in hard-real-time to guarantee safety."]
» 28 Jan 2009, 8:19 am

The History of PythonGuido van Rossum: The History of Python ["A series of articles on the history of the Python programming language and its community."]
» 13 Jan 2009, 10:34 am

How to make money with free software...Stani Michiels: How to make money with free software... ["The Dutch Ministry of Finance organized an architecture competition for which a selected group of architectural offices (unstudio, nox, ...) and artists were invited, including myself. The goal of the competition was not to design a building, but the new 5 euro commemorative coin with the theme 'Netherlands and Architecture'. The winner will be rewarded with a nice price, but most of all with the honor: his design will be realized and will be a legal coin within the Netherlands."]
» 30 Oct 2008, 2:16 pm