Category Archives: Programming

Programming

What makes a good programmer? Acceptance of meaningless rules and conclusions!

Posted on December 12, 2008 by Bob

Boing Boing has this great post: Comfort with meaninglessness the key to good programmers. Research in the UK on teaching computer science found three groups of students: People who answered the questions using different mental models for different questions. People … Continue reading →

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Stack Overflow Launches: A Programmer’s Resource and Community

Posted on September 15, 2008 by Bob

A new programming site,  Stack Overflow, officially launched (public beta) today. Started by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spoksky, the intent is to provide a forum for getting answers to your programming questions. From the About: Stack Overflow is by programmers, … Continue reading →

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The Dirty Words of Software Development

Posted on August 24, 2008 by Bob

A post today by Jeremy Miller has a (late) Tribute to George Carlin which lists words and phrases that should not be used when discussing software development. I don’t think the list was meant to be comprehensive but it’s a … Continue reading →

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Visualizing Spaghetti Code

Posted on August 19, 2008 by Bob

Is a picture of a computer program really worth a 1000 words? HP seems to think so. Making Sense of Spaghetti Code discusses the visual representation of source code as a marketing tool for their consulting services.  Being from California, … Continue reading →

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Top 10 Concepts That Every Software Engineer Should Know

Posted on July 29, 2008 by Bob

Check out Top 10 Concepts That Every Software Engineer Should Know. The key point here is concepts. These are (arguably) part of the foundation that all good software engineers should have: Interfaces Conventions and Templates Layering Algorithmic Complexity Hashing Caching … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Technology, Tools | 1 Comment

Loading Individual Designer Default Values into Visual Studio .NET Settings

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Bob

The VS.NET Settings designer creates an ApplicationSettingsBase Settings class in Settings.Designer.cs (and optionally Settings.cs).  The default values from the designer are saved in app.config and are loaded into the Settings.Default singleton at runtime. So, now you have a button on … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, Programming, Visual Studio | 1 Comment

Interoperability: Google Protocol Buffers vs. XML

Posted on July 14, 2008 by Bob

Google recently open sourced Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format (documentation, code download). What are Protocol Buffers? Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. The documentation is … Continue reading →

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One Reason Why Linux Isn’t Mainstream: ./configure and make

Posted on June 22, 2008 by Bob

Bare with me, I’ll get to the point of the title by the end of the post. I primarily develop for Microsoft platform targets, so I have a lot of familiarity with Microsoft development tools and operating systems. I also … Continue reading →

Posted in Open Source, Programming, Tools | 3 Comments

.NET Console.Writeline Performance Issues

Posted on May 28, 2008 by Bob

We ran into an interesting problem recently that I have not been able to find documented anywhere. We’re doing real-time USB data acquisition with .NET 2.0. The data bandwidth and processing isn’t overwhelming. Specifically, we expect data packets at 50 … Continue reading →

Posted in .NET, Programming | 1 Comment

Selecting Books About Programming

Posted on May 26, 2008 by Bob

This is tough to do. There are tons of technical books out there. Also, now that the Internet can instantly answer just about any question, the path of least resistance leads to arguments like this: Why I don’t read books. … Continue reading →

Posted in Programming, Technology | 1 Comment