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• Windows Phone 7 developer resources

  - by Daniel Moth

  Developers of Windows Mobile 6.x (and indeed Windows CE) applications still use the rich .NET Compact Framework 3.5 with Visual Studio 2008 for development. That is still a great platform and the Mobile Development Handbook is still a useful resource (if I may say so myself :-). The release of Windows Phone 7, changes the programming paradigm. The programming model has NETCF in its guts, but the developer uses the Silverlight or XNA APIs (and they can call from one into the other). I thought I'd gather here (for your reference and mine) the top 10 resources for getting started. Windows Phone Developer Home - get the official word and latest announcements. Windows Phone Developer Tools RTW - download the free developer tools (on my machine the installation took 30 minutes, over my existing vanilla Visual Studio 2010 install). Windows Phone 7 Jump Start video training - watch the 12 sessions by Wigley/Miles. Windows Phone 7 Developer Training Kit - work through the labs. Windows Phone RSS tag - channel9 has tons more WP7 videos, stay tuned. Windows Phone 7 in 7 Minutes - watch 20 7-minute videos. Programming Windows Phone 7 - read 11 free chapters from Petzold's eBook. The Windows Phone Developer Blog - subscribe to the official blog. Getting Started with Windows Phone Development - explore all links from the MSDN Library root page.            Silverlight for Windows Phone – another root MSDN library page. If after all that you get your hands dirty and still can't find the answer ask questions at the WP7 development MSDN Forum.   On a personal note, I was pleased to see that the Parallel Stacks debugger window works fine with the WP7 project ;-) Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• Game Development World Championship 2013 for all game developers

  - by Hanhviope

  Interested in games and programming? Want to be visible in global game industry? Missing Viope Game Programming Contest 2012? Want to win a trip to Finland, visit top game studio and other attractive rewards? This is your CHANCE! Viope Solutions proudly announces Game Development World Championship 2013, as a sequel of successful Viope Game Programming Contest 2012 WHAT? The contest is organized by Viope Solutions. Students and freelancers are invited to compete in different categories. Participants can compete for Computer/Console game or Mobile Phone game. The competition involves partners and judges from Rovio, Microsoft, Unity, ArtiGames, Housemarque, Redlynx, Remedy, GrandCru, GameReactor and IGDA WHO? The contest is open to everyone around the world. WHERE? The submission of your game will be done via Viope World e-learning platform. WHEN? The contest is open from 08th October 2013 till 26th January 2014. HOW? Individuals and team of up to 4 members can register through our website. For information, please visit website www.viope.com/contest WE CHALLENGE YOU TO CREATE THE BEST GAMES EVER! Share this to all your friends who would be interested in this contest!

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• What are the reasons why Clojure is hyped and PicoLisp widely ignored?

  - by Thorsten

  I recently discovered the Lisp family of programming languages, and it's definitely one of the more diverse and widespread families in the programming language world. I like Elisp because that most wonderful tool Emacs is an Elisp interpreter. But I was looking for one more Lisp dialect to learn and thought Clojure would be the obvious choice nowadays - until I discovered the well hidden gem PicoLisp. That must be the most intelligent programming environment I have ever seen, like taking the best ideas from Lisp and Smalltalk and adding performance and practicability - and the beauty of parsimony. There is even an Emacs-mode for it. PicoLisp must be the productivity world champion when it comes to building business applications with database and web-client - and that's a very common task. It seems that throwing more and more hardware cores at your PicoLisp application makes it faster and faster, and the database is very performant anyway. However, reactions to PicoLisp in in general mailing-lists etc. are almost hostile (envy?), and there is absolutely no hype and very little publicity (ie not one book published). Are there real justified reasons for this (except the vast amount of java-libs accessible by Clojure, I know that one)? Or is the mainstream it getting wrong again (see C vs Lisp, Java vs Smalltalk, Windows vs Linux) and will come to the conclusion 10 years later that the JVM was good as in between solution, but a really fast Lisp interpreter on multicore machines is much better and allows much cleaner concepts? PS 1: Please note: I'm not interested in Scheme or any Common Lisp dialect, although they might be fine languages. It's just PicoLisp vs Clojure. PS 2: another thing I like about PicoLisp is its similarity to Elisp in certain aspects (both are descendants from MacLisp?) - it's easier to learn two similar languages. There is so much "dynamic binding bashing" on the web, but two of the most appealing Lisp applications use it.

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• How to advertise (free) software?

  - by nebukadnezzar

  I'm not sure if this fits on SO, but other SE sites don't seem to fit either, so I understand when this question gets moved, Although I'd like to avoid getting it closed due to being offtopics, since I think that this question might fit, considering this part of the FAQ: Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, ... covers … a specific programming problem ... matters that are unique to the programming profession Sorry for the lengthy Introduction, though. When Software is advertised, it is usually Software for one (or more) specific purpose, such as: Mozilla Firefox - A Web Browser Ubuntu - An Operating System Python - A Programming Language Visual Studio - A Development Studio ... And so on. But when writing Libraries, that is, Software that doesn't necessarily serve one specific purpose, but instead multiple purposes, which are usually supposed to be used inside an application, such as: Irrlicht - A 3D Engine Qt - An Application Framework I'm a developer of the latter kind of Software, and I naturally want to advertise my Software. It's not commercial Software; It's not GPL either. It's completely free (Licensed under the MIT License :-)). I naturally host my stuff at github, which technically makes it very easy to access the software, and I thought that these might be possible options, although I have no experience with them: Submit the Software to Freshmeat, and hope for the best Submit the Software to Sourceforge, and hope someone accidently stumbles over it Write spammails, and get death threats via Mail ... But something tells me that these methods are probably not the best Methods. So, my final question would be, How does the Average Joe Hobby Programmer advertise his/her Software Library? Yes, I know this question is probably getting closed due to being Offtopic on SO. But maybe a move might be better instead.

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• Newbie, deciding Python or Erlang

  - by Joe

  Hi Guys, I'm a Administrator (unix, Linux and some windows apps such as Exchange) by experience and have never worked on any programming language besides C# and scripting on Bash and lately on powershell. I'm starting out as a service provider and using multiple network/server monitoring tools based on open source (nagios, opennms etc) in order to monitor them. At this moment, being inspired by a design that I came up with, to do more than what is available with the open source at this time, I would like to start programming and test some of these ideas. The requirement is that a server software that captures a stream of data and store them in a database(CouchDB or MongoDB preferably) and the client side (agent installed on a server) would be sending this stream of data on a schedule of every 10 minutes or so. For these two core ideas, I have been reading about Python and Erlang besides ruby. I do plan to use either Amazon or Rackspace where the server platform would run. This gives me the scalability needed when we have more customers with many servers. For that reason alone, I thought Erlang was a better fit(I could be totally wrong, new to this game) and I understand that Erlang has limited support in some ways compared to Ruby or Python. But also I'm totally new to the programming realm of things and any advise would be appreciated grately. Jo

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• Why are data structures so important in interviews?

  - by Vamsi Emani

  I am a newbie into the corporate world recently graduated in computers. I am a java/groovy developer. I am a quick learner and I can learn new frameworks, APIs or even programming languages within considerably short amount of time. Albeit that, I must confess that I was not so strong in data structures when I graduated out of college. Through out the campus placements during my graduation, I've witnessed that most of the biggie tech companies like Amazon, Microsoft etc focused mainly on data structures. It appears as if data structures is the only thing that they expect from a graduate. Adding to this, I see that there is this general perspective that a good programmer is necessarily a one with good knowledge about data structures. To be honest, I felt bad about that. I write good code. I follow standard design patterns of coding, I do use data structures but at the superficial level as in java exposed APIs like ArrayLists, LinkedLists etc. But the companies usually focused on the intricate aspects of Data Structures like pointer based memory manipulation and time complexities. Probably because of my java-ish background, Back then, I understood code efficiency and logic only when talked in terms of Object Oriented Programming like Objects, instances, etc but I never drilled down into the level of bits and bytes. I did not want people to look down upon me for this knowledge deficit of mine in Data Structures. So really why all this emphasis on Data Structures? Does, Not having knowledge in Data Structures really effect one's career in programming? Or is the knowledge in this subject really a sufficient basis to differentiate a good and a bad programmer?

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• Is duck typing a subset of polymorphism

  - by Raynos

  From Polymorphism on WIkipedia In computer science, polymorphism is a programming language feature that allows values of different data types to be handled using a uniform interface. From duck typing on Wikipedia In computer programming with object-oriented programming languages, duck typing is a style of dynamic typing in which an object's current set of methods and properties determines the valid semantics, rather than its inheritance from a particular class or implementation of a specific interface. My interpretation is that based on duck typing, the objects methods/properties determine the valid semantics. Meaning that the objects current shape determines the interface it upholds. From polymorphism you can say a function is polymorphic if it accepts multiple different data types as long as they uphold an interface. So if a function can duck type, it can accept multiple different data types and operate on them as long as those data types have the correct methods/properties and thus uphold the interface. (Usage of the term interface is meant not as a code construct but more as a descriptive, documenting construct) What is the correct relationship between ducktyping and polymorphism ? If a language can duck type, does it mean it can do polymorphism ?

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• Nice take on Open Source

  - by EmbeddedInsider

  I just revisited the “Micro Framework”- Microsoft’s bootable runtime, essentially an OS that allows managed code to run on small 32bit CPUs, even without Memory Management.  Things are happening http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/netframework/bb267253.aspx Abstract The Microsoft .NET Micro Framework is a bootable runtime module that brings the advantages of .NET programming to devices too resource-constrained to run other Microsoft embedded platforms. The benefits of developing with the .NET Micro Framework include the C# programming language, a managed execution environment, a substantial subset of the .NET libraries, and Visual Studio™ deployment and debugging. In this white paper we explain why the .NET Micro Framework is an ideal choice for embedded development and provide technical details of the platform’s Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and Common Language Runtime (CLR). “Micro Framework” is an interesting product, it is very low cost, like zero. And it is largely community controlled under the Apache License.  A partner network is building, and the application environment is .NET. I have been following this for some time, and the community open source approach seems to be working.  There are new features/packages emerging, for example an F# programming language (ARGH! I am still wresting with VB and C#). Anyway, what I found most interesting was a port to Tron.  Tron is a very popular Japanese open source intuitive.  It is a very real time, very compact kernel, and is, like the Micro Framework, ‘free as beer’.  One limit on MF was it was not real time.  But the merger with Tron may eliminate that problem.  Certainly, if I were dealing with a consumer product with quantities in the millions (like a SmartGrid device, or a toy) I would seriously consider something out of this technology pool.

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• Frederick .NET User Group June 2010 Meeting

  - by John Blumenauer

  FredNUG is pleased to announce our June speaker will be Pete Brown.  Pete was one FredNUG’s first speakers when the group started and we’re very happy to have him visiting us again to present on Silverlight!  On June 15th @ 6:30 PM, we’ll start with a Visual Studio 2010 Launch with pizza, swag and a presentation about what makes Visual Studio 2010 great.  Then, starting at 7 PM, Pete Brown will present “What’s New in Silverlight 4.”  It looks like a evening filled with newness!   The scheduled agenda is:   6:30 PM - 7:15 PM – Visual Studio 2010 Launch Event plus Pizza/Social Networking/Announcements 7:15 PM - 8:30 PM - Main Topic: What’s New in Silverlight 4 with Pete Brown  Main Topic:  What’s New in Silverlight 4? Speaker Bio: Pete Brown is a Senior Program Manager with Microsoft on the developer community team led by Scott Hanselman, as well as a former Microsoft Silverlight MVP, INETA speaker, and RIA Architect for Applied Information Sciences, where he worked for over 13 years. Pete's focus at Microsoft is the community around client application development (WPF, Silverlight, Windows Phone, Surface, Windows Forms, C++, Native Windows API and more). From his first sprite graphics and custom character sets on the Commodore 64 to 3d modeling and design through to Silverlight, Surface, XNA, and WPF, Pete has always had a deep interest in programming, design, and user experience. His involvement in Silverlight goes back to the Silverlight 1.1 alpha application that he co-wrote and put into production in July 2007. Pete has been programming for fun since 1984, and professionally since 1992. In his spare time, Pete enjoys programming, blogging, designing and building his own woodworking projects and raising his two children with his wife in the suburbs of Maryland. Pete's site and blog is at 10rem.net, and you can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/pete_brown Twitter: http://twitter.com/pete_brown Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pmbrown Pete is a founding member of the CapArea .NET Silverlight SIG. (Visit the CapArea. NET Silverlight SIG here )    8:30 PM - 8:45 PM – RAFFLE! Please join us and get involved in our .NET developers community!

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• What is your definition of a programmer?

  - by Amir Rezaei

  The definition of a programmer is not obvious. It has happened that I have asked questions in this forum where people believe it don’t belong here because it’s not programmer related. I thought this question may clarify the definition. What characteristics, roles and activities do you think defines a programmer? Is there a typical programmer? The technology changes so fast that it may be hard to be typical programmer. From wikipedia: A programmer, computer programmer or coder is someone who writes computer software. The term computer programmer can refer to a specialist in one area of computer programming or to a generalist who writes code for many kinds of software. One who practices or professes a formal approach to programming may also be known as a programmer analyst. A programmer's primary computer language (C, C++, Java, Lisp, Delphi etc.) is often prefixed to the above titles, and those who work in a web environment often prefix their titles with web. The term programmer can be used to refer to a software developer, software engineer, computer scientist, or software analyst. However, members of these professions typically possess other software engineering skills, beyond programming; for this reason, the term programmer is sometimes considered an insulting or derogatory oversimplification of these other professions. This has sparked much debate amongst developers, analysts, computer scientists, programmers, and outsiders who continue to be puzzled at the subtle differences in these occupations

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• Message Passing Interface (MPI)

  So you have installed your cluster and you are done with introductory material on Windows HPC. Now you want to develop an application with the most common programming model: Message Passing Interface.The MPI programming model is a standard with implementations from many vendors. For newbies (like myself!), I have aggregated below links for getting started.Non-Microsoft MPI resources (useful even if you are not on the Windows platform)1. Message Passing Interface on wikipedia. 2. The MPI standard.3. MPICH2 - an MPI implementation.4. Tutorial on MPI by William Gropp.5. MPI patterns presented as a tutorial with sample code. 6. THE official MPI Forum (maintains the standard) including the wiki discussing the MPI future.7. Great MPI tutorial including at the end the MPI Exercise.8. C++ MPI Exercises by John Burkardt.9. Book online: MPI The Complete Reference.MS-MPI10. Windows HPC Server 2008 - Using MS-MPI whitepaper (15 page doc).11. Tracing MPI applications (27 page doc).12. Using Microsoft MPI (TechNet section).13. Windows HPC Server MPI forum (for posting questions). MPI.NET14. MPI.NET Home Page (not owned by Microsoft).15. MPI.NET Tutorial.16. HPC Development using F# using MPI.NET (38 page doc).Next time I'll post resources for the Microsoft Cluster SOA programming model - happy coding... Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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• CodeCritics.com: A no nonsense place for coders to critique code and raise awareness of standards and "good coding standards" [closed]

  - by Visionary Software Solutions

  StackOverflow has been a boon for increasing programming knowledge by allowing developers to ask for help and knowledge related to programming. Oftentimes these questions boil down to: This code is broken, fix it I don't know how to do this Is this the best approach (hard question to answer on StackExchange, but democratic) Oftentimes, however, these questions are discussed at a very high level. "I use web services with a proxy client to ..." But, as Grady Booch is fond of saying "the Truth is raw, naked, running code". Those high level descriptions can be accomplished in any ways. Programming is an Art, and there are an infinite number of different ways to do things. But some are better than others. A site devoted to Q&A can help increase knowledge...a site devoted to critique of code can help elevate standards and result in higher quality knowledge. By upvoting the most elegant ways to solve a short, concise problem statement, or just looking at a piece of code and saying "this is ugly, how can we fix it?" we can increase community participation in discussions about the substantive details of an approach: "is my commenting clear? "Is this 3 nested for-loops with a continue that breaks in a special case a good way of building an object?" "Does this extremely generic and polymorphic inheritance hierarchy have issues?") Code is an art/craft and science/engineering artifact. Doesn't it deserve the same type of review treatment as a painting and an experiment? For praising those that provide that moment of zen when looking at exceptionally good code that makes you believe in a better tomorrow, and panning those whose offal is so offensive that were you to meet them on the job you'd say "YOU! GET OUT!!!" Hence, CodeCritics. A collaborative critiquing platform in the style of StackOverflow focused solely on critiquing code that can act as a collaborative code review and assist in the discovery of Design Patterns.

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• Learning advanced java skills

  - by moe

  I've been programming in java for a while and I really like the language, I've mostly just done game programming, but I want to get a feel for some of the more commonly used api's and frameworks and just get a generally more well-rounded grasp of the language and the common libraries in the current job market. From what I found things like spring, hibernate, and GWT are pretty in demand right now. I looked at some tutorials online and they weren't hard to follow but I really felt like I had no context for what I was learning - I had no idea how any of it would be use in a real work environment. I know nothing can rival the benefit I'd get from actual work experience but that's not an option for me right now, I need another way to learn these technologies in a way where I'll at least feel comfortable working with them and know what I'm doing beyond just understanding what code does what. I checked out a few books but they were all really old(like pre-2006, am I right to assume those books would be kind of out of date today?) or required experience with libraries that I didn't have and can't get. I hate getting stuck looking for the best resource to learn something instead of spending my time actually learning. All I really want is someone to point me to a resource(website or ebook) that is aimed at already experienced java developers and will not only teach me some interesting useful java technology(anything that is useful, I dont know much outside of graphics libraries and game related things so I was thinking some database or web programming api's) but also give me a good perspective of it and leave me feeling confident that I could actually use what I learned on a practical application. If my post makes you think I'm not yet experienced to be learning these things, which I doubted earlier today but am now starting to question, then what do you think is the next step for me? I just want to get better at java. Thanks everyone

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• Can I save & store a user's submission in a way that proves that the data has not been altered, and that the timestamp is accurate?

  - by jt0dd

  There are many situations where the validity of the timestamp attached to a certain post (submission of information) might be invaluable for the post owner's legal usage. I'm not looking for a service to achieve this, as requested in this great question, but rather a method for the achievement of such a service. For the legal (in most any law system) authentication of text content and its submission time, the owner of the content would need to prove: that the timestamp itself has not been altered and was accurate to begin with. that the text content linked to the timestamp had not been altered I'd like to know how to achieve this via programming (not a language-specific solution, but rather the methodology behind the solution). Can a timestamp be validated to being accurate to the time that the content was really submitted? Can data be stored in a form that it can be read, but not written to, in a proven way? In other words, can I save & store a user's submission in a way that proves that the data has not been altered, and that the timestamp is accurate? I can't think of any programming method that would make this possible, but I am not the most experienced programmer out there. Based on MidnightLightning's answer to the question I cited, this sort of thing is being done. Clarification: I'm looking for a method (hashing, encryption, etc) that would allow an average guy like me to achieve the desired effect through programming. I'm interested in this subject for the purpose of Defensive Publication. I'd like to learn a method that allows an every-day programmer to pick up his computer, write a program, pass information through it, and say: I created this text at this moment in time, and I can prove it. This means the information should be protected from the programmer who writes the code as well. Perhaps a 3rd party API would be required. I'm ok with that.

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• Building a common syntax and scoping framework.

  - by Ben DeMott

  Hello fellow programmers, I was discussing a project the other day with a colleague of mine and I was curious to see what others had to say or if such a thing already existed. Background There are many programming languages. There are many IDE's and source editors that highlight and edit source code. Following perfectly and exactly the rules of a language to present auto-complete options and understand scopes in the code is rather complex. This task is complex enough that most IDE's implement different source-editors as plugins that often re-implement the same features over and over but in a different way (netbeans). From what I can tell most IDE's and source editors re-implement parsers that use regular expressions, or some meta-syntax Naur Form to describe the languages grammer generically. These parsers are implemented over and over and over again. Question Has anyone attempted to unify or describe a set of features through an API and have a consistent interface to parsing various programming languages and dialects. I'm not describing an IDE - but a consistent API for any program to use to parse and obtain meta-information from the source code. I realize various programming languages offer many different features which are difficult to 'abstract' into a set of features, but I feel this would be a worthwhile venture. It seems to me that this could possibly allow the authors of interpreters to help maintain a central grammer intepreter for their language. the Python foundation could maintain the Python grammer api, ANSI the C grammer api, Oracle the Java grammer API, etc Example usage If this was API existed code documentation generators could theoretically work across all dialects and languages to some level. It wouldn't matter if your project used 5 different languages a single application could document all of them and the comments and doc-tags within. Has anyone attempted this comprehensively?

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• Computer Science Degrees and Real-World Experience

  - by Steven Elliott Jr

  Recently, at a family reunion-type event I was asked by a high school student how important it is to get a computer science degree in order to get a job as a programmer in lieu of actual programming experience. The kid has been working with Python and the Blender project as he's into making games and the like; it sounds like he has some decent programming chops. Now, as someone that has gone through a computer science degree my initial response to this question is to say, "You absolutely MUST get a computer science degree in order to get a job as a programmer!" However, as I thought about this I was unsure as to whether my initial reaction was due in part to my own suffering as a CS student or because I feel that this is actually the case. Now, for me, I can say that I rarely use anything that I learned in college, in terms of the extremely hard math, algorithms, etc, etc. but I did come away with a decent attitude and the willingness to work through tough problems. I just don't know what to tell this kid; I feel like I should tell him to do the CS degree but I have hired so many programmers that majored in things like English, Philosophy, and other liberal arts-type degrees, even some that never went to college. In fact my best developer, falls into this latter category. He got started writing software for his church or something and then it took off into a passion. So, while I know this is one of those juicy potential down vote questions, I am just curious as to what everyone else thinks about this topic. Would you tell a high school kid about this? Perhaps if he/she already knows a good deal of programming and loves it he doesn't need a CS degree and could expand his horizons with a liberal arts degree. I know one of the creators of the Django web framework was a American Literature major and he is obviously a pretty gifted developer. Anyway, thanks for the consideration.

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• Good ruby book with exercises? [closed]

  - by watabou

  I find that I learn the best with a book that has a number of exercises at the end of each chapters. A great example of this is C++ Primer Plus by Stephen Prata or Scientific Programming with Python or the Horstmann Java books. All of those books have a number of programming exercises at the end tailored to that specific chapter. I love the styles of those book and was wondering if there is anything similar for Ruby. I've extensively searched google for this and people have been suggesting different stuff like different websites like Ruby Koans and LRTHW but honestly, I've tried those and they aren't for me. I taught myself Python with the the Hard Way book and to be honest, it's not for me. Now, forgive me if I'm blunt but does anyone have a Ruby programming BOOK (i.e. not a website), that has EXERCISES in it? I do NOT want a website, unless the book is only or is freely available online by the author, similar to the Hard Way books. I would say that I'm a intermediate level programmer with only some Ruby experience but if you know of a beginner book on Ruby, that is fine too. Thanks in advance, I would really really appreciate the help.

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• Life and Career guidance

  - by Andrei TheGiant Haxtor

  Hello programmers. I have a current dilemma I'm pondering over. I will be graduating from high school with ~60 credits worth of community college work (pre-engineering courses), and I am wondering what would experienced programmers suggest I do with my time since I have all of the bull courses out of the way. Should I start taking computer science/engineering courses or should I take some other courses that interest me?(psych, math) The reason I am asking this is, well , I like doing a lot of self studying, especially relating to software and tech. I don't like to have the pressure of hard classes on me, so I could make up for the time lost doing the CC courses and dive deep in programming and books. I've started getting into programming recently unfortunately, since I didn't have much time b/c of my course load. Right now I am doing Java and messing around with android. I would like to get involved in web&mobile development, operating systems, and finance software. If any of you experienced people could please give me some guidance and words of wisdom, I would greatly appreciated. Sorry that this isn't necessarily related to programming. All the best.

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• Learning to code first game, few questions on basic game development and 3D

  - by ProgrammerByDay

  I've been programming for a while, and I'm concurrently learning how to make a basic game and slimdx, and wanted to talk to someone to hopefully get a few pointers. I've read that Tetris is the "Hello, world" of game programming, which made sense to me, so I decided to give it a shot. I've been able to code up a basic version in a few hours, which I'm quite happy with, but I had a few questions about 3D programming. Right now I'm using Direct3D to do display the blocks without any textures (just colored squares). I have a data structure (2d array of bytes, where each byte denotes the presence of a block and its color) which is the "game board," and on every render() call I create a new vertex buffer of the existing squares in the game board, and draw those primitives. This feels very inefficient, and I wondering what would be the idiomatic way of doing this in a 3D world, with matrix/rotations/translation operations. I know 3D is overkill for such a project, but I want to learn any 3d concepts that I can while I'm doing it. I understand that what you'd usually want to do is keep the same vertices/vertex buffers but manipulate them with matrices to achieve rotations/translations, etc. To do so, I assume what would happen is I'd have one vertex buffer for the "active" piece, since that'll be constantly rotated and moved, and have one vertex buffer for the frozen pieces on the bottom of the board, which is pretty much stationary, but will need to be changed/recreated when the active piece becomes frozen. Right now I'm just clearing and redrawing on every render call, which seems like the easiest way to do things, although I wonder if there's a more efficient way to deal with changes. Obviously there are a lot of questions I'm asking here, but if you can even just point me a step or two ahead in terms of how I should be thinking, it'd be great. Thanks

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 12, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, June 12, 2011Popular ReleasesSizeOnDisk: 1.0.8.4: Fix: Contextual menu failures. Switch to ShellExecuteEx of Win32Api.Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.1 (June 2011) for .NET 4.0: Release of Phalanger 2.1 - the opensource PHP compiler for .NET framework 4.0. Installation package also includes basic version of Phalanger Tools for Visual Studio 2010. This allows you to easily create, build and debug Phalanger web or application inside this ultimate integrated development environment. You can even install the tools into the free Visual Studio 2010 Shell (Integrated). To improve the performance of your application using MySQL, please use Managed MySQL Extension for Phala...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.0.0.7: Version: 2.0.0.7 (Milestone 7): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Remark The sample applications are using Microsoft’s IoC container MEF. However, the WPF Application Framework (WAF) doesn’t force you to use the same IoC container in your application. You can use ...SimplePlanner: v2.0b: For 2011-2012 Sem 1 ???2011-2012 ????Visual Studio 2010 Help Downloader: 1.0.0.3: Domain name support for proxy Cleanup old packages bug Writing to EventLog with UAC enabled bug Small fixes & RefactoringMedia Companion: MC 3.406b weekly: With this version change a movie rebuild is required when first run -else MC will lock up on exit. Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. Refer to the documentation on this site for the Installation & Setup Guide Important! If you find MC not displaying movie data properly, please try a 'movie rebuild' to reload the data from the nfo's into MC's cache. Fixes Movies Readded movie preference to rename invalid or scene nfo's to info ext...Windows Azure VM Assistant: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5: AzureVMAssist V1.0.0.5 (Debug) - Test Release VersionNetOffice - The easiest way to use Office in .NET: NetOffice Release 0.9: Changes: - fix examples (include issue 16026) - add new examples - 32Bit/64Bit Walkthrough is now available in technical Documentation. Includes: - Runtime Binaries and Source Code for .NET Framework:......v2.0, v3.0, v3.5, v4.0 - Tutorials in C# and VB.Net:..............................................................COM Proxy Management, Events, etc. - Examples in C# and VB.Net:............................................................Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access - COMAddi...Reusable Library: V1.1.3: A collection of reusable abstractions for enterprise application developerClosedXML - The easy way to OpenXML: ClosedXML 0.54.0: New on this release: 1) Mayor performance improvements. 2) AdjustToContents now take into account the text rotation. 3) Fixed issues 6782, 6784, 6788HTML-IDEx: HTML-IDEx .15 ALPHA: This release fixes line counting a little bit and adds the masshighlight() sub, which highlights pasted and inserted code.AutoLoL: AutoLoL v2.0.3: - Improved summoner spells are now displayed - Fixed some of the startup errors people got - Double clicking an item selects it - Some usability changes that make using AutoLoL just a little easier - Bug fixes AutoLoL v2 is not an update, but an entirely new version! Please install to a different directory than AutoLoL v1Host Profiles: Host Profiles 1.0: Host Profiles 1.0 Release Quickly modify host file Automatically flush dnsVidCoder: 0.9.2: Updated to HandBrake 4024svn. This fixes problems with mpeg2 sources: corrupted previews, incorrect progress indicators and encodes that incorrectly report as failed. Fixed a problem that prevented target sizes above 2048 MB.SharePoint Search XSL Samples: SharePoint 2010 Samples: I have updated some of the samples from the 2007 release. These all work in SharePoint 2010. I removed the Pivot on File Extension because SharePoint 2010 search has refiners that perform the same function.AcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.0 Beta5: ??AcDown?????????????，??????????????，????、????。?????Acfun????? ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)?.NET Framework 2.0???(x64)，?????"?????????"??? ??v3.0 Beta5 ?????????? ???? ?? ???????? ???"????????"?? ????????????? ????????/???? ?? ???"????"??? ?? ??????????? ?? ?? ??????????? ?? ?????????????????? ??????????????????? ???????????????? ????????????Discussions???????? ????AcDown??????????????VFPX: GoFish 4 Beta 1: Current beta is Build 144 (released 2011-06-07 ) See the GoFish4 info page for details and video link: http://vfpx.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=GoFishShowUI: Write-UI -in PowerShell: ShowUI: ShowUI is a PowerShell module to help you write rich user interfaces in script.SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack: SharePoint 2010 FBA Pack 1.0.3: Fixed User Management screen when "RequiresQuestionAndAnswer" set to true Reply to Email Address can now be customized User Management page now only displays users that reside in the membership database Web parts have been changed to inherit from System.Web.UI.WebControls.WebParts.WebPart, so that they will display on anonymous application pages For installation and configuration steps see here.Babylon Toolkit: Babylon.Toolkit v1.0.4: Note about samples: In order to run samples, you need to configure visual studio to run them as an "Out-of-browser application". in order to do that, go to the property page of a sample project, go to the Debug tab, and check the "Out-of-browser application" radio. New features : New Effects BasicEffect3Lights (3 dir lights instead of 1 position light) CartoonEffect (work in progress) SkinnedEffect (with normal and specular map support) SplattingEffect (for multi-texturing with smooth ...New ProjectsAnything Over Anything (Network Tunneling): Tunneling software created using the Reactive Extensions framework! Rx is not just for events!!!BDDocs - Behavior Driven Documentation: An alternative tool to enable project collaboration between stakeholders in a BDD environment. Focuses more on the domain and its implementation then the technical details of the testing framework.Checkin Policies for TFS 2010: More check-in policies for TFS 2010cheese: Projet d'études sur les jeux d'échecs http://davcha.wordpress.comCodeCrusade: Code Crusade is a programming game based around Lua and C#.Dimensional Values: Dimensional Values is a class library that defines units like inch, foot, meter, second, minute, hour, Newton, Pascal, Hertz, etc. that qualify values stored in classes of different dimensions such as the length dimension, the time dimension, the force dimension, etc. The library takes care of unit conversion automatically and produces higher dimension class objects from the mathematical operators (for example, dividing a length dimensional value by a time dimensional value automatically y...Enlight Adventures: Enlight Adventures is a Windows Phone 7 game that is based on the activities of the Enlight Fountain Control Group at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.Expression Tree Serializer: .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4 class library that serializes and deserializes Expression instances. Also: a WCF IQueryable LINQ Provider and Web Http (REST) client for Silverlight that provides a simplified REST client API (i.e. WCF's WebChannelFactory) that's easier to use than WebClient.F# and C# ASP.NET MVC 3 (Razor) VSIX Project Template Example: This project provides an example of how to create a F# and C# VSIX Project Template made up of a C# ASP.NET MVC 3 web application, a F# Library that contains controllers, models, etc., and a F# Library that can be used to contain unit tests. FreeForm - SilverLight Dynamic Form Builder: FreeForm is a SilverLight4 Dynamic Forms Designer. It is enterprise forms for gathering information and making tools, include a lot of Silverlight4 interface control. Now Give Up InfoPath! TO Use FreeForm! First version online DEMO: http://crmwin.com/TestPage.html?Type=tempInternational Geek Developer Alliance: Take it easy!Kouak - HTTP File Share Server: Kouak is a basic portable file share server over http. He let you share easily files in eterogenous environements and in just few click. He don't need installation and run on every machine from windows xp s2 to windows 7.MARK: MARK is an interpreted programming language, written in PHP, for beginners to learn the fundamentals of programming paradigms. To make learning easier this language cuts the syntactic learning curve out that can hinder learning - hence allowing any beginner to learn the fundamentals of programming easily, whilst having fun with an easy-to-write, powerful programming language.Movie Manager: A tool for personal Movie CollectionNairc: This is a telescope control system project of Nairc.NPD: NPD Trading SystemObjects Library: OLib is a list of objects for programming, Programmers don't have to make alot of own classes anymoreProgressbar Field: The progress bar is typically used when an application performs tasks such as project progress or sales activity. Users of an application might consider an application non-informative if there is no visual cue.PTask: PTask is an API built on the .NET Task API that simplifies the execution in parrallel of dependent units of work. It provides a fluent API for building node dependency structures and executes those structures with the maximum level of parralelization using the thread pool.Quant: quantSharpAuctioneer: A set of classes to parse and read the World of Warcraft Auctioneer Add-On scan data.SimplePlanner: NTU Simple PlannerSiteUnity Framework: SiteUnity Framework makes it easier to build website. The target of framework, write less and simple code to build complex website. For that purpose there are some modules for viewing and managing page. It's develop in Asp.NET using C#, Mssql and Jquery.SMTP Proxy for GMail and Windows Live Mail/Hotmail: GMail and Microsoft Live Mail require encrypted connections (SSL/TLS), but not all software supports SSL/TLS. SmtpProxy accepts unencrypted connections and forwards them to GMail/Live. It runs as a Windows Service and supports ALL email clients. It's developed in C#/.NET4.WipeTouch, a jQuery plugin for touch devices: jQuery plugin for touch wipe events. Detects when user wipes on all 9 directions (top, bottom, left, right and diagonals) and triggers the desired event.

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• Bad at math, feeling limited

  - by Peter Stain

  Currently I'm a java developer, making websites. I'm really bad at math, in high school I got suspened because of it once. I didn't program then and had no interest in math. I started programming after high school and started feeling that my poor math skills are limiting me. I feel like the programming's not that hard for me. Though web development in general is not that hard, i guess. I've been doing Spring and Hibernate a lot. What i'm trying to ask is : if I understand and can manage these technologies and programming overall, would it mean that I have some higher than average prerequisite for math and details? Would there be any point or would it be easy for me to take some courses in high school math and get a BSc in math maybe? This web development is really starting to feel like not my cup of tea anymore, i would like to do something more interesting. I'm 25 now and feel like stuck. Any help appreciated.

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• What is the evidence that an API has exceeded its orthogonality in the context of types?

  - by hawkeye

  Wikipedia defines software orthogonality as: orthogonality in a programming language means that a relatively small set of primitive constructs can be combined in a relatively small number of ways to build the control and data structures of the language. The term is most-frequently used regarding assembly instruction sets, as orthogonal instruction set. Jason Coffin has defined software orthogonality as Highly cohesive components that are loosely coupled to each other produce an orthogonal system. C.Ross has defined software orthogonality as: the property that means "Changing A does not change B". An example of an orthogonal system would be a radio, where changing the station does not change the volume and vice-versa. Now there is a hypothesis published in the the ACM Queue by Tim Bray - that some have called the Bánffy Bray Type System Criteria - which he summarises as: Static typings attractiveness is a direct function (and dynamic typings an inverse function) of API surface size. Dynamic typings attractiveness is a direct function (and static typings an inverse function) of unit testing workability. Now Stuart Halloway has reformulated Banfy Bray as: the more your APIs exceed orthogonality, the better you will like static typing My question is: What is the evidence that an API has exceeded its orthogonality in the context of types? Clarification Tim Bray introduces the idea of orthogonality and APIs. Where you have one API and it is mainly dealing with Strings (ie a web server serving requests and responses), then a uni-typed language (python, ruby) is 'aligned' to that API - because the the type system of these languages isn't sophisticated, but it doesn't matter since you're dealing with Strings anyway. He then moves on to Android programming, which has a whole bunch of sensor APIs, which are all 'different' to the web server API that he was working on previously. Because you're not just dealing with Strings, but with different types, the API is non-orthogonal. Tim's point is that there is a empirical relationship between your 'liking' of types and the API you're programming against. (ie a subjective point is actually objective depending on your context).

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• Learning C, C++ and C#

  - by Zac

  I'm sure you guys are tired of this question but after wading through hours of similar posts and questions I've really not made any progress to my specific concerns. I was hoping you guys could shed some light on a couple of questions I have before I decide on a course of action. BACKGROUND: I'm wanting to enroll in some type of program to learn a programming language/get a certificate/degree to work in the field. I've always been interested and bought a book on VB back in high school and dabbled. Now I want to get serious after a huge hiatus. Question 1: I've read it's counter-productive to learn C first, then C++ or C# because you develop bad habits. In a lot of college courses I've looked at, learning C/C++ is mandatory to advance. Should I ever bother learning C? On a related note, I really don't understand the difference between C and C++, or C# for the matter other than it incorporates .NET (which, I understand, is a compilation of tools and libraries that make programming easier and faster). Question 2: Where did you guys learn to program? Where do you recommend? Is it possible to land a job programming being self-taught? Is my best chance an ITT tech or a regular college? I was going to enroll in a JC and go from there but I can't decide what to do. LAST question :) I heard C++ is being "ported" to .NET. True? And if so, is this going to make C++ a solid, in-demand language to learn? Thanks for looking. :)

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• How to advertise (free) software?

  - by nebukadnezzar

  I'm not sure if this fits on SO, but other SE sites don't seem to fit either, so I understand when this question gets moved, Although I'd like to avoid getting it closed due to being offtopics, since I think that this question might fit, considering this part of the FAQ: Stack Overflow is for professional and enthusiast programmers, ... covers … a specific programming problem ... matters that are unique to the programming profession Sorry for the lengthy Introduction, though. When Software is advertised, it is usually Software for one (or more) specific purpose, such as: Mozilla Firefox - A Web Browser Ubuntu - An Operating System Python - A Programming Language Visual Studio - A Development Studio ... And so on. But when writing Libraries, that is, Software that doesn't necessarily serve one specific purpose, but instead multiple purposes, which are usually supposed to be used inside an application, such as: Irrlicht - A 3D Engine Qt - An Application Framework ... The process of advertisement gets a little more difficult. I'm a developer of the latter kind of Software, and I naturally want to advertise my Software. It's not commercial Software; It's not GPL either. It's completely free (Licensed under the MIT License :-)). I naturally host my stuff at github, which technically makes it very easy to access the software, and I thought that these might be possible options, although I have no experience with them: Submit the Software to Freshmeat, and hope for the best Submit the Software to Sourceforge, and hope someone accidently stumbles over it Write spammails, and get death threats via Mail ... But something tells me that these methods are probably not the best Methods. So, my final question would be, How does the Average Joe Hobby Programmer advertise his/her Software Library?

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• One Does Like To Code: DevoxxUK

  - by Tori Wieldt

  What's happening at Devoxx UK? I'll be talking to Rock Star speakers, Community leaders, authors, JSR leads and more.  This video is a short introduction.   Check out these great sessions: Thursday, June 12Perchance to Stream with Java 8by Paul Sandoz13:40 - 14:30 | Room 1 Making the Internet-of-Things a Reality with Embedded Javaby Simon Ritter11:50 - 12:40 | Room 4 Java SE 8 Lambdas and Streams Labby Simon Ritter17:00 - 20:00 | Room Mezzanine Safety Not Guaranteed: Sun. Misc. Unsafe and the Quest for Safe Alternativesby Paul Sandoz18:45 - 19:45 | Room 3 Join the Java EvolutionHeather VanCuraPatrick Curran19:45 – 20:45 | Room 2  Glassfish is Here to StayDavid DelabasseeAntonio Goncalves19:45 – 20:45 | Room Expo Here is the full line-up of sessions. Devoxx UK includes a Hackergarten, where can devs work an Open Source project of their choice. The Adopt OpenJDK and Adopt a JSR Program folks will be there to help attendees contribute back to Java SE and Java EE itself!   Saturday includes a special Devoxx4Kids event in conjunction with the London Java Community. It's design to teach 10-16 year-olds simple programming concepts, robotics, electronics, and games making. Workshops include LEGO Mindstorms (robotic engineering), Greenfoot (programming), Arduino (electronics), Scratch (games making), Minecraft Modding (game hacking) and NAO (robotic programming). Small fee, you must register. If you can't attend Devoxx UK in person, stay tuned to the YouTube/Java channel. I'll be doing plenty of interviews so you can join the fun from around the world. 

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