Scriptionary Blog

Maybe this news is a bit old but Visual Studio 2010 CTP was released, you can get it at the following location:

Visual Studio 2010 CTP Site

For you who don’t know, CTP means Community Technology Preview and can almost be regarded as a public beta version.

For C/C++ developers, you can find more info on the next version of Visual C++ 2010 on the Visual C++ Team Blog. I’m glad to see that IntelliSense for VC++ is being improved since in 2008/2005 it’s a quite horrible technology. This version also has support for some C++0x functionality.

First of all, I have to mention that this colleague has been a C and ASM programmer for most of his lengthy professional career, I won’t mention his name here but let’s just call him “Joe the Programmer” in light of current braindead naming schemes.

Joe the Programmer recently started programming with the .NET framework but yesterday came to a stop. When he was asked to help out with .NET development using ASP.NET, he took some time and to his amazement couldn’t find the ASP.NET programming language in the Visual Studio “new project” dialog.

At first this made me chuckle and I brushed it off, but then I realized he was correct to assume that there should be an ASP.NET programming language. After all, there used to be an ASP programming language although it looked suspiciously much like BASIC.

After explaining that ASP.NET is not as much a language but a technology, he went on his way and continued programming.

This all made me think that maybe the name, ASP.NET, is ambiguous, vague and might be a concept difficult to grasp for guys like Joe the Programmer. I just hope that he has a concept of OOP to go along with his newly found knowledge of ASP.NET.

What: A C++ wrapper around both WINAPI (Microsoft Windows) and PThreads (POSIX threads) functionality.
Why: To abstract cross platform functionality.
Remarks: On windows, CRITICAL_SECTION objects cannot be shared cross-process. This means that the class is tied to your application or DLL process. Comments are in Doxygen/Javadoc style.
Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like Visual Basic, yet in many Microsoft shops, VB is still being used especially in combination with ASP.NET. The problem with Visual Basic is that it’s not very strongly typed. Conventions are often thrown out of the window and Senior VB developers often hold their seniority as experience which, is more fiction than fact.

How many more times do I have to see Functions which don’t return anything and should have been declared as Subs.

Or: Variable 'XYZ' is used before it has been assigned a value.
Or: Variable declaration without an 'As' clause; type of Object assumed.

Ugh. You’d think that people with 15 years of development experience wouldn’t dismiss this kind of stuff and just do the right thing.

Scriptionary is growing again. Several articles have been added to the Wiki and a few articles are still coming up. Notably, two articles have been recovered from the old site: Got a minute? Refactor your code and CPUs Maximum Throughput and Overhead which haven’t been altered from their original formats.

Besides the old, new things have been introduced to Scriptionary such as the Creating a Window Wrapper Class and Getting Screen Modes articles for Microsoft Windows Graphics Programmers.

Edit: Additionally, you can keep track of the pages by visiting the “All Pages” page on the wiki.