It’s cool that Microsoft has announced that IE8 passes the Acid2 test (in “IE8 Standards Mode” – I sure hope that mode is enabled by default. But what I found interesting is how they announced it: By showing the check-in mail that signified the committing of the code that implemented the fix into the main [...]
It’s great to see a serious update to MFC coming. Check out this video with Pat Brenner where he describes some of the new stuff happening, with demos. I’m really torn on C++ these days. Some people believe it should basically be retired, in favour of one of the better alternatives like C# or Java, [...]
Every release Microsoft promises something that’s going to make it so now you can really positively absolutely kill processes that you want to kill. With Vista, the feature that would help was I/O Cancellation, the ability to cancel an I/O request without having to wait, in case it was hung in the kernel. And yet.. [...]
Intrinsics in C++ are places where the compiler knows how to generate code for common C++ operations, including function calls, and does so inline rather than generating a call. For example, a simple copy of a string from one buffer to another looks like this: 1234567 strcpy(dest, src); 00419123 lea [...]
When I got a new machine at work about a year ago, it came with Vista 64 bit installed on it. Not long before receiving this machine, I’d tried to upgrade my home machine to Vista 64 and ran into so many problems that I had quite a negative impression of Vista 64. I didn’t [...]
Computerworld has an article entitled “10 Things you Should Know About Microsoft’s Silverlight“. I just wanted to add a few notes comparing things to Flex, since the author doesn’t even acknowledge the existence of Flex. 1. Silverlight Avoids Cross-Browser/OS Issues As long as you don’t count Linux as an OS. Flex spans Windows, Mac, AND Linux. [...]
How’s that for an analogy? But I think there’s a bit of truth to it. Dr. Atkins defined a low-carb diet that many people have considerable success with. The diet involves a small set of restrictions that, when followed, help you lose weight. In my opinion, however, what makes Atkins successful isn’t the specific food choices that it requires, [...]
I got interested in Rails a year or so ago when I first started hearing the hype, and I dug into it a little bit. At the time, I came to the conclusion that while the Ruby language was pretty slick, Rails itself was basically a code generation engine that would become more hindrance than [...]
I’ve been playing with Rails recently, developing a site mostly for my own amusement. There are a few issues I’ve run into that I think are growing pains related to Rails’ rapid evolution. First, there’s the question of plugins, generators, and engines, and 3rdPartyLibs. If you want to extend your Rails application using canned functionality, [...]
Adobe’s Apollo platform is, basically, Flex for the desktop. Mike Chambers wrote an article answering the question “Why Apollo?” and it makes a pretty good case for why you’d want to use Apollo and where it fits in. A key point is that Flex lets you write for the desktop and for the browser, using the [...]