Peter Shaw

In this day and age of HTTP and Web browsers, you might thing that the only network protocol you need to know these days is “HTTP”, but there are still a lot of places where raw socket-level programming has an advantage. For example, there are still a lot of POP3 and IMAP mail systems out […]

We all know what a dramatic increase in speed we can give a Web application if we choose to use some kind of an output cache for a given Web-based application. For those who are unfamiliar with the term ‘Output Cache’, what we generally mean is that any output generated by the application, from a […]

Did you know that the .NET framework has a built-in control/class for displaying the hexadecimal byte dump output of binary data? It’s one of those rare gems that pretty much stays hidden away unless you actually need to go looking for it. For those who are wondering what I’m talking about, I’m describing the type […]

Recently, I had to work on a project that saw me using a lot of XML, something I’ve not done for a long time. The thing was, however, I had a number of XSD files that I then had to use to build parsers for the XML data I was dealing with. This is not […]

I don’t hide the fact the PostgreSQL is my favourite database, and where possible I try to use it in as many places as possible (and on as many projects as possible). There are a lot of reasons why I do this, and that’s simply because of some of the clever things that you can […]

We hear about “Design patterns” all the time. We, as programmers, are trained to obey design patterns, and that design patterns are king, and that we should never deviate from them. In some cases, especially for the simpler patterns (such as the Singleton pattern), there’s really not much deviation you can perform. In some other […]

HTML5 is now firmly entrenched in modern day I.T. life. If you’ve not moved on to the new standards by now, you either work for a government institution (in which case, there is help available 🙂 ) or you’re still living under a rock where Netscape Navigator still rules the waves. One of the nice […]

If you’ve come to C# from a language such as C++, you might very much miss one of its most powerful features, the ‘Vectors’ namespace. C++ developers new to C# often ask how they can use vectors in a C# application, and often one of the first questions (if stack overflow is any evidence) is […]

Okay, cheesy title I know, but it got your attention, right? I’m guessing you’re already thinking that in this post we’re going to be discussing HTML5 User Interfaces. Well, we are, but not quite in the context you might be expecting. Because this column tries to cater to general .NET-related things, dedicating an entire post […]

What do you know about the PC your currently sitting in front of, reading this on? You probably know who built it, how many hard drives are in it, what it’s general speed is, the usual stuff. If you’re a bit more technical, you might know what type of CPU you have, or how many […]

If you’ve done any kind of web development using Visual Studio, you might be familiar with “Config Transformations”. If you’re not, don’t worry. All will be revealed. Most applications that you create under .NET are accompanied by some kind of configurations file. For web projects, this is usually “Web.Config” and for WPF and desktop apps […]

In a previous post, I showed you how to construct a wave file manually by hand, using nothing but program code. In this post, I want to show you how to use the other sound generation device that most Windows machines have, the MIDI Sequencer. Most Windows-based sound cards these days have some kind of […]