Codeguru Update eNewsletter – May 27th, 2008





CodeGuru.com

Earthweb.com Network
Tuesday May 27, 2008




This Week’s Topics







Comments from the Editor

In the United States, yesterday was a holiday. In my city of Indianapolis, the entire weekend was crammed back with racing and racing events. Many years ago I stopped fighting the hundreds of thousands of people that converge on the Indianapolis 500 racetrack (actually in Speedway); however, after this year’s race, I’m ready to get tickets for next year. It was an exciting race even if the people I was cheering to win didn’t win! I would have liked to see Sarah Fischer go the distance, but when another car wrecks in front of you, sometimes you run out of options.

Some might ask why I would root for Sarah Fisher when there are Andrettis, Rahals, and Foyts in the race. Better yet, it is easier to root for favorites like Danica Patrick or dancing stars like Helio Castroneves.

Rooting for Sarah Fisher is like rooting for Ruby or Python to become the winning programming language. Ruby and Python are programming languages that are part of the community and seem to be more down-to-earth. They can get praised for being well liked. In fact, Sarah Fisher was voted the most liked driver for three years. Ruby and Python are open source and thus can be considered grass roots. Sarah Fisher is a bit grass roots too in that she owns her own racing car and puts her own sweat and tears into her racing team. Just as open source developers generally are not paid to contribute, Sarah too has no big corporations behind her to pay her rent. She has to take her car to the track and win to get paid just as developers have to put Ruby and Python into source code for someone else to win.

If you saw the Indianapolis 500, then you know Scott Dixon on the Target Chip Ganassi Racing team won. Just like programming languages, the ones with the big companies tend to come out ahead. This year it seems like C# driven by Microsoft is leading the pack along with Java driven by Sun Microsystems. Regardless, it is still fun to root for some of the underdogs. Next year I think I’ll root for Sarah Fisher again. I think I’ll also root for a new underdog in the development race to move ahead. F# might not be in the race this year, but next year we’ll see what it is doing..

(Okay, this was a goofy editorial, but I’m from Indianapolis, so I had to work the race into this somehow!)

Until next week…

Brad!
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Bradley L. Jones
www.CodeGuru.com
webmaster@codeguru.com
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Recently Published Books

For those of you keeping up by reading books. The following are just a few of the new books that have been recently released. If you’ve read any of these, feel free to write a review to be posted on CodeGuru. See the submission guidelines.


Pro WPF with VB 2008
By Matthew MacDonald for Apress
1080 pages for 54.99
It always raises my eyebrows when I see a VB book and C# book published by the same author on the same topic within a month or two of each other. It makes me ask whether the C# book is written like a VB book or the VB book is written like a C# book….


Simple Architectures for Complex Enterprises (Best Practices)
Turning your code into a saleable product
By Roger Sessions for Microsoft Press
200 pages for $34.99


Visual Basic 2008 Recipes
By Herman, Jones, MacDonald, and Rajan for Apress
700 pages for $52.99
Odd price.



New & Updated Articles on CodeGuru

Following are short descriptions of new articles on CodeGuru. If you are interested in submitting your own article for inclusion on the site, then you will find guidelines here.


Developing Management Packs for Operation Manager 2007
By Jeffrey Juday
Using the Microsoft System Center Operations Manager Author Console learn how develop a management pack to accompany your application.


Choosing Between MVC and MVP Patterns in ASP.NET
By Oleg Zhukov
Probe for ASP.NET developers and choose the right pattern between MVC and MVP, concerning all major differences between them.


Writing CDs with C# and Windows XP’s ICDBurn Interface
By Hannes du Preez
Learn how to write data to a CD while utilising XP’s ICDBurn interface.


Managed Calls and Events in Unmanaged C++
By Safouane Hicham
Learn how to use managed calls and events in unmanaged C++.



Discussion Groups

Check out the CodeGuru discussion forums
Forums include Visual C++, General C++, Visual Basic, Java, General Technology, C#, ASP.NET, XML, Help Wanted, and much, much, more!

… HOT THREADS …


Read from an INI (C#)


Static drawing in Worker Thread (VC++)


battleship in c++ (C++)



New Articles on Developer.com

Jython Reborn
By Chris McAvoy
Jython is back! With recent investment from Sun Microsystems, Jython is poised to take the JVM by storm. Create apps with the agility of Python and the speed of Java with Jython.


Working With Design Patterns: Interpreter
By Jeff Langr
Many of the design patterns lead a double life.the structure of some patterns are exactly alike, but the intent differs. An interpreter is a composite whose purpose is to support interpretation of a simple grammar.


Working with Images in Google’s Android
By Chunyen Liu
Google’s new mobile platform, Android, has become increasingly popular among developers even without hardware available on the market yet. Discover where to get the right software APIs and documentation as well as what technologies are supported. Then, you will focus on the technologies for images by working through an example.


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