Here are some of the tools that I currently have installed on my dev machine. Most of them are freeware or have free versions available.
IDEs
Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 - The essential IDE for any professional windows developer, I only have C# and C++ installed btw to keep resource usage to a minimum. The Visual [...]
I’ve been working on this bug for the past one week, basically a call to the GDI+ APIs MeasureString and DrawString was failing with a very useful exception “A generic GDI+ error has occured” , my initial hypotehesis was that the problem was coming because of the length of the string that we were [...]
When I had first read about CMM I had thought that it was the holy grail that all software companies should be working towards, at that time I was still in school and idealism took precedence over reality.
After having worked in this field for some years now, I feel that CMM is so far removed [...]
I got back to application development using Java after spending the last 4 years developing applications using .Net and C++ and things have really changed!!! I have spent the last one month trying to catch up on all the new stuff in the Java world. Updating myself with the latest changes to the syntax only [...]
The build is the pulse of any software development activity and a good build system facilitates quality software development. My current thoughts on a build process are as follows
Build Machine
The build machine is a dedicated physical or virtual machine whose sole purpose is to build your product. It should not be used for development or [...]
Recently I downloaded Picasa from Google to manage my huge collection of photographs, I was totally blown away by the great experience of using such a great piece of software. Everything was so intuit, and the UI was really slick and well organized. Being a developer the first thing that came to my mind was [...]
Over the last year I’ve downloaded the source for many popular open source tools like Gaim, eMule, Mozilla etc. in order to read the code. One big problem I always faced coming from a Visual Studio background was the lack of a solution or workspace kind of concept that allows for easier code browsing. Today [...]
A few years back when I first started reading about design patterns, refactoring, OO principles etc. I got it into my head that I should “Always program to an interface not an implementation”. So whenever I needed to create a new class/abstraction I used to start of with an interface IThis, IThat etc. over [...]
An uber cool use of web services, Amazon has released the “Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)” web service, it’s in limited beta right now.
Check it out.
Death of the command line - A.P Lawerence puts down his thoughts on the command line. Frankly my head is so full of other CS stuff that I could barely fit in command lines and their arguments. Command line tools tend to be less discoverable and need constant reinforcement to remember than the GUI counterparts [...]
Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer by Martin Davis
