General Development Archive

Microsoft Corp. last week announced the final beta of its Visual Studio .Net 2003 product -formerly known by the code name Everett- and released its .Net Compact Framework. New features include: Availability of .Net Compact Framework, Improved scalability with support for up to 32 processors, Improved performance, Support for new Web services specifications: WS-Security, WS-Routing and WS-Attachments, 98 percent conformance with the International Organization for Standardization's C++ standard, Integration of Visual J#.

Intel released its version 7.0 compiler suite for Linux and Windows, for the x86 and Itanium1/2 architectures. Optimizations include support for SSE2 in the Pentium 4 CPU and software pipelining in the Itanium1/2 CPUs. Inter-procedural optimization (IPO) and profile-guided optimization (PGO) can provide greater application performance. Intel Compilers support multi-threaded code development and optimization through the Auto-Parallelism feature and OpenMP 2.0 support. Intel claims that the new version of their compilers are now much more compatible with Linux code (including the GCC C++ ABI) and that they also outperform GCC 3.2 by 30% at the produced executables. There is a 30-day evaluation version for everyone to try out.

One of the great things about using tools and databases such as Borland Delphi 7 Studio and IBM DB2 Universal Database is that moving between platforms is only a matter of a few changes and a recompile. This article shows how to move a functional application from a Delphi 7 application running on Microsoft Windows to a Linux application using Borland Kylix 3. This article also goes over DB2 on Linux and minor source code changes.

In the Advanced filesystem implementor's guide, Daniel Robbins shows you how to use the latest filesystem technologies in Linux 2.4. In this conclusion to the AFIG series, Daniel continues his discussion of the Enterprise Volume Management System for Linux, or EVMS. He shows you how to use evmsn to take a new hard drive, partition it, and create LVM volumes on it. Along the way, he fills you in on important EVMS concepts that you'll find essential as you continue your exploration of this powerful technology.

Some interesting programming and other articles are to be found this way round at InformIT. Read more for a list of the articles (free registration required).

This is an informative article about the upcoming Reiser4 filesystem. It covers a lot of the performance improvements in Reiser4 along with a lot of ideas about a database filesystem.

"Subversion is an open source revision control system, similar in purpose to the well-known, widely deployed, and aging CVS. It is designed to provide state-of-the-art versioning, built from modern technologies. Subversion is still in development and has not reached version 1.0 yet. However, it's pretty stable and you can use it right now." Read the article at OnLamp.

"It is not as if I am new to Kylix. I am a Delphi programmer since version 1, and I always keep my C++ skills up. So it was with great anticipation that I looked forward to the release of Borland's Kylix 3, the Rapid Application Development environment for Linux that includes both Delphi language and C++ IDE's (integrated development environment). The code produced with Kylix can be recompiled with minimal changes under Microsoft Windows using either Delphi for Windows version 6 or greater, or C++ Builder version 6 or greater." Read the review at NewsForge.

In this article, Daniel Robbins introduces the Enterprise Volume Management System (EVMS) for Linux. He explains what EVMS is, why it is so desperately needed, and why it will very likely transform the way storage is managed on Linux systems.

Here is a poll we put together to better understand the nature of the OSNews readers. Please tell us about the level of experience you got with programming.

In this second and final part of my interview with Ted Shelton, Borland's chief strategy officer, Shelton focuses on Microsoft .Net's support for multiple languages and reveals a hidden .Net stumbling block. First part here.

This document illustrates guidelines and best practices required to port existing UNIX applications to the Windows environment, which can potentially reduce the time, cost, and risk associated with a traditionally painful migration process. This guide covers planning and practical issues involved in migration or co-existence between UNIX and Windows and provides a review of the different ways in which such a migration can be done. Ideal for both UNIX programmers as well as Windows programmers, this is a valuable source of information for anyone looking to take advantage of Windows.

Glibc 2.3 is out and prelinking support was added for ELF targets, startup times are significantly reduced (C++ and Qt/KDE applications will be most benefited from this - with this support on glibc there is no reason to revert to manual prelinking KDE which reportedly created stability issues). Read-only stdio streams now use mmap to speed up operation. The malloc functions were completely rewritten. The runtime now can handle the ELF thread-local storage (TLS) ABI on some platforms. This release has been ported to PowerPC64/Linux. Download it in a bz2 (13 MB) or gunzip (17.5 MB) tarball formats.

From LWN: "Linus has just merged the XFS filesystem into his BitKeeper tree; it will thus show up in the 2.5.36 kernel. XFS is a high-performance, journaling filesystem from SGI; it now becomes the fourth journaling filesystem (alongside ext3, ReiserFS, and JFS) supported by the Linux kernel. (Other stuff which has been merged, so far, for 2.5.36 includes an IEEE-1394 ("Firewire") update, the next big set of IDE patches, the "huge page" patch for i386 systems, and a number of other tweaks)."