GUI programming

I did a search on Google and found lots of uninspiring articles about GUI programming. But I also found one excellent article!

User Interface Design for Programmers

Of course it was written by Joel, i.e. JoelOnSoftware.

Win32++

Win32++ is a simple alternative to MFC and WTL written by David Nash. It is based more on basic C++ features and less on macros and templates. I haven't tried it yet but plan to on my next small or medium size windows project.

He's also got it hosted at Codeproject as Win32++: A simple alternative to MFC.

Learn UNIX in 10 minutes

$ ls -l
drwxr-xr-x 4 cliff user 1024 Jun 18 09:40 WAITRON_EARNINGS
-rw-r--r-- 1 cliff user 767392 Jun 6 14:28 scanlib.tar.gz

Lush

Oops, got stuck in youtube after the previous post. Found this excellent Lush tune. Nowadays you can find Emma Anderson in the band Sing-Sing. Their tune Lover is actually quite good!

The Reid Brothers

The Reid brothers from The Jesus and the Mary Chain are back with their sister in Sister Vanilla! As you can see above they still rock but as always the original is hard to beat...

Improving on COUNTOF

This is an interesting example of how to improve on the default implementation of COUNTOF in a way that no mere mortals would have thought of.

Paint.NET

Got to check Paint.NET out as soon as possible. Seems like an excellent complement to Picasa.

Ivar Jacobson

"There are many different processes promoted within the software development industry. But are they really that different? If you look closely at their content, you find that there are more similarities than differences."

"Often, there are complaints when a team seems not to be following the defined process. However, these complaints miss the point. The point of software development is to develop good software, not to slavishly follow a predefined process."

Ivar Jacobson just started an interesting article series in Dr. Dobb's called Enough of Processes: Let's Do Practices that I can recommend. I can only assume that it will lead up to recommending his own EssUp!

HeapAgent

The other day I had severe problems locating a bug in a program I'm working with currently. It seemed obvious that it was some sort of memory error because of it's randomness. When I was stepping the code in the debugger sometimes everything worked alright and the next time it segfaulted. And sometimes it worked for a couple of runs and sometimes it crashed immediately. So I installed HeapAgent and found the problem in something like 10 seconds. It was a memory allocation that I thought was global but a 3rd party library deallocated the memory when called!