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Improve Your Job Search With a Personal Project
More and more, hiring managers tell us that they want to hire candidates who work on personal projects outside of their jobs. Don’t believe me? Just check out a few of our recent Landing@ stories. They...
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Visual Studio 2013 Released – Worth Upgrading?
Visual Studio, Microsoft’s flagship development tool and considered the best IDE around, has had an overhaul, a new coat of polish and some new features added. But is it worth upgrading, when everyone...
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Interview Questions for C++ Programmers
Even if you know C++ syntax and have memorized STL components, you could stumble during a technical interview since some managers like to explore the boundary of a programmer’s C++ knowledge. To make...
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Coding Challenge: Best Have a Card Up Your Sleeve
Our newest coding challenge runs through January, ending on Jan. 31, 2014, so you should have plenty of time for it. It’s about a card game called Sevens. The game is for three to seven players. To set...
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Watson Becomes Available for App Developers
Watson, the IBM supercomputer that won $1 million playing Jeopardy in 2011, is now becoming available to app developers. The system that was built for Jeopardy was not your everyday PC. With 2,880...
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Blocking Queues Beat Lists in Multithreaded Code
In .NET, it’s quite common to store data in a generic List – a List<T> where T is some type such as an int or a class. In addition to its standard uses, a generic list can be implemented as a...
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Key Differences Between C# and Java
Any comparison of C# and Java’s language features will always be contentious. The parable about the three blind men describing an elephant illustrates the issue well — no one developer has used or...
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Why Managed Code is Safer
One of the biggest sea changes in computing took place in the late 1990s, with the switch over to running managed code, first with Java and then a couple of years later with .NET. Prior to this,...
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Tournament of Sevens Contest Update: A Saga
I picked the game for this contest with the thought that it would be simple and straight forward. Was I ever wrong! The contest was due to start Jan. 1, but a sudden unexpected vacation took me to...
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Programming for iOS With Xamarin Studio
Back at the start of July I began a contract to develop an iOS app for a Taxi firm. I decided to invest in Xamarin Studio so that I could develop the app in C#. The development took a bit longer than...
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Tournament of Sevens: Week 1 Results
Though the Tournament of Sevens coding challenge took much longer to get off the ground than expected, I’ve taken steps to sort out the bot bugginess and the contest is now roaring ahead. The first...
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2 Free C Compilers Worth a Look
It’s surprising how important the C programming language remains, as it’s now over 40 years since it was first created. It’s a simple but useful language that gives you a very low level view of memory...
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A Look at Microsoft’s PCL for SQLite
Having grown up in a world where the concept was anathema to Microsoft, it seems strange to think of them now on the side of open source. In 2002, for instance, there was public debate about the GPL...
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How One Line of Code Forced a Full OS Release
It’s not often that Apple ‘fesses up about a bug, but the release iOS 7.0.6 came about because somehow an extra line of code got added to a function and broke it. Normally a bug would probably not...
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How to Write a Game Runner Program
I wrote the runsevens game runner program to automate the running of the Tournament of Sevens programming challenge, and it was an interesting little project. It’s designed to do the following:...
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Creating Random Access Text in C#
Back in April I looked at disk folders as a possible alternative to NoSQL or using a relational DB. My conclusion wasn’t encouraging—I was concerned about poor performance, especially on Linux. The...
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Passing Functions as Parameters
When I first started programming in the late 1970s, I was heavily into Pascal and the concept of passing an address as a parameter was just unheard of outside of academic circles. Procedural...
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Is C Still Relevant in the 21st Century?
Many programming languages have come and gone since Dennis Ritchie devised C in 1972, and yet C has not only survived three major revisions, but continues to thrive. Large chunks of Windows were...
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Is Microsoft Truly Embracing Open Source?
Back in the day, Microsoft viewed open source and Linux as a threat and did its best to retaliate with FUD and patent threats. So it must have been galling to its executives as, over the past 20...
View ArticleIs Developing in Xamarin Better Than Xcode?
Apple makes its Xcode IDE available for free to iOS and Mac developers. Should experienced C# developers use the cross-platform Xamarin Studio instead? Talent Community Guides David Bolton and Eric...
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