(Laurence Moroney) I first saw Comega about a year an a half ago when the lab that was developing it gave me a sneak preview and asked me for some feedback. The only feedback I could give at the time was “Wow!” Now, everybody can get access to this add-on to C# as Microsoft Research has released the

(Paul Meagher) Calculating Entropy for Datamining discussed the Entropy.php class, which provides web database programmers with quick access to an entropic analysis of a single database column. This article discusses the concepts of joint and conditional entropy through developing the corresponding

(Scott Mitchell) Most developers I’ve met and talked to throughout my career have shared one thing in common: their interest in solving problems and their disdain of the mundane. Boring, repetitive tasks are the bane of the development world, so much so that oftentimes programmers will spend countle

(Anthony Glenwright) Microsoft’s Platform Tests help ensure that the many and varied applications available for Windows give users a consistent experience, and avoid application and operating system conflicts. The tests verify basic application stability, check for memory and other leaks, ensure

(John Topley) In Part 1 of this series, we learnt why using Ant to do builds is a good idea, and were introduced to the core Ant concepts of the project, targets and tasks. We also wrote and executed a simple build file. Now, let’s take a look at some of the other ways that Ant can make our live

(Paul Krill) Jim Rumbaugh is an IBM Distinguished Engineer who currently leads software modeling efforts at IBM Rational. Along with Grady Booch and Ivar Jacobson, he was part of the “Three Amigos,” a trio responsible for developing Unified Modeling Language, which was adopted by the Object Manageme

(Paul Kimmel) VB can be a completely object-oriented language and still find ways to enhance productivity. One of the ways that Microsoft is still finding innovative ways to increase productivity without making VB.NET a second-class language is the introduction of the My object, which will ship in V

(Saravana Kumar) During application development, you might come across a situation where you need to write the same code repeatedly with just a few changes. For example, you may write code to fetch data from the database many times in your application. In this case, you will open a text file, wh

(Eric Lippert) A poster to one of the Joel On Software fora the other day asked what a “salt” was (in the cryptographic sense, not the chemical sense!) and why it’s OK to make salts public knowledge. I thought I might talk about that a bit over the next few entries. But before I do, let me give

(Phillip Perkins) Microsoft is tipping the scales in its favour with ASP.NET Web Matrix, a free download that lets you create ASP.NET Web applications, services, etc. This IDE runs on Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines. Here’s an overview of Web Matrix, as well as the steps you need to take to cre