John Howell

Even with Quad-Cores, it appears that XP still outperforms Vista on game setups (which to us geeks, is a real developer box! 🙂

But be patient.  XP seemed a bit sluggish out of the gate, but continual tuning got it where it is today.  So I guess we all just need a little patience.

Happy Coding!

Dave Campbell has put up a site (well, it’s a over a week old now) that is a place for ‘all things Silverlight’.  You can search for examples and the blog alone is worth it.  Check it out here.

Microsoft has put together a great demonstration of a Silverlight-based search tool that was built on top of Microsoft’s Life Search engine.  The site is www.tafiti.com and gives you a just a hint of what you can do with Silverlight.  It uses Silverlight v1 RC (which is available for Windows and Mac).  Oh, and "Tafiti" means "to search" in Swahili.

As Scale Developers, we’re often required to verify that our systems meet their performance requirements.  The best practice is to instrument your application using performance counters.  But sometimes you ‘inherit’ an application that is already ‘instrumented’ with calls to the Stopwatch class.  Hopefully this post will help you deal with this class in a more informed way.

This class basically provides a wrapper for the QueryPerformanceCounter and QueryPerformanceFrequency functions.  Many of you probably already knew this but what you might not have known is that these functions used much different measuring between Windows 5 and Windows 6.

Under Windows 5 these functions use rdtsc for its measurements.  On W5 this is pretty fast at only 100 cycles for each start and each stop.  However, if you’ve used this before, you know that its not terribly accurate and can fail on multi processor systems.  For example if a start occurs on one proc and a stop occurs on another processor at the same or earlier time, then the function will return a zero timespan.

Enter Windows 6.  It uses a much more accurate type of measurement: hpat (couldn’t find the link). However, if you use it, you will notice an immediate significant performance degradation!  The reason is that this method is much more expensive: 700ns for each call!  Holy cow!  

So in summary, just because you have a way to measure your process, make sure you understand it and its ramifications!!!

Happy Coding!

Many people give Microsoft guff because they tout their own products and development.  So for those detractors of Microsoft Research, take this!  It’s not just SigGraph that is saying that Microsoft’s research into graphics is monumental, but Peter Jackon‘s firm (director of Lord of the Rings) has licensed it!

Major League Baseball adopts Redmond’s new multimedia technology for MLB.com Web site.

And this was with v1.0!  Just think the impact as the versions rev up!!!!

Continuous Integration (CI) is a process whereby as items are checked in, builds and unit tests are kicked off to ensure that if something is checked in that breaks the system (either in the build or the unit tests) you know it right away.  This is a great technique and can avoid the embarrassing phone calls or ‘meeting’s if you break the nightly build.

In VS2005 Team System, you don’t have a built-in way to do CI but you can use CruseControl.Net to implement it.  Now for my next plug, VS2008 Team System will have it built in!!!  I can’t wait!

Happy coding!

Beta 1 was very good and Beta 2 is even more stable!  There are many features in this update.  Check out Soma’s webcast to hear more!

This little tidbit came from ScottGu and although a small tidbit, it is a great new feature in the upcoming Orcas IDE.  You can now not only sort your ‘using’s but you can remove unused ‘using’s!

Intel has taken their dual-core technology and put two dual-core ICs into one CPU.  Now it’s hitting the streets!  The motherboards that support it are also just now hitting the streets so my guess is that quad-core systems will hit the shelves in volume just in time for Christmas.  (Just in case you needed a gift idea for that favorite geek of yours!)

Happy coding!