David's C / C++ / C# Blog

A 21 year old programmer who hosts the blog Wr3cktangle has published the source to his Zombie Simulator. It's a simple simulator, a variant on the predator/prey simulations that have ... Read More

There's less than three weeks to go as Microsoft and Dr Dobb's magazine are offering several thousand bucks in prizes for the best modifications of the "Dr. Dobbs's Challenge" game ... Read More

I suspect the name is probably a bit unfortunate given the huge ranks of lawyers that Microsoft can afford but if you're interested in having a look at a SQL ... Read More

Back nearly twenty years ago before databases (or even networks for PCs) were used much, if you wanted to have file access you used either text files or random access ... Read More

Yes I know there's just under a week to go for Challenge 12 (is anyone going to enter that?) so hopefully you'll find this challenge, less er challenging. I saw ... Read More

Sorry this is a bit short notice but I only found out today. If you run a programming contest please write and tell me (so long as C, C++ or ... Read More

I don't mean by downloading from dodgy websites or P2P networks but obtaining the software legally and legitimately. If you are a student in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, ... Read More

The output is: False True Why? When comparing two objects, the equality operator (==) checks to see if the objects are exactly the same object (i.e. the same reference) and ... Read More

I've mentioned jobs in the past but recently came across an excellent UK job tracking website that gets data from agencies and employers and shows salaries/contract rates for development jobs ... Read More

A regular entrant in the programming challenges (and winner) Robert C. Cartaino has sent in this puzzle. In C#, the value of any type can be treated as an ... Read More

One thing that C and C++ are not short of is IDEs. Eclipse which started life as a Java IDE has the CDT (The C/C++ Development Tools) project which is ... Read More

No it's not a misspelling of a certain Caribbean island! A few years back it was discovered that graphics processing chips (GPUs) could be used to offset much of the ... Read More

I've been asked if I would write some additional programming tutorials for people who are totally new to programming and on both Linux and Windows. These will initially be for ... Read More

When you have two overlapping technologies, in this case Silverlight and Visual Studio, both with betas there is the risk that things won't work together. It's happened this week so ... Read More

In case you didn't know it, Hungarian names are apparently given in the order family names first then personal name. This was the reason given for Hungarian Notation where variable ... Read More

This is not the full version but an early beta and if you want to start programming games (including multi-player) for the Zune media player you'll want to try this ... Read More

It's not that it is intrinsically difficult, I think I was just trying to run before I could walk. I've just spent three days last week taking an existing partly ... Read More

With the publication of the C# strings tutorial last week, I'm now back onto C again and this tutorial will be about files; both text files and random access files. ... Read More

If you're used to C or C++ and not C#, you'd expect the compiler to whinge about the casual mixing of incompatible types but C# is more like some scripting languages ... Read More

Answer tomorrow. Without trying it, will this compile and if so what does it output? using System; using System.Text; namespace ex1 {     class Program     {         static void Main(string[] args)         {             string a="David ";             int b = 0;             a= string.Concat(a,4,5.6,b) ;             Console.WriteLine("a= {0}",a) ... Read More

Although not at version 1.0 yet, Inkscape is a quality vector drawing program not unlike Illustrator. I'm pretty dire in the artistic stakes, more technical drawing ability than artistic flair ... Read More

If there is a problem with a programming challenge entry I try and fix it. Not to make it run faster but just to make it compile and run. ... Read More

Back in January I commented about the available Betas and the full version of the MFC Feature Pack is now out as a free download for Visual C++ 2008 (The ... Read More

This challenge is about writing a program to find the shortest path between ten points in a data file designated by the characters A- J. This is what a ... Read More