EXE articles from March 2000

EXE archives from March 2000

Bye bye Borland.(Borland-Corel merger)(Company Business and Marketing)
March 1, 2000... 'True or False?' asked M as we strode down the corridor, the day after the Corel/Borland take-over news broke. 'When one struggling company buys out another struggling company, that makes a "powerhouse"?' He made the quizshow 'wrong answer'...

Digests.
March 1, 2000... NuMega DriverStudio 1.5 is a suite of tools for the development of device drivers for all Windows platforms, including Windows 2000 (development, debugging, tuning, testing and deployment). Version 1.5 sees code coverage analysis for kernel...

C++Builder 5 BC (before Corel).(Borland International)(Product Information)
March 1, 2000... The last major Hurrah from Borland before the Corel merger was a new release of C++Builder. It may only seem like last month that we got our hands on C++Builder 4, but it's a year since borland.com launched with a new version of the C++ RAD...

XMLDeveloper seeks validation.(Stilo)(Product Information)
March 1, 2000... Stilo XMLDeveloper is a tool to create, edit and validate messages within the testing stages of XML application development. Stilo sees the creation of messaging systems in XML as underpinning the majority of e-commerce systems. When...

Too thin, too bad.(computer design)(Technology Information)
March 1, 2000... In the days before computers, when office workers had no more than a typewriter and an adding machine, the task of office maintenance was much easier. Machines went wrong, the worker would be docked half a day's wages for the breakage and the...

A COOL range?(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2000... Dear Sir, I have been using Sterling's Cool:Plex development tool for about 18 months now (having previously used Cool:2E for several years before). The part of Ian Murphy's article (A Sterling range, EXE, January 2000) regarding...

Software rental.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2000... Dear Sir, I was very interested to read the Mayhem on software rental in the Dember 1999 issue. The day after reading it I got a letter from Interleaf. We have been using Interleaf for our end-user manuals for nearly 8 years now,...

Stob is a snob.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2000... Dear Sir, I would just like to point out what a total waste of space the January Stob was (13 ways to loathe VB). Are her comments 'for real' or is she just having a C++ Snob's pop at a language she is clearly not qualified to comment on....

Windows 2000 is served.(Software Review)(Evaluation)
March 1, 2000... And so Microsoft has finally completed its biggest ever undertaking and Windows 2000 (W2K) is now its flagship operating platform. The result is another massive training exercise for the worldwide community of developers who will target this...

Ending with the grin; In October's EXE, Francis Glassborow introduced the classic C++ idiom 'Cheshire Cat'. Alan Griffiths examines this technique in more depth and applies some recent ideas.(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
March 1, 2000... The compilation model of C++ (and to a lesser extent of C) leads to a number of related problems that we can group under the heading of 'compile-time dependencies'. Later in the article, solving these problems will lead us to the 'Cheshire Cat'...

And still they come.....; Peter Collinson is a freelance consultant specialising in Unix. He can be reached electronically as pc@hillside.co.uk, by phone on 01227 761824 or on the Web at http://www.hillside.co.uk.(HTML)(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
March 1, 2000... I suppose that I've had an active Web presence of one form or another for around five or maybe six years now. I don't think there's been a time in that period when I haven't been faced with decisions about exactly which bits of the HTML...

Good intentions; Adding a helper function will make the class work more efficiently. Maybe. Francis Glassborow warns about adding virtual functions .(C, C++)(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
March 1, 2000... A feature of C and C++ is that they both require responsible users. Neither language is designed to protect against abuse, be it conscious or through ignorance. Unlike some languages, C and C++ both require that the user understand them at...

Version city; Philip Brown designs a class that hides raw access to the standard Windows format for version information.(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
March 1, 2000... Since the earliest computer programs were deployed, developers have wanted some way of identifying which version a customer was running. After all, it's obviously worthwhile to know if a bug they're reporting has already been fixed. Fairly...

Java on a Stik.(Dallas Semiconductor)(Technology Tutorial)
March 1, 2000... The folks at Dallas Semiconductor have been producing interesting Java implementations for a while now. They made the famous Java Ring that was given to each attendee at the 1998 JavaOne conference. The ring is impressive but limited, being...

Getting started with XML; The handling of data across the Web is evolving. Jon Perkins suggests that it's worth getting up to speed with XML.(Technology Tutorial)(Tutorial)
March 1, 2000... It's a common mistake to assume that XML is a forthcoming replacement for HTML, but this isn't the case. XML was intended from the outset to be a tag-based markup language complementary to HTML. However, whereas HTML describes the layout of a...

The Perl CD bookshelf Reviewed by Ed Butche.(Review)
March 1, 2000... I've been a fan of the O'Reilly books for some time now. Their consistent design, layout and style means that referring to any of them during a project causes few distractions and time lost wading through appendices and indexes in search of a...

Kent Beck; This month we feature Kent Beck, a pioneer of patterns for software development, one of the creators of the xUnit family of testing frameworks and the man behind XP. The author of 'The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns' and 'Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk: A Sorted Collection', his latest book is 'Extreme Programming Explained'.
March 1, 2000... What was the first computer you worked on? An 85-pound Philco desktop calculator with nixie tubes and 99 program statements in a sort of assembly language. The demise of nixie tubes was the first step in the tragedy that is modern...

Claire's story and other tragedies.
March 1, 2000... Garbage collection Our careless C++ girl Claire Bashed out her brains upon the stair. Java Johnson found her dead. His emailed message quickly spread: 'The prospects for the build look bleak, Claire's got another...

Digests.
March 1, 2000... Software AG has announced a wide-ranging architecture for XML-based applications. The X-Studio component will be a general integration of third-party XML tools: schema editors, stylesheet processors, and an IDE. X-Machine and X-Node components...