Check out this great article by Scott Mitchell regarding data structures in .NET 2.0. It’s a six-part series that pretty much covers all that you’ll need to know.
It goes like this:
Part 1: An Introduction to Data Structures
Part 2: The Queue, Stack, and Hashtable
Part 3: Binary Trees and BSTs
Part 4: Building a Better Binary Search Tree
Part 5: From Trees to Graphs
Part 6: Efficiently Representing Sets
Enjoy! \m/
Here’s an excellent article by James Avery discussing the must-have tools every developer should have in their toolbox arsenal. Just to summarize:
Enjoy!
I found this list in the Redmond Developer News newsletter, and believe it’s worth mentioning/posting here…because as we all know, there are far too many software development projects that end in abject failure (whether a simple internal app or a massive commercial system).
Here are the top 10 that made the list:
1. Never committing to project success (that is, the target user
community needs to be on board with the application).
2. Freezing the schedule and budget before the project is understood
well enough.
3. Overscoping the solution.
4. Circumventing the app dev organization altogether.
5. Underestimating the complexity of the problem.
6. Being stingy with subject-matter experts (SMEs).
7. Choosing the wrong project leadership.
8. Distrusting the managers to whom tasks have been delegated.
9. Jumping into the “D” of “R&D” without enough “R.”
10. Suppressing bad news.
It’s about time that the open source community take on Ajax. Check out xajax.
Ajax, or AJAX, is a web development technique used for creating interactive web applications. The intent is to make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded each time the user requests a change. This is intended to increase the web page’s interactivity, speed, functionality, and usability.
If you’ve worked on text parsing projects – or an app that needed it – then you know what regular expressions are. It truly has been a lifesaver for me on many, many occassions. If, however, you haven’t dealt with it before, here’s some background on it:
According to Wikipedia, in computing, a regular expression is a string that is used to describe or match a set of strings, according to certain syntax rules.
For example, to capture the word Perl in the text below, you would use the following expression: .*(Perl).
Regular expressions are used by many text editors and utilities to search and manipulate bodies of text based on certain patterns. Many programming languages support regular expressions for string manipulation. For example, Perl and Tcl have a powerful regular expression engine built directly into their syntax.
How does it work?
A tool that I personally use to learn, construct, and test regular expressions is called: The Regex Coach. This tool offers many views to show how the regex engine parses text, which garners you knowledge on how it works internally, so you can write more advanced expressions.
Here’s what the tool looks like:
To end this post, I highly recommend reading Master Regular Expressions by Jeffrey E. F. Freidl to learn how/when to use it and the text-processing power it offers. This book, in my opinion, reads like a novel and is the best book on regular expressions.Take care! =0)