Think In Geek

Since the Silverlight 1.0 SDK only includes a template project for the non free editions of Visual Studio 2005, and since the 2008 version is still a beta (probably until early next year), I decided to create s imple template for the Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition.

It's a very simple template which creates an empty web page with a silverlight applet printing the typical Hello, World! You'll still have to modify by hand the scripts on the js files if you want to change the XAML file names, but it's better than nothing.

Visual Web Developer 2005 Express Edition isn't very XAML and Silverlight aware anyway, so you won't have any kind of editing help with those files. Let's hope Microsoft will decide to release the final 2008 version soon!

You can grab the template here: Silverlight Project Template for Visual Studio 2005 Express.

This week we had a bug report of one of our products regarding some strange deadlocks in our database access. For those of you who don't know what a deadlock is, I'll try to summarize here what a transaction is in a relational database environment and why those transactions might lead to those nasty errors, and try to explain what was causing this deadlock in our SQL Server 2005 engine.

Finally I have added support for PowerPC Mac OS users. It will still need some more testing, tough.

You can find the download packages at the Sourceforge site. You can also visit the forums to get support and report bugs or make suggestions.

Some little bugs were corrected and now the ISO sizes is also shown.

One day and the first bugs have appeared

You can find the download packages at the Sourceforge site. You can also visit the forums to get support and report bugs or make suggestions.

I've also added more debug statements to the code and a Windows version which will output debug messages to a DOS window, helping me in the process of knowing where the program might crash.

I'm proud to announce a new release of QPSPManager!

This is a major release, it has support for Linux, Mac OS X (Intel only at the moment) and Windows! And it has the long awaited Video Conversion feature (better late than sorry).

You can find the download packages at the Sourceforge site. You can also visit the forums to get support and report bugs or make suggestions.

Stay tuned for new releases in the next weeks!

One of the deficiencies of actual programming languages, specially those ones still widely used that are old, such as C or C++, is that they were designed having in mind the sequential programming paradigm. This usually means that those languages don't have standard ways to work with multithreading features, and you usually have to rely on third party libraries to develop thread safe software.

Today I'll be discussing a design pattern called Double Check, which can be widely used to manage the resource access, elimination and initialization in a safe thread way.

This morning I was working on a project at work. It's a Web Application using the ASP .NET 2.0 framework and C# as a code behind language. My friend Ioannis came over to see what was I doing and when he saw I was appending some strings together he asked me this question: "are you using a StringBuilder to use those strings?". And I replied with this answer: "no, I am not". This kind of stupid dialog came over because last week we were discussing about using StringBuilders instead of the default String class operators to append strings each other in Java. It seemed using the StringBuilder class resulted in an overall performance gain. It was then when I asked: "don't tell me this happens with C#, too?". And he answered: "yes, it does!".

So, what's the matter with StringBuilders in C#?

Suppose you have an iPod. Now suppose your music library size is by far bigger than your iPod memory. This is not an unusual situation, specially if your iPod is a Shuffle, Mini or Nano version, since the ones able to play videos usually have much more memory.

Now suppose you're a busy person or simply don't have the time to select what music you'll want to hear every morning before going to work, so sitting in front of your iTunes program and selecting what you thing you're in the mood to hear is out of the question. But of course, the chances you want to listen to different music from yesterday is high. And because you are a pragmatic geek, you're trying to find a way to perfectly update your iPod music to fit your needs automatically.

Smart playlists come to the rescue!

The 2007 E3 is coming this week and I'm reading at The Magic Box that the PS3 sales continue being simply disastrous (specially in Japan).

Well, I'm sure the extremely high price is the one to blame right now, but to be honest, no killer games have been developed for the Playstation 3, or at least, there's none that I want to play right now. Specially considering the price of the console.

This year's E3 is coming this week (and we hope to have it covered a litthe here in Think in Geek) and for Sony's sake, they better have something really nice to show up or they'll continue selling like shit everywhere.

Those are the numbers in Japan:

1. NDS Lite - 157,435 [3,969,227] units
2. Wii - 73,919 [1,954,752] units
3. PSP - 38,305 [1,083,147] units
4. PlayStation 2 - 16,316 [420,373] units
5. PlayStation 3 - 11,914 [492,931] units
6. Xbox 360 - 3,154 [118,583] units

And the best part of it is that rumors about a price drop have been denied from Sony itself in USA, even tough more than one big videogame shop in the States have already anounced discounts from $100 to $200. One thing is clear: the strategy of a mega media center and multipurpose expensive machine has not been well received in the videogame market, and the idea of a console just to play has (you just have to look at the numbers from Nintendo and Sony sales this year).

Sony has clearly abused of its name, people is no longer willing to buy anything at any price just because it has the Sony and Playstation logos on it. So they better start showing something really funny or spectacular to play with, or the rumors of a price drop won't be rumors, they'll be just a must.