Rick Minerich's Development Wonderland : Debugger

Discoveries This Week 12/26/08

RickM — Fri, 26 Dec 2008 20:22:55 GMT

Being the holiday season, it’s been a bit of a slow week. Still, I stumbled across some very good articles and sites I would like to share. I also wanted to note that I will be tagging all of my “Discoveries This Week” posts with the roundup tag for easy filtering.

Blog: Steve Sounders’s State of Performance 2008

In this blog Steve provides an excellent overview of developments in web browser performance over the last year and then ventures to predict what may be coming in 2009. I’m not sure I agree with all of his predictions. For example, Think “Web 2.0” would be heavily dependant on framework development. However, I would agree that the next generation of web pages will require fast Javascript engines and so there will be quite a lot of pressure for browser developers to keep up. Surely this is what Google is betting on as Chrome is the leader in fast Javascript. Still, until Chrome gets a real plugin interface and some skinning, it will never be able to eat into Firefox’s market share.

The most interesting piece of information I gleaned from this article is that Google is going to be taking page loading time into account when determining the quality score used in Adwords. I can only wonder how they plan on doing this in both an impartial and game resistant way. Will a bigger data pipe or distributed servers mean cheaper Adwords? Only time will tell.

Series: Steve Apiki’s Managing Multi-Core Projects Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6

This series covers the process of mutli-core enterprise development at many different levels. Building a capable team, defining the development processes and architecture decisions are all discussed to some degree. As these were posted in quick succession, I haven’t yet had the time to thoroughly read through any but the first in the series. However, the first article was excellent and so I would expect that they all share the same high degree of quality.

Site: Collected Algorithms

This site contains a huge number of different math algorithms taken from ACM-published computer science papers. The archive ranges from papers submitted in 1960 to today and claims to only provide algorithms has the properties of “originality, accuracy, robustness, completeness, portability, and lasting value”. References are also provided and so if you wish to understand see the algorithm in context, the option to go look up the corresponding paper is available to you. While the license is noncommercial use only, ACM is open to relicensing and so it may be still worth taking a look if you have a particularly difficult problem that needs solving.

Software: Debug Inspector

Debug Inspector is a free addin for both Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 which provides a set of tools to help with mutli-threaded debugging. This includes (but is not limited to) browsing the callstack of multiple threads at the same time, automatic deadlock detection and .NET integration. If I had this back when I was working on parallelizing our image commands it would have saved me a great deal of time. I haven’t had a good chance to put it through it’s paces yet but the reviews have all been fantastic. I suggest checking it out if it suits your needs. A small walkthrough is available here.

How to set up your own free VSLab-based Matlab/Mathematica replacement

RickM — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 14:48:00 GMT

VSLab has just been updated with full support for Visual Studio 2008 Shell and the F# CTP release. It has been a rough couple of weeks for the VSLab team as F# CTP changed a number of things and they have been working hard to put together a compatible release. In this article I talk about a bit about what exactly VSLab is and walk you through creating a free VSLab installation.

What is VSLab?

VSLab is a Matlab-like interactive environment which is implemented on top of Visual Studio 2008 and F#. It is designed to speed the development of scientific applications and make visualizing data quick and easy. One of the great benefits, besides being free, is that VSLab allows you to compile your applications into binaries which can be easily redistributed. Also, because the code is being run on the CLR it is, in most cases, much faster than the notoriously slow Matlab and Mathematica.

The F# CTP was updated a few days ago in order to fix a number of bugs. Even if you aren't interested in VSLab, now would be a great time to update your CTP installation.

VSLab Quick Installation Instructions

With these two releases it's very easy to create your own free Matlab-Like Visual Studio environment. It's important that these steps are performed in order as each step depends on the previous step. Installing Managed DirectX is not strictly necessary but you will not be able to use the VSLab visualizations without it.

Prerequisites
If you already have a version of Visual Studio 2008 installed, it must be updated to SP1 before you can continue. The SP1 update package is available here.

All previous versions of F# and VSLab must be uninstalled before starting this process. Also, these steps must be followed in the order they appear here.

1) Install Visual Studio 2008 Shell.
1a) Download Visual Studio 2008 Shell (integrated mode).
1b) Run the installer to Extract VS 2008 Shell Package to a temporary directory.
1c) Inside that directory, run vside.enu.exe to launch the actual VS2 2008 Shell installer.

2) Install F# CTP
2a) Download F# September 2008 Release Installer (InstallFSharp.msi)
2b) Run the F# September CTP Installer, the default settings work great.

3) Install VSLab
3a) Download VSLab
3b) Run the VSLab Installer, the default settings work great here too.

4) Install Managed Direct X
4a) Download the latest DirectX End-User Runtimes (August 2008)
4b) Run the installer to extract the DirectX End-User Runtimes to a temporary directory.
4c) Inside that directory, Run DXSETUP.exe to update your DirectX drivers.

You now have a complete VSLab installation.

Quick Start Information

1) First off, launch Visual Studio 2008 to get started.
2) Go to File->New->Project
3) Select Project Type: Visual F# and the VSLab Template
4) Hit Shift+Alt+V To activate the VSLab Interface
5) Right Click on your project and Click Add->New Item
6) On the left select the VSLab Category and Select the a the Viewer3D template.

Select all of the code before the calls to Close() and hit Alt-Enter to execute.

The real version is even animated.

Congratulations, you are now all set up to play with VSLab and F#.

Keys:
Shift+Alt+V: Starts The VSLab Interface
Alt-Enter: Send selected code to the F# interactive tool window

References:
The VSLab Tutorial is a great resource but has not yet been updated for the new VSLab release. Note that the key bindings have changed as mentioned above and keep an eye on the VSLab Blog for updates.

edit: fixed a link and added a picture from VSLab.

Custom Serializing Objects for Use in a Debugger Visualizer

RickM — Wed, 07 May 2008 19:02:00 GMT

I have a new CodeProject article up which details how to make a Debugger Visualizer in the case where you need to custom serialize the object. The actual classes I build in the tutorial are only useful with our DotImage project line. However, the process...(read more)