Introduction: The Message Passing interface (MPI) provides a standard way to distribute functions/objects/data across a cluster of systems -- whether embarrassingly parallel, or something more robust.  It’s an amazingly simple api to get started with, though working out how to send and receive the messages in the right order can get a ...

This is a post about a serious bug I turned up in the Microsoft C++ compilers that target CLI (both Managed C++ and C++/CLI). One of the key concepts in software engineering is Design by Contract.  Design by Contract boils down to “say what you do and do what you say.”  Essentially, when I make a semantic definition, I would like it to ...

We had a question in our forums about face detection via OpenCV.  I had looked at OpenCV a few weeks ago and had a small amount of time to burn, so I decided that this would be a fun project to tackle.  The API for OpenCV is sane and their internal image format appears to be similar to what we use in dotImage, so getting AtalaImage ...

While in most cases there is no explicit information in an assembly as to which languages it was compiled from, it is possible to make an educated guess as to which languages were used.  This is due to the fact that each different .NET compiler leaves it’s own unique type of fingerprint.  In this article I discuss both my methodology for ...

This is the first in a series of posts on the topic of interaction between different .NET languages.  I will cover all of the major Microsoft languages: C#, Visual Basic, F# and C++/CLI. In this first post in the series I will build a four language project in Visual Studio 2008 and begin to explore inter-language inheritance.  One of ...

When you are handed a string, integer, or any value type, can you know what it really represents?  Can you define the range of appropriate behaviors for that data?  Can you tell if it's formatted correctly?   The problem is, in all of these cases, you can't.  You can't be sure of it's meaning, it's format or even how to ...

It has come to my attention via a recent DZone article that .NET 3.5 and 2.0 SP1 jointly included a new feature which lets you manipulate the way your garbage collector acts programmatically.  This can be done through changing the value of a new property of the System.Runtime.GCSettings class named LatencyMode. In this article I will walk you ...

After my last post, A Safe and Asynchronous One to Many Stream Copy Through IL and Inheritance”, I ordered a few books and spent some time playing with generating IL. Along the way I’ve developed a library which allows you to make a franken-clone of any object. You pass the method an object to clone along with a hash table of values to change, ...

Tuning the garbage collector to the specific context of the particular application can significantly improve the performance of both non-threaded and multi-threaded applications. In this post I discuss the gcConcurrent and gcServer settings which allow you to exercise some control how the Garbage Collector operates.   Articles in This ...

This is the first in a series of posts I will be writing about managing memory in .NET. Before I move on to more complex techniques, I thought it would be good to cover the basics. Articles in This Series Part 1 - Basic Housekeeping Part 2 - Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation Part 3 - Increasing the Size of the ...