I’ve been doing a lot of work in the PDF space lately. While implementing Binary Cross Reference Streams I was surprised to see that they could be encoded with PNG Predictors. This was surprising to me because binary cross reference streams aren’t images, they are byte tables:     While the values vary, they are often within the ...

Synopsis   I gave an hour long talk today, here at Atalasoft, on Concurrency in F#. It featured some slides and a small ant colony simulation to demonstrate different kinds of threading. Overall, I liked developing in F# quite a bit; however, puzzling through the interpreter errors was a brutal process indeed.   You can grab my ...

In the previous article I discussed a few of the benefits of stack allocation as well as a couple of C# keywords which help you to leverage those benefits. However, the one megabyte default stack size is too small for stack allocation to be used with a large dataset. Alternatively, in some threading situations one megabyte per thread/fiber can ...

Before picking up the phone to call a software company's technical support, how many of these questions cross your mind? They wont talk to me until I show them the money I'll be on hold forever, just to leave a voicemail that goes unanswered I'm going to be directed to someone in India I'm going to be speaking to someone who knows less about ...

Articles in This Series Part 1 – Basic Housekeeping Part 2 – Improving Performance Through Stack Allocation Part 3 – Increasing the Size of your Stack Introduction In C#, when you create managed objects or arrays of value types, they are created on the Heap and you are passed back a reference to the memory in which that allocated ...

There are a great number of different ways to count the number of processors available to the .NET developer. In this post I will go over some of the more common methods and their pros and cons.   The Envirionment.ProcessorCount Way Code: Environment.ProcessorCount; Supported Platforms: Windows 98 Or Greater, .NET 2.0 or ...

One of the most often cited reasons to not use .NET is that it is initially compiled to an intermediary language (MSIL) and has to be recompiled every time you run it. In many high performance environments this wasted time is simply unacceptable. To combat this Microsoft released a tool with .NET 1.1 called NGen (Native Image Generator) which ...

Ian Piumarta and some very smart folks over at the Viewpoints Research Institute have been working on a meta programming language named IS which is specifically designed for implementing other languages. The project actually has several names (IS, idst, cola, jolt, &c), as far as I can tell the current development version is called cola. The ...

I read this kind of funny story about a kid who got himself into a little trouble reading and writing barcodes by hand. After reading it, I figured if he's going through the trouble of getting graph paper and markers to write Code 39, I can certainly provide the code to doing it with DotImage. Code 39 is a simple barcode format -- it supports ...

Last night the wmassdevs Group hosted a Clojure presentation by Rich Hickey. Clojure was born of Rich's dissatisfaction with the current state of the concurrent programming and so was built from the ground up around the idea of making this task less painful. Previously, I had never really looked closely at Clojure but I was struck by some of the ...