Google's Android - HTC Dream

2007, We saw google foraying into the handset market with the Open Handset Alliance which includes gaints like Qualcomm,T-mobile, HTC and many others including google itself. The intention was to develop open standards for mobile devices. Take a look at Android here and the SDK details here.

I remember watching the launch of iPhone SDK. It was impressive how they moved most of the stuff from mac into iPhone stack, for instance the cocoa library. It was really exciting to see the demos built in a week's time by developers on iPhone. I'm all excited to wait and watch android in function on mobile handsets, Probably on HTC Dream, which grapevine says will be released in October. So many exciting platforms out there for mobile devices now. Windows Mobile (Compact Framework), iPhone SDK (Objective C) , Java FX (Java), Android (Java-like managed environment) , Symbian (C++) and the list goes on..Wonder how much market share each of these will have in the next year..I'm sure windows mobile will still maintain a good market share.

Last week, There were security issues discovered on android..check them out here.

Google's Distributed C++ Compiler distcc

Imagine how long would it take for compiling (a rebuild) google's web server ? 20 mintues ?..Hmm., that's a lot of time for compiling , take a look at how google research engineers solved the problem by developing an algorithm called 'pump mode' for distcc. Amazing stuff.

VS 08 SP1 and .Net FX 3.5 SP1

Woohoo!! Time to get excited..VS 08 SP1 seems to me like more of a bug fixing upgrade over features. However, .Net FX 3.5 SP1 is exciting with the following

1] ASP.Net Dynamic Data :

ASP.NET Dynamic Data, which provides a rich scaffolding framework that enables rapid data driven development without writing code, and a new addition to ASP.NET AJAX that provides support for managing browser history (back button support). For more information

2] Entity Framework

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/aa937723.aspx

3] ADO.NET Data Services Framework

The ADO.NET Data Services Framework consists of a combination of patterns and libraries, which enable data to be exposed as a flexible REST (Representational State Transfer)-based data service that can be consumed by Web clients in a corporate network or across the Internet. The ADO.NET Data Services Framework makes data service creation over any data source. A conceptual view model of the underlying storage schema can easily be exposed through rich integration with the ADO.NET Entity Framework. Services created by using the ADO.NET Data Services Framework, and also compatible Windows Live (dev.live.com) services, can be easily accessed from any platform. For client applications that are running on Microsoft platforms, a set of client libraries are provided to make interaction with data services simple. For example, .NET Framework-based clients can use LINQ to query data services and a simple .NET Framework object layer to update data in the service

Downloads

> .NET FX 3.5 SP1

> VS 08 SP1

Visual Studio RSS Configuration

If you wanted to subscribe to a different feed from MSDN, which gets displayed in the start page, use this article here to learn configure Visual Studio to do just that.

A Concurrent Programming Primer on Code Project

 

I found a good read on PLINQ (Parallel LINQ) and TPL (Task Parallel Library) on code project. It doesn’t cover everything though but gives you good examples and common pitfalls using them.

The examples cover,

• Parallel Class - Parallel.For, Parallel.Do, AsParallel  constructs
• Exception Handling for Parallel programming constructs
• Handling of compiler side-effects.

You need the TPL CTP download and of course VS 2008 for trying out the samples.

Converting a LINQ query from sequential to parallel execution is as simple and straightforward as below :

   1: Enumerable<T> data = ...;

   2: var q = from x in data.AsParallel() where p(x) orderby k(x) select f(x);

Here’s the link