ddankwa Programming Tutorials: About C / C++ / C#: Significance iPad?

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C / C++ / C#

C / C++ / C#

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Going Pro

From David Bolton, Your Guide to C / C++ / C#.

This week's big news was the announcement of the iPad. A lot of people have poo-poohed it but I think the target audience will buy them by the bucket load. Having over 150,000 apps available (I guess by the time it launches) won't hurt at all. There will be lots of opportunities for developers. The latest C++ programming tutorial on Text Files is out. Shortly another C# Winforms will appear and then first iPhone development Tutorial. Interesting Times we live in!

Who is the Target Audience for an iPad?

I've heard and read a fair bit of negative stuff about the iPad. Partly this is because of the expectation, which Apple had quite some input through controlled and unattributable leaks to the press. If we hadn't got iPhones already this would have been truly revolutionary. I think people expected it to be larger capacity and a more powerful beast but the Wii has proved that less can compete and outsell more powerful games consoles. I see the audience for the iPad as being the same as that who buy a PC with Google's Chrome OS on. Web browsers, i.e. people not software, No booting up a computer and logging on the net, just switch it on and instant browsing and instant on games. Don't forget all your current iPhone apps will also sync and be usable. I think there will be a lot of new games, those written in Objective-C and existing Flash games once Flash CS5 comes out with the new "export to an Xcode project" feature. Casual games are a big business and will continue to grow with the iPad fueling much of that growth. I'm already working on the first iPhone App tutorial and iPad development comes as free with that. I can't wait to get an iPad...

Link to Objective-C Code Library

Iterating through your Own List with C# foreach

Collection classes support IEnumerable so you can easily iterate through them using foreach. But what if you've created your own list management object and wish to do this? Internally it might use a collections (say List) but that should be private and you don't want to make it public just to write bad code like foreach (myobject m in mylist.list) Where mylist is class that has a List list. You just want to write better code like this: foreach (myobject m in mylist) Well you can but you need to (in C# versions before 2.0) implement the IEnumerable interface or much easier in >= 2.0, by just adding a three line function. For details on how to write this function, see this new quick tip with example source code. You can see more C# tips at the link below. if you have any programming tips that the world should see, let me know by an email to cplus.guide@about.com?subject=programming tips

Link to C# Programming Quick Tips

Serving Up Ultima Online

13 years on and with 8 Guinness World records, Ultima Online(UO) was amongst the first of the online games and the first to reach a 100,000 subscriber base though now dwarfed by World of Warcraft and many others and subscriber numbers have been declining since 2003. Back in 2002 a developer called Krrios began creating his own game but was convinced to create a UO server emulator called RunUO. You can read lots more history of RunUO on the About Allexperts site. That server is written in C# and GPL licensed with a community who build and run servers. There's also another UO GPL server UOX written in C++ that is almost as old as UO though the first couple of versions were single player and the present version UOX3 is 12 years old. The most recent version came out just over a week ago. Again you can find out more on the AllExperts site. Note although Electronics Arts, the owner of Ultima Online allows servers these must be free and not commercial. You might also find the 19 page PDF Introduction to Server Side Emulation an interesting read!