About C / C++ / C#: Fascinating iPhone Statistics

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C / C++ / C# C / C++ / C# Fundamentals Tips & Tools Going Pro From David Bolton, your Guide to C / C++ / C# I read last week that on every day in April 105 game Apps (on average) were released for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and 541 non-game Apps. That is just an amazing amount of development (more details below) plus an article on what you need to do to publish an App in the App Store. Plus it looks like all those Flash developers who were anticipating a new market for converted Flash Apps by using Flash CS5's iPhone packager will have to learn Objective-C now instead as Apple have said no. Have a great week! MongoDB - More than Key/Value MongoDb is a NoSQL C++ schemaless database that stores documents in a binary form of JSON. It's halfway between a key/value retrieval system and a fully relational database without table relations and SQL. MongoDB is very good at real-time inserts, updates, and queries and scales horizontally, i.e. by adding more servers. If you don't need a full relational dbms and are even considering writing to flat files then MongoDB would work well for you. It's good at persisting objects especially with dynamic attributes. It also handles geo searching such as "find me the closest shops/restaurant/park to my location." type of queries. It's also cross platform with both 32 and 64 bit versions available on Windows, Mac and Linux and is used by a large number of customers such as Foursquare, Etsy, The New York Times (owners of About.com). Licensing is very liberal if you use the vanilla MongoDB binaries/source without changes. Don't underestimate the advantage of it using JSON and being schemaless. Ask anyone who works in a SQL production environment about the "fun" when changing schemas. In MongoDb you can add a new attribute to a record. If you query that attribute on any other record it will just return null. Link to C++ Code Library Creating Ascii Text Signatures These have been around as long as ASCII has. Text words made up of characters arranged in clever ways. I used to keep a large file of ASCII art when I was at University and some of the pictures had ASCII text as captions. Figlet is a C application for creating ASCII text using special fonts and has been around since the early 90s. There are something like 400 fonts available though to my mind, many look just like others! The images shown are screen captures but the program does output text files. Link to C Code Library 105 Game Apps Submitted Per Day! That's the current rate of submission of games into the App Store according to statistics from site 148 Apps. Mind you that's dwarfed by the average of 541 non game Apps submitted every day. That's just incredible, a rate of just under 20,000 Apps per month. The launch of the iPad will probably accelerate this as well, I imagine a lot of older Apps are now being revamped with iPad compatibility. I don't think anyone could ever have foreseen this two years ago. If you're tempted to try your hand at selling an App, read the How Do I Sell My iPhone App via the App Store? article to get an overview of the process. My First iPhone Programming Tutorial In this 9 page tutorial (with source code), David Bolton introduces iPhone\iPad Touch\iPad development and guides you through the creation of a very simple iPhone App, displaying text and responding to a button click. C / C++ / C# Ads Dog Problems Statistics Puppy Dog Training Bad Dog Behavior Pee Dog Featured Articles Development Projects from Initial Design to Completed Code Reviews of Software - Tools, Compilers, Editors etc Book Reviews Top Tools, Utilities and Resources Glossary of Programming Terms   More from About.com Disney Trip Planner Everything you need to plan the perfect Disney vacation -- from when to go and what to do, to saving money and picking a hotel. More > Join About.com's User Panel! Share your opinions and help us make About.com more relevant, informative and enjoyable to use. More> This newsletter is written by: David Bolton C / C++ / C# Guide Email Me | My Blog | My Forum   Sign up for more free newsletters on your favorite topics You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed to the About C / C++ / C# newsletter. If you wish to change your email address or unsubscribe, please click here. About respects your privacy: Our Privacy Policy Contact Information: 249 West 17th Street New York, NY, 10011 © 2010 About.com   Must Reads Programming Challenges About C, C++ and C# C++ for Beginners C++ Programming Intro to OOP Advertisement

About C / C++ / C#: A week of Visual Studio 2010

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C / C++ / C# C / C++ / C# Fundamentals Tips & Tools Going Pro From David Bolton, your Guide to C / C++ / C# Over the last few days I've been downloading, installing and trying out the various Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 and the free Express editions. All use WPF now instead of the traditional Windows Grey Boxes. If you've used Vista or Windows 7 you should be familiar but for those of us still on XP it is a culture change. But as I've said in my open question to Microsoft, why no Silverlight on Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express version (see below). PS If you use Visual Studio 2008/Visual C# 2008 with XNA Game Studio 3.x, don't upgrade just yet as the new versions don't support it. There's also Game Studio 4 but that's for Windows 7 Phone. See you next week, have a great one! An Open Question to Microsoft Over the weekend I took a look at the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional and was very impressed with what I saw. Overall this is very impressive piece of software, and the best showcase for WPF after Vista/Windows 7. I'll be doing a full review shortly. But I think Microsoft have missed a big trick. Here's my Question. Why Didn't you put Silverlight in Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express? At this point I have to question Microsoft's growth strategy with Silverlight. I know that Silverlight 4 is out or almost out so they are still pushing it so why not go the whole way and make it easy for people to develop in it? Microsoft Visual C# 2010 Express is an excellent free piece of software and making Silverlight development free could give it enormous growth. It's up against Flash and though C# is technically superior to ActionScript, it needs all the help it can get because Flash is heavily entrenched. Link to Silverlight 2 source code library Need to Zip in .NET? Use DotNetZip Although .NET has built in Zip handling classes in the BCL, there's always room for improvement and DotNetZip which is open source certainly does that. Back in the days of PkZip etc some 20 odd years ago, all that software had to do was add files to archives or extract them and the password protection was pretty weak. Nowadays there is Zip64, AES encryption, Unicode support, comments in zip archives, spanned zips, creating self extracting zip etc. This library does them all, including a compact framework version. Everything is done in one dll that's about 400KB but can be reduced. The documentation is good as well so overall I'm very impressed with this library, it's a really nice piece of work. Link to C# Code Library New Features in C# 4.0 + New Express Versions As a follow up to the tutorial on Winforms, this one on Advanced Winforms shows you the basics on working with: ComboBoxes ListViews DataGridViews Containers: Panel, FlowLayoutpanel, SplitContainer, TabControl and TableLayoutPanel. It also includes anchors and tags, tips on working with containers and the usual source code examples are included. Enjoy! Normally I'd next go onto preparing the next C tutorial but just this one time in light of recent activity with iPads and iPhone, I've started creating the next iPhone tutorial on memory management and Views. After that, back to C tutorials. Link to C# Tutorials Never Programmed Before? Start Here For the complete novice to computer programming. Learn how a computer works and how to control it by writing computer programs. C / C++ / C# Ads C# Tutorials C# Net C# Programmer Localization C# Net VS Visual Studio Featured Articles Other Blogs You might find Interesting Welcome to the C Area with Articles about C Programming Welcome to the C++ Area with Articles about C++ Development Welcome to the C Sharp Area with Articles about C Sharp Development Learn about Commercial Software Development All about Games Programming   More from About.com Disney Trip Planner Everything you need to plan the perfect Disney vacation -- from when to go and what to do, to saving money and picking a hotel. More > Join About.com's User Panel! Share your opinions and help us make About.com more relevant, informative and enjoyable to use. More> This newsletter is written by: David Bolton C / C++ / C# Guide Email Me | My Blog | My Forum   Sign up for more free newsletters on your favorite topics You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed to the About C / C++ / C# newsletter. If you wish to change your email address or unsubscribe, please click here. About respects your privacy: Our Privacy Policy Contact Information: 249 West 17th Street New York, NY, 10011 © 2010 About.com   Must Reads Programming Challenges About C, C++ and C# C++ for Beginners C++ Programming Intro to OOP Advertisement

About C / C++ / C#: A New C# Programming Tutorial Published

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C / C++ / C# C / C++ / C# Fundamentals Tips & Tools Going Pro From David Bolton, your Guide to C / C++ / C# I've been busy writing the next C# programming tutorial and it's now out, details are below. And the next tutorial I've decided will be another iPhone Tutorial, then I'll revert to the usual C, C++ and C# tutorial cycle. It would normally be C next but I've almost exhausted that language! I'll be doing specialist tutorials like SQLite programming. But with the activity in the iPhone and iPad, iPhone tutorials are a priority! Programming Challenge 33 was marked and I managed to miss an entry when I first published the results. Murphy's Law of course ensured that the missed entry was the fastest! See you next week! Latest C# Programming Tutorial Published As a follow up to the tutorial on Winforms, this one on Advanced Winforms shows you the basics on working with: ComboBoxes ListViews DataGridViews Containers: Panel, FlowLayoutpanel, SplitContainer, TabControl and TableLayoutPanel. It also includes anchors and tags, tips on working with containers and the usual source code examples are included. Enjoy! Link to C# Tutorials Rendering 3D in Just Software With all of the silicon provided in GPUs, there really is no reason to do this except as an exercise in recreational programming but that's just what Dr. Thanassis Tsiodras has been doing for the last few years in C++. His aim was to maximize speed, while trying to make the code as concise as it can be. It even uses the Intel Threading Building blocks if you have it to take advantage of multi-core CPUs. It's not as fast as OpenGL being completely in software but that's not the point. If you want to see how 3D rendering works in software then this is the perfect example as the code is cross-platform. It's also interesting how the speed has increased by using faster hardware from 6 frames per second (fps.) 7 years ago on an AMD XP, to 23 fps on a Core 2 Duo and now on a quad core AMD to 80 fps! Moving to 64 bit increases the speed by 20-25% His software includes 3D transformations, point rendering, Gouraud and Phong shading, Z-Buffer and Shadow mapping. It's GPL licensed open source. Link to C++ Code Library Programming Challenge 33 Marked Congratulations to Jeremy Nicklas who just pipped Jonathan Scabich with a time difference between their entries measured in micro-seconds. Neither of the other two entries were slouches either so my thanks to all four entrants: Jeremy, Jonathan, Andrew and Ehsan. Just a reminder that Challenge 34 is now open to entries. You just have to work out the fastest moves to complete a line! Link to Programming Challenge Thirty Four Complete a Straight Line Link to Programming Challenge Thirty Three Evaluate Expressions Code Library for C, C++ and C# The Code Library with source code for all examples and free downloads for this topic. C / C++ / C# Ads 3D Game Programming Computer Programming Programming Classes C# Sample Code C# Graphics Library Featured Articles Development Projects from Initial Design to Completed Code Reviews of Software - Tools, Compilers, Editors etc Book Reviews Top Tools, Utilities and Resources Glossary of Programming Terms   More from About.com Disney Trip Planner Everything you need to plan the perfect Disney vacation -- from when to go and what to do, to saving money and picking a hotel. More > Join About.com's User Panel! Share your opinions and help us make About.com more relevant, informative and enjoyable to use. More> This newsletter is written by: David Bolton C / C++ / C# Guide Email Me | My Blog | My Forum   Sign up for more free newsletters on your favorite topics You are receiving this newsletter because you subscribed to the About C / C++ / C# newsletter. If you wish to change your email address or unsubscribe, please click here. About respects your privacy: Our Privacy Policy Contact Information: 249 West 17th Street New York, NY, 10011 © 2010 About.com   Must Reads Programming Challenges About C, C++ and C# C++ for Beginners C++ Programming Intro to OOP Advertisement