Articles filed in category 'Other Languages'

So, you’re considering using PHP for a project, but aren’t sure where to start, or maybe even why you should use it? Perhaps you’ve heard all the horror stories about PHP being spaghetti code, bad for your health or that it’ll run slow as molasses. Don’t believe them! It’s not as bad as you think, and with the right approach, can be quite fun (and productive). Honest! Don’t believe me? Read on...

Collections are a common way to store multiple instances of things.For example, a TreeView control has a Nodes collection and Microsoft Word has a Documents collection. Until recently, Visual FoxPro developers wanting to use collections often created their own classes that were nothing more than fancy wrappers for arrays. However, in addition to being a lot of code to write, home-built collections don't support the FOR EACH syntax, which is especially awkward when they'r...e exposed in COM servers. Visual FoxPro 8.0 solves this problem by providing a true Collection base class.See More

Visual FoxPro 8 offers many new features and opportunities to make life easier.In this article Rick describes how to build a native VFP-based status bar that fixes some of the problems found in the Windows Common Control OCX version (MSCOMCTL.OCX) that ships with VFP and other development tools. This article introduces several new VFP 8 features: Collections, the Empty object, AddProperty() and BindEvents(), and shows how to integrate these new features into a useful component.

Eiffel Software Inc.'s Eiffel for .NET is now available as part of ESI's EiffelStudio™ . Eiffel for .NET combines the power of two object technology variants: Eiffel (including Design by Contract™, multiple inheritance, genericity and seamlessness of software development) and .NET (including language interoperability, Web services and other advanced facilities.).

Visual FoxPro developers have been using an event-based methodology for a very long time.For most purposes, events are what drive the development effort. The user clicks a button, causing an event to fire, and the developer writes code to react accordingly. All of this happens very transparently and without difficulty for either party. However, from a developer's point of view, there also isn't much flexibility in this approach. But in VFP 8, event handling is changing for the better.

Regular expressions, also referred to as "regex" in the developer community, is an extremely powerful tool used in pattern matching and substitution.In this article, Jim will introduce you to regular expressions, what they are, why you would want to use them, and finally, how you can begin putting them to work in Visual Studio .NET.

In Show #449 we spoke to Niklas Gustafsson and Josh Phillips about Axum, a new language developed specifically for parallelism.

If your application uses multi-threading, immutability should be part of it. John covers how to enforce and work with immutable objects, despite C#’s lack of native support for them.

IronPython is easy to learn yet surprisingly powerful language for .NET development. In this article, I’ll introduce you to IronPython and demonstrate it differs from C# and Visual Basic while still allowing you to leverage your existing .NET knowledge.

Sept/Oct 08 Editorial by Rod Paddock

The new VFP 8 feature often referred to as "Member Classes" is a set of new properties and new ways to define classes that can bring much more flexibility when working with certain controls.Need to define several pages in a pageframe with different properties and settings? No problem. How about better control of grid column headers? No problem.The new VFP 8 feature often referred to as "Member Classes" is a set of new properties and new ways to define classes that can br...ing much more flexibility when working with certain controls.Need to define several pages in a pageframe with different properties and settings? No problem. How about better control of grid column headers? No problem.See More

When you first begin using the new Visual FoxPro 8, you are sure to find useful new features that will make your development tasks easier.Several members of the Visual FoxPro developer community who have already worked with VFP 8 tell us their opinions of the best and most useful new features. Perhaps their answers will help guide you to some cool ideas you can put to work right away.

This second article in a series explores implementing data access and web services in PerlINET.

Perl is a language that has been around for a while and is one of the most popular open source languages among system administrators, Web developers and the research community. Meanwhile, Microsoft's .NET technology, which is comprised of a framework and set of tools, was recently released for creating sophisticated applications. Is it possible to have any connection between these two different worlds? Yes it is! Perl is now a .NET language. This is the first of a two-pa...rt series written to introduce and explore the tools and technologies that are giving Perl and .NET a new dimension. See More

Polyglot programming refers to leveraging existing platforms by solving problems via solutions that compose special purpose languages.This concept leverages the multi-language nature of the CLR to create simpler solutions to vexing problems. This article delves into the motivation, benefits, and challenges of writing applications in this style.

Microsoft’s IronRuby project brings a powerful and fun dynamic language to the Windows platform. In this article, I’ll examine the history of Ruby and the IronRuby project at Microsoft. I’ll talk about why a .NET programmer may want to learn and use Ruby, and cover the core syntax of the language to get you started learning it

If you need to use a language that compiles to native code and runs without any runtime support, you might consider Rust. Ted takes us on a tour of this new language.

If you’re looking to build a server-side framework, you’ll want to check out IBM’s Kitura. Mohammad shows you how to build a complete service on Kitura using Swift.

SharePoint is a very powerful platform. It gives you a very easy-to-setup place to put your data in.And you know what happens when you have a tool like SharePoint? People use it! And then when people have been putting in data, they want to retrieve it, in all sorts of weird ways. Putting in data is only half the story, and I’d argue the easier part. It is fetching the data in a meaningful and targeted manner that separates the wheat from chaff.

With the introduction of Visual FoxPro 3.0, error handling in VFP changed substantially.Rather than using "on error" statements, "state of the art" error events became available. Now, 7 years later, more sophisticated error handling mechanisms take center stage as Visual FoxPro 8.0 introduces structured error handling.

Visual FoxPro 8.0 introduces a whole new way to work with eXtensible Markup Language (XML).The XMLAdapter class works with hierarchical XML, provides an object-oriented approach to working with XML data, and leverages your familiarity with tables and fields in the way it exposes the XML contents.

Writing software is hard, particularly when the tools you use force you to think at too low a level; it’s time to start thinking about changing the way you write code… by making it easier to write code.Back in the days of our fathers, programming meant focusing on learning one language, one platform, and one environment, and mastering it over a span of years. Those years are long behind us, along with half-decade project development times and bell-bottomed pants. It’s ti...me to take a hard look at the “state of the union”, per se, and see how you can think about how to work better, rather than just putting in more time.See More

Visual FoxPro 8 includes numerous new features that are a direct response to the requests of VFP developers.Just reading through the "What's New" section of the documentation will take you quite a while due to large quantity of additional or changed features and commands. Let's take a brief look at just a few of the exciting new capabilities that you can put to use immediately.

Some of the early adopters of VFP 8 have contributed tips for some of the new features of this exciting release.Check out their ideas, then jump into the product and try some of the new stuff. You'll find that there is much more than meets the eye, with hundreds of additions, changes, and improvements.

Eric Rudder talks about VFP 8.

Ken Levy discusses VFP8.

Functional programming is all the rage and Microsoft's foray into the functional world is called F#. Rachel introduces you to this first-class functional language with the ability to harness the rich .NET ecosystem.

XQuery will likely become the dominant language for querying data from most data sources.Although designed for querying XML data, you can use XQuery to tie together data from multiple data sources. In that respect it is much more powerful than SQL, which will slowly but surely be replaced as the main query language.