Software Development

Recently I came across an interesting feature which I hadn’t seen before, I used to think that in IIS you can only host one website per IP address and port. But apparently you can host multiple websites on the same IP on IIS as long as the sites have unique domain names.

After many failed attempts at building webkit I was finally able to get all the pieces together and build and debug webkit under visual studio. I can now start playing with the live system, rather than browsing through the code.

Here are some of the tools that I currently have installed on my dev machine. Most of them are freeware or have free versions available. IDEs Visual Studio 2003 and 2005 - The essential IDE for any professional windows developer, I only have C# and C++ installed btw to keep resource usage to a minimum.

I’ve been working on this bug for the past one week, basically a call to the GDI+ APIs MeasureString and DrawString was failing with a very useful exception “A generic GDI+ error has occured” 😉 , my initial hypotehesis was that the problem was coming because of the length of the string that we were trying to measure, at that time around 100000+ characters.

When I had first read about CMM I had thought that it was the holy grail that all software companies should be working towards, at that time I was still in school and idealism took precedence over reality.

I got back to application development using Java after spending the last 4 years developing applications using .Net and C++ and things have really changed!!! I have spent the last one month trying to catch up on all the new stuff in the Java world.

The build is the pulse of any software development activity and a good build system facilitates quality software development. My current thoughts on a build process are as follows Build Machine The build machine is a dedicated physical or virtual machine whose sole purpose is to build your product.

Recently I downloaded Picasa from Google to manage my huge collection of photographs, I was totally blown away by the great experience of using such a great piece of software. Everything was so intuit, and the UI was really slick and well organized.

Over the last year I’ve downloaded the source for many popular open source tools like Gaim, eMule, Mozilla etc. in order to read the code. One big problem I always faced coming from a Visual Studio background was the lack of a solution or workspace kind of concept that allows for easier code browsing.

A few years back when I first started reading about design patterns, refactoring, OO principles etc. I got it into my head that I should “Always program to an interface not an implementation”.