Desktop application development

C++ is certainly one of the most complex programming languages around. A particularly gnarly aspect of C++ are the templates: as a late addition to the language, they had to fit within the existing syntax. On top of that, using the STL approach, the…

Today’s high core-count processors require parallel algorithms for programs to run fast. To achieve this, asynchronization and future values are not a reliable solution.

One of the challenges of writing multithreaded code is that it is often necessary to share data that was not designed to be used by multiple threads at the same time. In this blog post, I want to show two approaches to protect such data: duplication…

In the course of an internal project, I was charged with exploring Amazon’s email services. In this article, I’ll be sharing what I learned about the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) features: sending, bounces, out-of-office messages, complaints…

Code golf is usually all about the briefness of the code. This code golf will be a bit different: it will be about code size, speed and efficiency. 

The first rule of optimization is “don’t do it”. However, once you’ve made your code as clear as it can be, written all your unit tests and verified that the actual product works, you’re sometimes left with underwhelming performances.

Qt is a very flexible and complete tool. That flexibility has its limits, though, and sometimes the Qt documentation can lead one down dead-ends. That is what happened to me recently. All I wanted to do was to put some buttons and text fields in a…

François shares 17 tips and tricks to be efficient in Visual Studio.

Ismaayl explains how the containerization arrival makes it possible to improve the use of physical infrastructure:

Qt is a powerful framework for building desktop application user interfaces. However, when you need information on how to achieve a particular goal, it is sometimes difficult to gather it. It can be frustrating to feel that the solution is close at…

Data in a C++ program flows from a source, gets modified multiple times and ends up as something entirely different. During processing, the data may change type, reflecting its changing nature. As programmers, we design a type system that reflects…

In this essay, we will explore an imaginary extension of the C++ language that could simplify programming, help detect more errors automatically and make programs clearer.

This question comes back regularly, but now we may have the beginning of an answer!

It went unnoticed, yet it was probably the IT world’s biggest news of the year: Windows 10 is going to be compatible with ARM processors.Microsoft has had some experience with ARM processors (ARMv7), with a more tablet-specific operating system…

Since the Windows 10 Anniversary update, and thanks to an agreement between Microsoft and Canonical, it is now possible to install Ubuntu directly, free of virtual machines and containers.It’s actually very easy. Just follow these simple steps to…

Thirty years ago, I received a beautiful electric train set.It came with three different kinds of rails:

IntroductionA number of years ago now, microprocessor (CPU) frequency, which until then had been an indicator of a computer’s performance potential, levelled off. There are several reasons for this [1]:

How to add information tiles to an application for Windows 8.1 (and maybe 10, who knows?):If you have ever developed a desktop application for Windows 8.1, you may have noticed that at some point, you will need to have an image tile.

This article will discuss a few technical issues we faced while developing the Hololens brain demo that was introduced on this page.Microsoft’s decision to team up with Unity has really made life much simpler for Hololens developers. With a bit of…

Shared data is a fast way to communicate between parent and child processes. Depending on the size of the shared data, you can choose either named pipe or named shared memory. The following examples illustrate both cases and show how to use event…

The following article explains how to easily create and configure a Windows service with TopShelf and Ninject dependency injection.TopShelf is a NuGet package that allows you to encapsulate a classic console application in a Windows service.Ninject…

When working on several projects at once, using several different technologies, programmers are forced to install many different programs in order to be able to work in the right environment for each project. And sometimes, one version of an…

In this article, we’ll examine UV mapping techniques and the different types of textures. What are UVs?UV mapping is the 3D modeling process of projecting a 2D image onto a 3D model’s surface. The term “UV” refers to the bidimensional (2D) nature of…

Outlines are drawn on objects to visualize an object selection status, and constitute a main part of every toon shader. In this blog post, we describe some techniques to implement outline shaders in Unity.

Unlike managed languages, like C# and Java, where memory used by a program is automatically freed up by the garbage collector when no longer needed, native languages like C or C++ must explicitly manage memory. This means that the programmer must…

I don’t think that it is common, but it is something that I had to do: I run a Neverwinter Nights server and because it is quite large, the memory usage of the process was climbing by around 100 megabytes every hour. It is not an issue for…

In the previous blog article we showed how to build a Mingw-w64 toolchain that links with a specific runtime. In this article we will use this toolchain, along with a locally built Python installation, to generate a version of NumPy that links with…

Compiling native Python modules from source packages using a Un*x compatible toolchain can sometimes be tricky. Both the Cygwin and Mingw-w64 toolchains end up linking with msvcrt.dll while the Python interpreter, built with Visual Studio 2008 links…

Let’s draw a 4D cube! I created the above animation using Houdini, my favorite 3D modelling package. Interestingly, Houdini does not provide any particular support for 4D models, so I had to improvise. This post explains how I did it.

Current APIs OpenGL 4.x and DirectX 11 have greatly improved functionality over the years since the earliest versions. One of the most significant updates was probably the introduction of the programmable pipeline to replace the old fixed-function…

Introduction My last article (Introduction to WinDBG) discussed the various prerequisites necessary to use the WinDBG debugger effectively. In order to get the most out of the article below, it is important to understand the information that was…

When nothing goes wrong and Visual Studio can no longer help us, we still have one last tool that may allow us to save ourselves, as long as we are ready to roll up our sleeves: WinDBG. This article is an introduction to this tool.

The friend keyword in C++ has always been clouded by controversy, often being accused of breaking encapsulation. This article aims to present an existing but lesser-known idiom that allows you to limit the scope of the friend…

Introduction I am not a big gamer, but I enjoy creating things and then playing with what I create, so I quickly got attached to Neverwinter Nights 1. This game lets us create persistent worlds, script them and then play on them with other real…

3D printing and mechanical simulations are two situations which require solid modelling, that is, a representation of 3D objects which clearly distinguishes the parts of an objects which are filled with solid material and the parts which are filled…

After implementing an intuitive one-finger 3D translation gesture which kept landmarks under the user’s finger as the camera moved, we wanted a similarly-intuitive gesture for 3D camera rotation. We ended up replicating the style of camera…

At Spiria, we are currently migrating our repositories from svn to git. In the process, we have encountered a surprisingly large number of small issues, which I would like to share with you today. If you are planning to undergo a similar migration…

Installing Haskell on Ubuntu seems to be a challenge. But maybe I can help!