Articles by David Bolton

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  How Shaders Can Render Awesome 3-D Graphics

  Creating 3-D graphics involves more than just creating objects -- you also have to tell the GPU how to best render them. To do that, you use shaders. Shaders are computer programs that are run on…
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  How to Build Your Job Credentials With Code

  The mark of a great programmer is well-written code, but it's not always easy to showcase the quality of your work. As a contract programmer, I’ve started to bring printed examples of my code to…
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  Programming for iOS With Xamarin Studio

  Back at the start of July I began a contract to develop an iOS app for a Taxi firm. I decided to invest in Xamarin Studio so that I could develop the app in C#. The development took a bit longer…
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  Why Managed Code Is Safer

  One of the biggest sea changes in computing took place in the late 1990s, with the switch over to running managed code, first with Java and then a couple of years later with .NET. Prior to this,…
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  Generating Not-So-Random Numbers With Java’s Random Class

  All programming languages have random number generator classes or libraries, which produce sequences of random numbers. Those sequences are similar to pi in that they run on forever (well, sort o…
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  Key Differences Between C# and Java

  Any comparison of C# and Java's language features will always be contentious. The parable about the three blind men describing an elephant illustrates the issue well -- no one developer has used…
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  Using Microsoft’s OneNote as a Creative Tool

  For many years I designed games, projects, to-do lists, and more using Wiki on a Stick, a single page wiki which worked beautifully in Firefox until three or four years ago. It held everything in…
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  Blocking Queues Beat Lists in Multithreaded Code

  In .NET, it's quite common to store data in a generic List – a List where T is some type such as an int or a class. In addition to its standard uses, a generic list can be implemented as a gen…
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  Watson Becomes Available for App Developers

  Watson, the IBM supercomputer that won $1 million playing Jeopardy in 2011, is now becoming available to app developers. The system that was built for Jeopardy was not your everyday PC. With 2,88…
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  Coding Challenge: Best Have a Card Up Your Sleeve

  Our newest coding challenge runs through January, ending on Jan. 31, 2014, so you should have plenty of time for it. It's about a card game called Sevens. The game is for three to seven players.…