Articles by David Bolton

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  A Look at Microsoft’s PCL for SQLite

  Having grown up in a world where the concept was anathema to Microsoft, it seems strange to think of them now on the side of open source. In 2002, for instance, there was public debate about the…
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  The 5 Best Ways to Contribute to Open Source Projects

  So you've got a bit of programming experience and some spare time available, and the thought of gaining experience, reputation and maybe even a paid job (hey, it worked for Linus Torvalds!) has t…
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  2 Free C Compilers Worth a Look

  It's surprising how important the C programming language remains, as it's now over 40 years since it was first created. It’s a simple but useful language that gives you a very low level view of m…
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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…