Articles by David Bolton

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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.…
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  Coding Challenge Results: The Most Factorially Fluent

  Thank you to everybody who entered our first Coding Challenge: Prove Your Factorial Fluency. We received a total of 61 entries, from 58 individuals -- three players submitted extra entries in dif…
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  Visual Studio 2013 Released - Worth Upgrading?

  Visual Studio, Microsoft's flagship development tool and considered the best IDE around, has had an overhaul, a new coat of polish and some new features added. But is it worth upgrading, when eve…
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  Is TrueCrypt Truly Secure?

  Written in C++, with C and some assembler, TrueCrypt is an open source tool for creating encrypted disk volumes. The volumes it creates can be stored on an external disk, as a partition of a disk…
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  Improve Your Job Search With a Personal Project

  More and more, hiring managers tell us that they want to hire candidates who work on personal projects outside of their jobs. They say the first place they look up a potential candidate is on Git…