Free Programming Tutorials

In my previous article, "C# Object Serialization", I explained how you could persist objects into a file. However, in many cases, not all objects are suitable for serialization. Some objects contain sensitive data that should not be saved into a file. Other objects are too bulky to persist in whole, so you may want to [...]

In October 2004 I wrote what was arguably the first article on receiving podcasts with Windows Media Player. At the time, client software options were limited, and the process of adding downloaded files to Windows Media Player and subsequently transferring them to your favorite portable device was extremely convoluted.

Multithreading is one of the most powerful concepts in programming. Using multithreading, you can break a complex task into multiple threads that execute independently of one another. One particularly good application of multithreading is in tasks that are synchronous in nature, such as web services calls. By default, web [...]

The old saw says the cobbler’s children have no shoes, and that’s also true for us. When we finished writing Building the Perfect PC,we had half a dozen new systems sitting on workbenches, but our primarydesktop systems were showing their age. Robert’s main desktop was anantique Pentium 4/1.7 with single-channel SDR memory. Barbara’s maindesktop, although [...]

Log Parser is one cool tool. Created by Gabriele Giuseppini, a software engineer at Microsoft, the original Log Parser 1.0 was developed for Microsoft’s internal testing purposes. It proved so popular that a public version, Log Parser 2.0, was released in 2001, and it has gone through two iterations, the current version being 2.2 and [...]

In our just-published book, Windows Developer Power Tools, we make the case that developers who limit their toolset to Microsoft�s Visual Studio (and the other tools your employer provides for you), are missing out on scores of incredibly useful, freely available tools.

To finish Part I of this book, and before getting to the really fun topics, it’s helpful to examine