Since the Visual Studio 2012 RTM came out I have been experimenting with the different features. Now this may of existed in previous versions(although not as pretty), but this is quite a nice little tool for understanding where your code is being locked up. Sadly though in this case I wasn’t actually able to get any advantage without a big re-write.

So what do you get, some charts some nice percentage bars, and also the ability to dig down into your function and find where it really is going slow.

This is an example of a tree being searched through so there is little to be gained (or at least on first glance) to improve the performance. But is nice to know that abusing vectors is killing my code… maybe a note for next time I write something like this.

Stuart James  …

<p> </p> <p>Every so often you will hit a user interface that will break your user model. It isn’t often that mainstream publishers will do this so I was quite shocked on the Google Listen App for Android (2.3) in the add podcast option the add and cancel buttons are around the wrong way. Making me accidently click add instead of cancel. The worse part when these events occur you have to think, is that actually the wrong way? but after opening a few more apps I felt happy to say Google FAIL!</p>
Stuart James  …

Stuart James  …

Often when doing image dataset evaluation you want a quick easy way to either see how different descriptors perform or just get an evaluation measure for your system. Well I have created a tool to be able to do the former. This is a simple tool so you can select images, if that image appears in another descriptors results it is auto-magically highlighted to avoid bias or mistake. As you scroll the query image stays with you and finally you can upload a relevance result for each descriptor to the server.

<p> </p> <p>Of course to use this requires you being able to ping against my server so isn’t for public use, but is quite fun to play around with javascript and see how easy although painful it can be to create GUI’s for distributed use.</p>
Stuart James  …

Visual Studio

I have been a Visual Studio user for many years so trying out Visual Studio 11, isn’t a big surprise. I like the restyle that VS11 has received doesn’t encourage me to run out and get add-on to get VS theme add-on. As for C++ coding sadly I haven't had much time to see what the changes are but general functionality seems more stable such as intelligence, highlighting and the right click goto  definition. This functionality was broken in Visual Studio 2010, taking forever to find a definition in the same file. I also noticed a considerable improvement in compilation time, rebuild of my un-optimised(e.g. not precompiled header) library was greatly improved.

Example code: clapack

Aptana Studio (for PHP and JS)

I have started doing increasing amounts of web development for projects I am working on. Writing mark-up tools search systems and generally are all Ajax enabled with DOM. All my backend API is written in PHP although I may get tempted to change this at some point, but writing and managing the code has been a bit of a pain. Visual Studio has little(via add on) to no support for PHP and most other tools have out-dated versions of support for JS and HTML, not including the HTML5 draft standard. No obvious IDE has resorted in me abusing editors like notepad, programmers notepad, gedit, geany although all great for editing files not really designed for proper coding.

So over time I have played with a few different IDE’s including Eclipse with add-ons. Never really settling into one that I liked for long and often returning back to my trusty friends the editors. But I think I may have found a hit, Aptana Studio (modded eclipse) seems to be a nice environment for writing JS code especially.

Example code: secret-ish project ;)

A lot of functionality works well, auto complete function descriptions jump to file. Oh and good layout of windows (always a must in my book). Works through the multiple languages html,js,php so is a nice IDE. I have to use it for a few more weeks but I think this one is a keeper!

Stuart James  …