Programmer's Heaven have teamed up with Alpha Software to give you the chance to win one of two Garmin GPS 18 sensors or one of ten copies of their award winning database application development software - Alpha Five!

The GPS sensor is a Garmin GPS 18. Plug it into a USB or serial port, install the included software and your laptop becomes a street navigator. Or take it with you when you travel and see what points of interest are nearby using its extensive points of interest database. We're sure you can think of plenty of other creative uses!

Entering is free and easy: just supply your contact details (these will, of course, not be disclosed to anyone, including Alpha Software) and answer a few questions about the Alpha Five product. So what are you waiting for?

http://www.programmersheaven.com/competition/alphafive/

The Internet Explorer team, currently working on Internet Explorer 8, have announced that they can now render the Acid2 test correctly.

The Acid 2 test is far from a complete standards compliance test, but more an indicator of a browser's level of CSS support. If anything, perhaps this is a sign that the IE team are getting serious about web standards. The Acid 2 test is already passed by Opera and Safari, and the current Firefox 3 BETA release also passes it. Since Firefox 3 will almost certainly be out before IE8, that means Microsoft are still the last of the major browsers to arrive at the Acid 2 party...

Today represents exactly twenty years since the very first release of the Perl programming language! On 18th December 1987, Larry Wall released Perl 1.0. Twenty years on there has been another release of Perl: Perl 5.10. Five years in development, Perl 5.10 makes some significant advances on the Perl 5.8 series both in terms of performance and features, while maintaining backwards compatibility with Perl 5.8.

The regex engine, always a strength of Perl, has seen a whole raft of improvements. Some of these include performance enhancements, and others are new features; if is now, for example, much easier to write recursive regexes for matching nested structures. You can also name captures rather than just referring to them by number, which will bring readability enhancements...

Sometimes a program you have written just doesn't run fast enough. In this article I'm going to look at how (and how not) to approach such problems along with some tips for speeding things up in various cases.

Stop Right There!

The biggest mistake people make when trying to improve the performance of their programs is jumping straight in and trying to do it without first understanding where the bottleneck lies. Often the real performance issue may not lie where you think it does.

Tools for analyzing program performance are called profilers. They will tell you which functions and sometimes even which lines of the program are taking up what factor of the execution time. This is highly valuable information and can save you a lot of wasted time. Without it, you might set about optimizing a function or method that is only taking a tiny fraction of the execution time anyway...

The final part of our C# 3.0 series is about Linq - Language Integrated Query.

Learn:

• What declarative programming is
• How to write Linq queries
• How to use ordering, joins, groups and query continuations
• What DLinq and XLinq are

Read it now!

This is a review of Alpha 5, a tool for developing database backed web and desktop applications.

Distributed by: Alpha Software
Price: From $199 for IDE, from $399 for web application server

An awful lot of web and desktop applications are very similar: basically, just front ends to databases. Therefore there is a market for tools that make the job easier or do a lot of the tedious repetitive work for you. This not only saves time over hand-rolling the application yourself, but saves you from fixing the same types of bugs again and again. I've been there and written such a tool for web-based front ends myself. One of the largest challenges is making the most common things really easy without making the less common things really hard or just plain impossible.

What is Alpha Five?

I'm reviewing version 8 of Alpha Five. You can get a free trial version that lasts 30 days, if you want to follow along with the application I'm going to try and build in this review. But first, let's see what it claims to offer...

The third article in our C# 3.0 series covers the new features that will help you to build data structures with less and more readable code.

The article covers:

• Object initializers
• Collection initializers
• Anonymous type is
• Type equivalence of anonymous types

Check it out.

Most programmers today will be familiar with a number of programming paradigms. The age-old procedural programming paradigm, where a program is broken down into a number of procedures or routines, is still very much alive and the right solution for a number of problems. Object Oriented programming is one of the most popular and fashionable paradigms today, allowing for a good level of code re-use through mechanisms such as instance management (one class can be instantiated many times to give many objects), data hiding (think private variables in a class) and inheritance.

Another paradigm cross-cuts these two: that of imperative programming. This simply means that a program consists of a sequence of instructions that are executed one after the other (or at least appear to be; both the compiler and the CPU may well re-order instructions to improve performance when it does not affect the behavior of the program). In fact, when I was younger my definition of a computer program included the words “a sequence of instructions”...