Articles by David Bolton
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Joys of Raspberry Pi Development: A Walkthrough
My first computer, an Amstrad PC1512 that I bought new in 1989, cost $1,200 (or roughly $2,460 in 2019 dollars). It came with 512Kb of RAM and two floppy disks, and ran at 8 MHZ. Thirty years later, I bought a… -
Eclipse IDE: Getting Started, Plugins, and More
With the recent quarterly release of the Eclipse IDE, it’s a good time to see how both the IDE and the larger Foundation are progressing. I started using Eclipse about 14 years ago, not long after a consortium… -
PHP: A Quick Introduction to a Complex Language
PHP is a quarter-century old… and for the first 20 years, it had no written specification. That’s astounding, and probably explains why it was a bit of a challenge for many developers to get their heads around… -
Speeding Up a SQL Application: a Walkthrough
Not so long ago, I had to figure out why an old desktop application, written mainly in Delphi and using a proprietary file-based database, felt a bit slow when moved to SQL (with a bit of C# added on the front-… -
Five 'Gotchas!' in a Nightmare Delphi, C++ Project
This is a tale of the "fun" I've had creating some software. It involves taking a Microsoft technology called Virtual Channel and using it with an older programming language, Delphi. I want to show what can hap… -
Python Debugging: How to Improve Your Skills
When you work with visual programming languages such as Delphi, C#, and VB.NET, you're a bit spoiled for debugging options as they’re nicely integrated into their IDEs. But when it comes to Python, debugging “o… -
Asynchronous Programming in Python: A Walkthrough
When we talk about program execution, “asynchronous” means that the program doesn't wait for a particular process to complete, but carries on regardless. An example of asynchronous programming is a program writ… -
Programming for .NET Core: A Beginner's Walkthrough
Since its first appearance in 2002, the .NET framework has been a major success for Windows. Along the way, it spawned the .NET Compact Framework on Windows CE, as well as the .NET Micro Framework (targeted at… -
Testing and Automating an Old Code Base
At work, I'm part of a team that maintains a software product in the proptech sector. It’s popular (i.e. it sells well, generates revenue, and dominates its particular sub-market), and as a result, we’ve had to… -
The Fall and Rise of Dart, Google's 'JavaScript Killer'
Seven years ago, Google unveiled Dart, a general-purpose programming language. Version 1.0, released in late 2013, was meant as a replacement for JavaScript in browsers; it also had its own virtual machine (VM)…