When it comes to software and memory use there are two ways to deal with managing it, either manually or automatically. With a managed environment, such as the .NET framework, memory is generally managed automatically.

When running an ASP.NET webpage the page goes through a series of steps as it is being processed. This page life cycle includes: instantiating controls, restoring and maintaining state, running event handler code, and rendering. Having a good understanding of the page life cycle is important so that you know when in the process you should populate properties, initialize controls, run control behavior code, etc.

If you are looking for a good solution to protect your data, but want it to be more flexible than something like a RAID 1 or RAID 5 you may have considered ZFS, unRAID, or various other proprietary solutions.

Programming in BASIC on a BBC microcomputer, showcasing different sorting algorithms.

“How does HTTPS actually work? ….. How was data protected? How can a client and server create a secure connection if someone was already listening in on the wire? What is a security certificate and why do I need to pay someone to get one? …..”

“How much does your framework choice affect performance? This site helps answer that question.

Here is a a really very detailed explanation (with examples) of how a program ends up going from code to an executable that your processor can run. This post details all of the steps along the way, from the original code, compiling, compiler optimizations, assembly, machine code, etc.

What factors impact the comprehensibility of code? Previous research suggests that expectation-congruent programs should take less time to understand and be less prone to errors. We present an experiment in which participants with programming experience predict the exact output of ten small Python programs. We use subtle differences between program versions to demonstrate that seemingly insignificant notational changes can have profound effects on correctness and response times. Our results show that experience increases performance in most cases, but may hurt performance significantly when underlying assumptions about related code statements are violated.

In the context of code reviews, are checklists useful? Do they work? How do you use them (if you do)? This article poses these questions and gives a couple of checklist examples used for code reviews. I personally prefer using checklists as they help remind me of the most important ‘big’ things to check for.

The battle between ARM and x86 (Intel) has been gaining steam more and more lately as Intel begins its movement into the mobile space (tablets, smartphones, etc.). Here is an article that provides a detailed analysis of ARM vs x86 in regards to performance and power consumption. Surprisingly, the paper  concludes that the current Atom processor and the ARM Cortex A9 are mostly equivalent at the current moment.