Programming, the final frontier......ok, so maybe programming is not really the "final" frontier, but it sure is close. Final frontiers aside, a couple weeks ago we had our second installment into pygame. It was fun, and we added some cool new features. However, after looking over what I wanted to add for the third installment, I decided to go over something in python itself.

A long time ago, in a tutorial far away... Ok, so maybe it hasn't been that long since our last foray into the world of programming, but it sure seems like it sometimes. On a more serious note, however, a while back we did go over some very basic things involving Python and a library known as Pygame. Today my friends, we will be continuing on this path, and adding to what we build that fateful December day.

Another year has come and gone here at Switch On The Code and that means it's time to look back at 2009 and how we did. First I have say it was a great year and we really did a lot of new things here. We started podcasting, doing video tutorials, and much more. A new version of the site was launched built completely in Drupal just about 1 year ago exactly. Now I really hope that this year will bring just as many goodies.

This talk will cover some basic tools that you can start using now that can save you a lot of time on your work. Some of these tools include version control, build systems, static analysis, debuggers, profilers and IDEs.

I have a multitude of tutorials on the Flex Datagrid here at Switch On The Code and none of them show you how to use percentage widths in your Datagrid. Now at the surface this seems really easy, but the way they implemented it in Flex is very unintuitive. So, today I am going to show you how to quickly get percentage based columns in your datagrid.

Most conversations about interviews involve how to land the job. What happens when you land the job and you don't love it. The job interview isn't just a one-way experience. Find out how to make best use of job interviews for yourself in the video below.

It's a rule that should never be forgotten - don't ever perform work that takes a non-trivial amount of time on the UI thread. Of course you're now wondering, "Where do I perform tasks that take a non-trivial amount of time?". The answer is simple - on a different thread. There are lots of ways to get your work onto another thread, which can include directly creating a Thread or using the ThreadPool.

There ain't nothing that can keep us down. The latest episode of the podcast is jammed packed with awesome stuff. We discuss all the latest Google happenings including their recent purchase of AdMob, Google Go, Analytics updates, Chrome OS, and more. Among other topics we also talked about PDC, Silverlight 4, Adobe AIR 2, CrunchPad and Cyber Clean keyboard cleaning goo.

Audio Downloads: 

SOTC Episode 6 - Im on a Boat.mp3

So you're sitting around, playing some simple game on your computer, and you finally realize that as a developer, you can make games too. After a little research you come across this "python" thing that is fairly popular among the dev crowd, but also has a nice 2D game library. Using the Pygame library with Python you finally can realize your quick and simple games. So it's time to get started.

Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference has just wrapped up and I've decided to run through an account of what happened and some of the major announcements that have been made.