HPC Developer Group?

I brought this up over on the RSS Reader thread, and as it is horribly way off topic I've started this thread. Thanks C:Amie for letting me know!

It's probably been brought up before, but since in the last week we've seen quite a few developers posting about their projects and asking for help, I thought it might be advantagous, and engaging if all of the developers could have a place to bring their projects and questions to the table. The forum is a great place for this, and will continue to be for a long time but a lot of us are directing questions at an individual or a select group, and often the questions are very specific to a project. In other cases, newbies like myself are looking for a place to start. I've seen numerous threads about example code, and tutorials. If we could put it all in one place (much like the CESD and HCL), it would greatly increase the amount of developers, while decreasing thread bloat. Also, through use of this second medium, developers and people with ideas could link up and start projects, which would be great for the vitality of HPCs in general.

Anyone have any thoughts about this? I'm really curious to hear everyone's opinion and ideas. I in no way wish to redirect traffic from the forums, but rather augment it with a more feature rich system for developers. It would cool to be able to go into the developer section and see all the projects, their status, and the like as well as tutorials, code, and stuff. Even for non-developers could really benefit from this.

I've often badgered Chris about the idea of a developers' wiki... That would seem to be useful for me.

For what it's worth, I'll happily donate the source to MagnetiCE, and to the Sig3Tool that I'm writing. I'd like to polish up the code a bit, but it's available.

Don't forget that there's good example programs in the SDKs, and that the Boling book has some good code examples too.

Wiki would get my vote; I can try to throw together a FAQ which could serve as a sticky thread to start us off?

I have always been very keen on the idea, as have the other owners. However to this day we have been unable to pull together sufficient developers to actually make a difference.
There is the added problem that there has been little interest in working together collectively - on open source efforts such as web browsers or even more simple applcations. I stress that this is a historic observation, and I hope greatly that this will change!

In the near term I am ready and willing to chip in in any way that I can can with projects, and with content for the CESD. However until such a time that there is a developer base present demanding going all out on dedicating vast areas of the site to developers, I am not going to offer up whole rafts of my time. I have been in the position too many times before where I have made changes to sites (this and others) at the request of users and they are seldom used there after.

I can however nominate to the other Admins that I give Chiark some autonomy in this regard.

Chris, I fully agree with your stance and observations. The problem is that a small software project is easy, whereas scaling up to develop as a team takes a serious amount of commitment and management overhead.

Content for the CESD/FAQ sounds like a good option to start off with: if it goes well, who knows where it'll take us. and if it doesn't... Well, it's up to everyone to make it go well!

Just to add my 2 cents as a beginning HPC dev myself...

I think it would be great to have a resource on this site, somewhere where HPC developers that are either just starting out or just need to look up information as a reference, could share code, ideas, etc. that is specific to the HPC platform.

There are some of us (myself included) who have done lots of development work on the desktop (and may have been using CE, or more specifically HPC, devices for quite awhile now), but just haven't really looked into or aren't as comfortable/used to embedded development yet. I think a repository of some sort would definitely be helpful to gather all of these kinds of helpful information, code, experiences with APIs/hardware/software, etc.

Yes, I apprecviate that, always did. My point there is that in the past we have never been able to stem sufficient developers to have a tea party, let alone a programming group.

IM me, we'll bang heads and fill out hte paperwork (in triplicate).

Mscdex: Well, for a reference there's MSDN which really can't be bettered. Once you've learnt where to find things, a reference is redundant. The examples in the SDK are not a bad start, but I do believe that the Boling book is a very good introduction to the WinCE API...

WHERE??? WHERE???

in the very near future - a bit of bugfixing and more error trapping yet. Sorry to get your hopes up

Someone's let the cat out of the bag

count with me
I can provide some source code, tips and stuff if they are needed. I'm also working on an integrated Development Environment for pgcc (or other compiler) . It'll also allow you to have the compiler in a storage card since I've managed to found out some ways to allow this (relative paths instead of absolute paths is one of them).
If other developers start writting tools like a resource editor, hexeditor, debugger, icon/bitmap editor maybe, among other tools we can create a whole SDK for on-device development and provide it here in factor for new developers !
lol... wouldn't be a bad idea at all.....

I personally have been writing C, Java, and PHP for a few years (basically since I started college I really dove into code, one more year on my BA). I've been interested in writing something for my CE devices (PPC/HPC) and really have no clue what I'm doing. I have eVT and have opened up some of the SDK samples and basically got blown away. eVC scares the living daylights out of me honestly, and eVB is just a tad bit more tame, but the syntax reminds me of ASP (which I used a long, long time ago). I'd like to get up to speed and help out. Maybe if we started small, giving all the developers who have begun their small projects someplace to post revisions, source, and recieve bug reports to start and if it grew, and we have a few group projects maybe we could move up to the ultimate extreme browser project. A wiki would be perfect for this so long as its moderated, and the front page has links to the main pages. At work we use a wiki for tips for working with certain clients and applications, but nothing is ever linked to anything else, so its one big mess.

Anyways, I'm off to charge my MP800 which finally has a power source...

eVC is frikin simple if you have programmed for Windows before (I personally prefer Lcc for desktop apps). There are some things to understand first (can become quite a lot if you pretend to make complex GUI-based apps).
I've observed anyway that CE development is seen as some kind of black art and even developers seems to be scared to start with it....

Haha frikin.



Well, those are some good things to hear when I get started on GUI programming one day...

Lcc?

ShadowMaster. I think that the keywords here are "if you have programmed for Windows before".

If you haven't, it's "Frikin hard"