Real-Time Programming Tips for Programmers & Engineers


A collection of helpful tips based on experience with Windows 95 and NT.


Legal Disclaimer: The views expressed here are the opinion of James S. Gibbons. They should not be relied upon without independent verification (if you can get it - most of the parties involved aren't talking about these problems yet). Your experience may vary due to different combinations of software and hardware.

Tip #1, Port I/O in Win32 A handy little driver is found that allows unrestricted I/O in a Win32 program.
Tip #2, Real-Time Windows An analysis of how well 95 and NT perform "real-time" operations.
Tip #3, High Speed Windows I/O Suggestions on how to make your programs run specialized I/O operations quickly.
Tip #4, Linking 3rd-party DLLs Some help using DLLs from various suppliers with Borland Delphi and C++ Builder.
Tip #5, CRT Gamma Correction How to properly display images on the IBM-PC.
Tip #6, More Real-Time Windows NT Further analysis of Windows NT real-time performance.
Tip #7, A Disktest program to crash Windows This program tests your disk and network speed, but can crash Windows too. Also useful for testing real-time performance.
Tip #8, SMP Test for Dual+ CPU Performance Test the SMP performance of your server. Shows interaction of PCI bus and memory cache.
Tip #9, Data Recovery with Knoppix This 3.5 MB PDF download is a short introduction to using Knoppix (see http://www.knoppix.net/ or http://www.knoppix.org/) to recover and repair Windows systems.
Tip #10, Kylix 3 and BCB6 Real-Time Test Programs Some new programs in C++ for Borland Kylix 3 and BCB6 for testing real-time functions on Windows and Linux.
Tip #11, Is .NET suitable for real-time projects? Is .NET suitable for real-time projects? A VS 2005 Cache Test program.
Tip #12, Fast Line Draw Method This is a fast pixel based line drawing method I developed many years ago.
Tip #13, Drawing Circles with Euler's Method A fast way to draw circles using only floating point multiplication and addition.
Tip #14, The Qt Framework and real-time projects. A search for a new C++ framework for real-time work.
Tip #15, Implicit Sharing and Multi-Threading Problems How resource sharing in objects can cause problems for multi-threading. Qt's QString and Borland's AnsiString are not thread safe!
Tip #16, Easy Qt Database Forms Using Qt's database classes to create standard form based editors.
Tip #17, Performance .NOT A look at .NET memory performance counters.

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