I was reading one of Paul Graham’s essays where he mentionned a thought experiment. Somehow, I forgot what the essay was about, but the concept of thought experiment stuck in my head. Continue Reading →

I’m going through my list of interesting assignments that are worth writing about and now is Huffman coding‘s turn. Simply put, we had to create a completely functioning file format implementing a compression method based on Huffman’s coding. The implementation of the coding itself is well documented, but the header of the file is the part that interests us. How can we describe the dictionary for the coding the most efficiently? Continue Reading →

The ProvideProperty attribute and the IExtenderProvider interface allows a provider Component to provide properties for other Components. These added properties will then appear on the Visual Studio Designer to be set and even localized just like any other property. This is very useful to create helper components such as a tooltip provider because it needs to provide a different tooltip text for every Component. Continue Reading →

I chose to bring my original Sudoku solver to the web in the form of a Javascript version. Self proclaimed titles sound way too arrogant for my taste, so I won’t say this is the world’s fastest Javascript Sudoku solver, but I would sure like to see anyone beat it! Continue Reading →

I spent some time considering how people solve Sudoku and it gave me a few ideas on how to improve my original Sudoku solver‘s performance. I hypothesized that finding naked pairs and lines would save more calculation than it would cost. Continue Reading →

I recently had to build an optimized Sudoku puzzle solver for a homework which turned into a contest between students. I was part of a team of three and we competed again six similar teams… And we won! Here, I will discuss the algorithm we used. Continue Reading →

While creating this blog, I had to make many decisions about layout, color, etc. and finally font. But I’m a pragmatic. I want usability, and my most important design goal is all about KISS! Yet, simple to read and navigate doesn’t necessarily mean simple to create… Continue Reading →

You’ve seen this kind of label on a dropdown menu before right? (the example is from Ebay.com)

Yes, of course you did. And so did your customer. So you are not at all surprised when he says he wants that in his Windows Forms application. Easy enough, you should be done within a few minutes, yet you refrain from telling him that (but that’s matter for another post). Continue Reading →