Article Summaries: Weekly Article Dump #17

Articles It’s official: Video games make your brain bigger: I don't have much time for video games anymore, but this is still totally awesome news. It's in. It's official. Video games can actually make you smarter. How great is that? If you're like me and you find you don't have much time for games any more, it might be worth picking up a hobby game. It's a great way to relax provided you don't get too addicted to it and apparently it can make you smarter. Perfect combo! The myth of the brainstorming session: The best ideas don’t always come from meetings: I thought this article was pretty interesting because we do a lot of brain storming at our office. Sometimes I like to think the sessions go smoothly or that they're productive. When I contrast them with particular cases…

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Fragments: Creating a Tabbed Android User Interface

Fragments: A Little Background Update: The actual application is available on the Google Play store. Once upon a time, Android developers used only two things called activities and views in order to create their user interfaces. If you're like me and you come from a desktop programming environment, an Activity is sort of like a form or a window. Except it's more like a controller for one of these classes. With that analogy in place, a view is then similar to a control. It's the visual part you're interacting with as a user. I remember the learning curve being pretty steep for me being so stuck in my desktop (C# and WPF) development, but once I came up with these analogies on my own, it seemed pretty obvious. So to make an Android application, one would simply put some views together…

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Git + Google Code + Windows

Just a quick one here because I'm hoping it will benefit a person or two. I'd like to start by stating I've always been a Windows user. I don't like using Macs and I don't like using *nix. Why? It's just my preference, and I'll leave it at that (I don't have an emotional attachment to Microsoft or anything, I'm just well versed with Windows). Anyway... I was recently trying to get a Google Code page setup for one of the postings I wrote. However, being a Windows user made things pretty difficult. Here's how I solved my problem: Install GitExtensions (I already had this installed, because I use this for everything) Created my google code account and created my project. Changed my google code account permissions to allow my GMail credentials when pushing. You can do that here. Navigate…

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Thread vs BackgroundWorker

Background There are two classes available in the .NET framework that sometimes have some confusion around them: The Thread and the BackgroundWorker. They're both used to do some heavy lifting for you on a separate thread of execution (so you can keep on keepin' on), so why do we have two different things to accomplish the same end result   Enter The Thread Class The Thread class is available in the System.Threading namespace. Surprising, right? It's the basic unit for spawning off work to be done. Threads let you provide them with a name, which could be one advantage to using them. A thread can either operate as "background" which means it will be killed when the application exists, or not as background, which will actually keep the application alive until the thread is killed off. An instance of the…

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