Interrupt-Driven

Software Engineering radio recently had two episodes which are of particular interest to the C/C++ developer.

First Scott Meyers gives a nice high-level overview on the features of the upcoming C++0x standard covering Lambda expressions, Uniform initialization, Initializer lists, threading and Variadic templates amongst others. Wikipedia has a good article covering C++0x in more detail. The episode is quite entertaining not only because Scott is a good speaker but also because Markus, the host of the podcast (a Java-guy), apparently has several C++WTF moments. Link - Episode 159 C++0x.

The second episode is with Johan Bezem who is talking about MISRA which is a set of guidelines for C/C++ development promoting safety and reliability. MISRA was developed and still is mainly in use in the automotive industry. To be frank the episode isn’t as entertaining as the one with Scott but i finished it because it provides an interesting perspective on C development for small/deeply embedded systems. Link - Episode 152 MISRA.

I recently discovered a new podcast i really like. Software engineering radio is a series of interviews with practitioners of the field. They started in 2006 and have so far produced nearly 80 episodes covering a wide range of topics (fault tolerance, realtime systems, SOA, concurrency, patterns, type systems, …).

Episodes i can recommend:

• Episode 61: Internals of GCC: Nothing really surprising if you took a course on compilers at university or had the "pleasure" of setting up  a gcc-based cross-compiler for an exotic platform but a very nice roundup anyways.
• Episode 56: Sensor Networks: TREC is a system developed by IBM for tracking world wide container shipment. It consists of an embedded sensor system which is attached to the door of every container and various backends. The TREC module can track amongst other things door openings, acceleration, temperature, light and GPS-coordinates. This data can be communicated by Zigbee (forming Ad-Hoc networks), GSM and satellite radio.
• Episode 5: Model-Driven Software Development Pt. 1: The first part of an introduction to "Model-Driven Software Development". Interesting for someone like me aka. someone new to this field.