Tag Archives: Data Structure

Data structures are used in almost every program or software system. Data structures provide a means to manage huge amounts of data efficiently, such as large databases and internet indexing services. Usually, efficient data structures are a key to designing efficient algorithms. Some formal design methods and programming languages emphasize data structures, rather than algorithms, as the key organizing factor in software design.

What is the difference between a Hashtable and Properties?

  By Gaurav Agrawal | March 12, 2013 - 8:24 PM | ,
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Properties is a very specialized class that’s designed to hold configuration and/or resources that are usually stored in some file. Properties has several features that Hashtable doesn’t have (and shouldn’t have): It supports reading and writing its content to a well-defined plain-text format (using load()/store()) It supports reading and writing its content to a well-defined XML-based format (using loadFromXML()/storeToXML()) It supports a default mechanism by providing another Properties instance at construction time. It only supports String keys and values. While it is technically a Map<Object,Object> actually storing non-String keys or values is strongly discouraged and unsupported. A Hashtable on the … Click here to continue reading. →

What is Native Code?

  By Gaurav Agrawal | March 9, 2013 - 4:09 PM | ,
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The phrase native code is used in two contexts. Many people use it as a synonym for unmanaged code: code built with an older tool, or deliberately chosen in Visual C++, that does not run in the runtime, but instead runs natively on the machine. This might be a complete application, or it might be a COM component or DLL that is being called from managed code using COM Interop or PInvoke, two powerful tools that make sure you can use your old code when you move to the new world. I prefer to say unmanaged code. for this meaning, … Click here to continue reading. →

What is Unmanaged Code?

  By Gaurav Agrawal | March 8, 2013 - 2:11 PM | ,
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Unmanaged code is what you use to make before Visual Studio .NET 2002 was released. Visual Basic 6, Visual C++ 6, heck, even that 15-year old C compiler you may still have kicking around on your hard drive all produced unmanaged code. It compiled directly to machine code that ran on the machine where you compiled it—and on other machines as long as they had the same chip, or nearly the same. It didn’t get services such as security or memory management from an invisible runtime; it got them from the operating system. And importantly, it got them from the … Click here to continue reading. →

Difference between Stack & Heap.

  By Gaurav Agrawal | March 6, 2013 - 9:24 AM |
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Stack: Value type allocates the values in Stack. Function parameters are allocated on the stack Local variables that are declared on the stack are not automatically initialized by the system so they usually have garbage in them until you set them Variables on the stack disappear when the function exits (thus, if a function is called multiple times, it’s local variables and parameters are recreated and destroyed each time the function is called end exited). Data is stored in stack using the Last In First Out (LIFO) method. Stack has a limited size. Sometimes having too many local variables or … Click here to continue reading. →