A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 7): Being Consistent

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents The Problem The next big problem with our distributed ledger is more subtle, and much harder to solve.  Indeed as we shall see it's a problem that leads to the crazy genius at the heart of Bitcoin. However, it's in no way a new problem.  I …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 6): Paying for Bitcoin’s Computers

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Printing Money: the Block Reward Another problem for Bitcoin is that someone has to pay for all the computers running this ledger.  With conventional money the government pays to create coins and banknotes from general taxation, and banks pay for systems that deal with checking accounts …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 5): Technical Description – The Big Book

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Introduction This article and a few that follow attempt a description of the technical aspects of Bitcoin in fairly simple terms.  This includes a long section describing and justifying mining. We start with the big book. One Big Book A Big Paper Book Suppose that we …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 4): Problems with Bitcoin

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Even from the very brief description so far in this series of articles you can see that Bitcoin is a kind of cool and weird form of money.  However it has some very serious problems. Technical Problems Bitcoin is slow.  In fact it’s deliberately slow and …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 3): Why the Excitement?

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Bitcoin is a New Form of Money If you're reading this I expect you're aware of all the excitement surrounding Bitcoin.  Of course it's a new form of money, and that's quite interesting.  However I could issue my own money in paper form, and I suspect …

A Beginner’s Guide to Bitcoin (Part 2): Bitcoin vs Money

Previous Article   -   Next Article   -   Table of Contents Bitcoin Overview Basics As I've already said I'm not assuming you know anything about Bitcoin.  To get started, below is a high level overview of the basics of Bitcoin and how payments in our new money are processed.  You may well know some of this already. …

‘HTML Application with TypeScript’ Project Template for Visual Studio

Background In Visual Studio 2015 there was a project template for building HTML applications with TypeScript. It was called, predictably, 'HTML Application with TypeScript'. The Visual Studio team have removed this template in versions of Visual Studio after Visual Studio 2017. I can see why. It contains some code that shows the time, ticking, in …

Debugging JavaScript/TypeScript Using Visual Studio 2017 and Chrome or Edge

Introduction One of the great features of Visual Studio 2017 is that you can debug JavaScript and TypeScript directly in the Visual Studio IDE if they are running in Google''s Chrome browser.  We've been able to do this with Internet Explorer and Visual Studio for some time, but of course Internet Explorer is old and has …

Connecting to Tibco EMS from a C# Client

Introduction This is a slightly esoteric post, but hopefully it will be of use somewhere.  Below is some reasonably simple code that shows the basic use cases for connecting to a Tibco EMS Server topic from a C# client using Tibco's TIBCO.EMS.dll. It actually points at a locally installed instance of EMS.  That is, the …

Asynchronous Programming in .Net: Async and Await for Beginners

Introduction There are several ways of doing asynchronous programming in .Net.  Visual Studio 2012 introduces a new approach using the 'await' and 'async' keywords.  These tell the compiler to construct task continuations in quite an unusual way. I found them quite difficult to understand using the Microsoft documentation, which annoyingly keeps saying how easy they …