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I'm using Windows and am comfortable with SVN (well, TortoiseSVN) because it's dead simple. It works for me. However, because it's been working so well, I haven't any reason to try anything else. Should I bother learning a different system, for example, Mercurial or Git?
"Premature optimization is root of all evil" is something almost all of us have heard/read. What I am curious what kind of optimization not premature, i.e. at every stage of software development (high level design, detailed design, high level implementation, detailed implementation etc) what is extent of optimization w...
I have finished designing a little application for Pandora and I am not sure how I can get it out and share it with everyone. What should I do to help advertise it to the public and let other people use it? As of right now it is free, and I hope to keep it that way, so I don't want to spend any money to give it out. I ...
I'm learning Haskell and as an exercise I'm making binary trees. Having made a regular binary tree, I want to adapt it to be self balancing. So: Which is most efficient? Which is easiest to implement? Which is most often used? But crucially, which do you recommend? I assume this belongs here because it's open to deba...
Part of the value of Open Source is to provide great example code to people getting started with a new platform or language. What's the best Open Source code you've encountered, and why do you like your choice? Any language will do, but I'm particularly interested in the best examples of Objective-C you can point out. ...
I'd consider myself pretty well versed in C#. It's my language of choice at the moment, and it's where basically all my professional experience lies. Still, I'm puzzled by the existence of the MonoDroid project. My understanding has always been that C# and Java are very close. Like, if you know one, you can learn the o...
First the background, during interviews in the past, many times I have been asked to design some or other variation of card game as programming puzzle, and I have tried to design it in OO way, but I have never been satisfied with my solutions. However it was not until recently that I realized that I had been approachin...
What server-side language(s) should be used for user-created information sites such as Facebook, SE, Blogs, etc.?
Douglas Crockford makes reference to Simplified JavaScript in this article about Top Down Operator Precedence. Unfortunately he only makes references to it in this article. The best explanation I found here. But I still don't have a clue what it actually is. What is Simplified JavaScript?
I was attempting to identify an element of software engineering that I think is overlooked, not emphasized or not taught in typical undergraduate course work for CS or SE. What I came up is the concept of defensive programming. I would like to hear the community's options on defensive program and/or specific techniques...
I was pretty good with algorithms and data structures once, a long long time ago. Since then, I programmed professionally, and then went to manage a small team, which totally shot my tech skills in this field back. I've decided I want to be a developer again, and work for Google. The thing is, I'm so out of practice, t...
There are now lots of WYSIWYG editors, however whenever we use one on a CMS-based website we consistently have issues. The biggest being users pasting content from Word or other online sources and all the various formatting rules being added in "behind the scenes". How do you deal with these editors on a live producti...
Do you test your SQL or SQL generated by your database framework? There are frameworks like DbUnit that allow you to create real in-memory database and execute real SQL. But its very hard to use(not developer-friendly so to speak), because you need to first prepare test data(and it should not be shared between tests). ...
I've currently graduated from my first run at higher education, landed my first full-time gig as a web application developer, and absolutely love it. My question is that in looking for jobs I ran across many jobs that require a certain level of experience and code examples. Much of the work I am doing is both protecte...
So, I'm seriously considering axing ASP.NET AJAX from my future projects as I honestly feel it's too bloated, and at times convoluted. I'm also starting to feel it is a dying library in the .NET framework as I hardly see any quality components from the open-source community. All the kick-ass components are usually eq...
I, for one, only add debug code (such as print statements) when I'm trying to locate a bug. And once I've found it, I remove the debug code (and add a test case which specifically tests for that bug). I feel that it's cluttering the real code and therefore has no place there unless I'm debugging. How do you do it? Do y...
What is the difference between Acceptance Test--Driven Planning and Acceptance Test--Driven Development? Are they the same?
I started writing an application for Windows Phone marketplace, at the time only making sure that the name I gave it wasn't being used by any other app on the marketplace. I just found out that the same name is being used by a, seemingly popular, SourceForge project. Is this a problem? I haven't released my app yet s...
I need to work in a team to develop a mid scale Desktop application developed using C# .NET. Prior to this, I have not applied Unit Testing and Test Driven Development. I am aware that there exists many tools and framework for Unit Testing C# applications. As of now, I am aware of Nunit and the Unit Testing facility in...
Many times my business objects tend to have situations where information needs to cross object boundaries too often. When doing OO, we want information to be in one object and as much as possible all code dealing with that information should be in that object. However, business rules do not follow this principle giving...
disclaimer: for simplicity sake, brackets will refer to brackets, braces, quotes, and parentheses in the couse of this question. Carry on. When writing code, I usually type the beginning and end element first, and then go back and type the inner stuff. This gets to be a lot of backspacing, especially when doing somethi...
A few days ago a sales manager asked me that question. But at this moment I didn't know a answer which he can understand. He isn't a programmer! At the moment I work on a product which is over 8 years old. Nobody thought about architecture or evolvability. I have a swamp of code in front of me every day which is not te...
I never used to like unit testing. I always thought it increased the amount of work I had to do. Turns out, that's only true in terms of the actual number of lines of code you write and furthermore, this is completely offset by the increase in the number of lines of useful code that you can write in an hour with tests...
I am an experienced asp.net developer and asp.net mvc and I have my own CMS that I have written but starting to think there should be another approach. When someone asks you to develop them a website how do you develop it so that they can add pictures,slideshows, content, news items, diary events. On a side note do you...
Okay, this is one of those little things that always bugged me. I typically don't abbreviate identifiers, and the only time I use a short identifier (e.g., i) is for a tight loop. So it irritates me when I'm working in C++ and I have a variable that needs to be named operator or class and I have to work around it or us...
I've recently been working with a team that's using both .NET C++ and pre-.NET C++. I fully understand the technical differences between the two technologies. However, I sometimes feel like I'm floundering when it comes to the terminology used to differentiate the two. Example: Say we have two projects: ProjectA cont...
I'm in the midst of an argument with some coworkers over whether team ownership of the entire codebase is better than individual ownership of components of it. I'm a huge proponent of assigning every member of the team a roughly equal share of the codebase. It lets people take pride in their creation, gives the bug scr...
I am trying to break into web development. I have taken a basic intro to OS, intro to Networking as part of my bachelors degree several years ago. I cannot say that we went into things deeply, beyond academic assignments. I would like to understand things much better regarding to this specific task (e.g what goes on in...
I work in web development, that involves a lot of smaller custom projects rather than one large product. Requirements and specifications are always coming from outside the company. We've setup a ticket tracking system (Active Collab, which is rubbish compared to redmine btw) and given access to clients so they can subm...
I'm a Java developer in charge of making a product which allows clients to "build their own site". I've spent a lot of time looking into Liferay, as I don't have any experience in building CMSs, and want to either use it, or get ideas of how to build a decent system. The time line is short, requirements are vague, yad...
I am looking at a small (~70kLOC including generated) C# (.NET 4.0, some Silverlight) code-base that has very low test coverage. The code itself works in that it has passed user acceptance testing, but it is brittle and in some areas not very well factored. I would like to add solid unit test coverage around the lega...
In-place sorting is essentially swapping elements without using extra storage, correct? How can I find the minimum number of swaps required for a list? A C D Q R Z E // input \| \| \| > > > <<< // movement A C D E Q R Z // output Swapping: A C D Q R Z E swap Q with E, ACDERZQ swap R with Q, ACDEQZR swap R with...
What are the best practices for exception handling in n-tier applications? The application is a fat client based on MVVM pattern with .NET framework.
So I just started freelancing both in desktop/web development and this client who already accepted my work, and payed me keeps coming back at me each time he finds a bug etc. And I have found myself spending more time than I thought fixing them for free. Is this alright, or should I start charging a support fee? Which ...
When programming, what naming conventions do you use for your variables? I don't mean when the name of the variable should be obvious; ie. sum, total, first, last. But when you name variables that don't really fit into a category/obvious structure, what sort of names do you use? Is it, myVar1 or test1 or variable1, etc...
I believe any programmer has several ideas that she/he considers as innovative or at least valuable. It may be an idea of a new product which will make this world better or a new development approach, etc. But a great idea must be implemented and promoted/advertised. This requires a lot of work (proofs of concept, prot...
What do you guys think is best practice regarding auto-updating? Google Chrome for instance seems to auto-update itself as soon as it get's a chance without asking and I'm fine with it. I think most "normal" users benefits from updates being a transparent process. Then again, some more technical users might be miffed i...
The purpose of this question is not to assemble a laundry list of programming language features that you can't live without, or wish was in your main language of choice. The purpose of this question is to bring to light corners of languge design most language designers might not think about. So, instead of thinking a...
I really should not be mentioning the name of the book, but the first time I read it (during my under-grad days) I almost concluded that data structure was a bad course to pick. Which brings me to the question I am asking here. What makes a programming or data structure or algorithm book tick? Clearly, lucid explanat...
I am involved with maintaining a fairly large portfolio of .NET applications. Also in the portfolio are legacy applications built on top of other platforms - native C++, ECLIPS Forms, etc. I have a complex build framework on top of NAnt right now that manages the builds for all of these applications. The build framew...
The API docs for Test::More::ok is ok($got eq $expected, $test_name); right now in one of my apps I have $test_name print what the test is testing. So for example in one of my tests I have set this to 'filename exists'. What I realized after I got a bug report recently, and realized that the only time I ever see this ...
We are developing a web-based, commercial point-of-sale application. We'd like the same web site to work well on an Ipad as well a desktop browsers. We're looking for a web framework that makes the site look good on an iPad, but also makes the site work well in a desktop browser such as Chrome, IE, or Firefox on Wind...
For our main system, we have a small monitor application that sits outside our network and periodically tries to log in to verify the system still works. We have a problem with the monitor though in that the communications component set (Asta 3 inside Delphi applications) doesn't always connect through. Overall, I'd ...
Can you recommend a good test plan template for an agile testing team? I know there are templates for testing on the web and have already looked at some found by search engines, but I could really use something lightweight and something that has already been tried by skilled testers and is known to work well. Many te...
I'm nearly clueless as to what a lambda expression is, but I have a hard time believing that I couldn't finagle something to the same effect in Delphi (albeit with 900% more code). What is the big advantage of lambda expressions, what am I missing out on and is there anything with the post Delphi 2009 RTL improvement...
I've been checking out some of the latest multiplayer engines in HTML all supporting multi-user games (Very nice) - I believe all these engines use Web Sockets for communication. That’s why we’ve decided to disable support for WebSocket in Firefox 4, starting with beta 8 due to a protocol-level security issue. ...
What is the difference between Requirements Elicitation and Requirements Analysis?
I've been using eclipse for a long time to do development. One of the problems I've come across when working on other people's projects is if they come from source control, some of the eclipse project files "default.properties" and other xml config files are missing. Its usually a big pain in the butt to get the projec...
I've been contemplating how to balance testable design using dependency injection with providing simple fixed public API. My dilemma is: people would want to do something like var server = new Server(){ ... } and not have to worry about creating the many dependencies and graph of dependencies that a Server(,,,,,,) may ...
I am learning some Ruby on Rails, and am a newbie. Most of my background is in ASP.net MVC on the back end. As I play with a basic scaffold project, I wonder about this case: you jump into an established Rails project and want to get to know the model. Based on what I have seen so far (again, simple scaffold), the prop...
I developed many GUI applications for the Windows platform during my early professional career, and saw several GUI frameworks come, have whole magazines devoted to them, and then fade away. MFC is iconic. Tasked with writing yet another GUI application, I starter researching cross-platform frameworks like Qt and WxWin...
Our company is looking for new programmers. And here comes the problem - there are many developers who look really great at the interview, seem to know the technology you need and have a good job background, but after two months of work, you find out that they are not able to work in a team, writing some code takes the...
I'm an entry level programmer and am involved in daily client meeting about project progress, issues, deadlines etc. I have no experience of client management, could you people please suggest any common things to consider when interacting with clients both in a project and people management perspective.
Recently one of our key engineers resigned. This engineer has co-authored a major component of our application. We are not hitting Truck number yet though, but we're getting close :) Before the guy waltzes off, we want to take actions necessary to recover from this loss as smoothly as possible and eventually 'grow' the...
I've developed code locally and taken a fairly regular snapshot whenever I reach a significant point in development, e.g. a working build. So I have a long-ish list of about 40 folders, each folder being a snapshot e.g. in ascending date YYYYMMDD order, e.g.:- 20100523 20100614 20100721 20100722 20100809 20100901 201...
Kent Beck famously said that Software features that can't be demonstrated by automated tests simply don't exist But is this too extreme? I mean, I can't demonstrate that my UI really works, the screen pixel is correct in automated tests. So my features don't exist?
Lately, I've been looking more and more into Resin + Quercus as a technology to develop an application of mine. The reason I started looking into it was that this application has high reporting needs, a lot of which cannot (or realistically, should not) be created in real-time. Java would offer a nice backend to queue...
I'm currently setting the groundwork for an ASP.Net MVC application and I'm looking into what sort of unit-tests I should be prepared to write. I've seen in multiple places people essentially saying 'don't bother testing your views, there's no logic and it's trivial and will be covered by an integration test'. I don't ...
I'm in grad school at a university that was one of the first to have a software engineering accredited program. My undergrad is in CS. An employer recently recruited at our university and hired 5 SE majors. None of them were CS. Do employers prefer software engineering majors? The reason I ask is because I can focus on...
By supporting tools, I mean: reference data manager, like virus definition for anti-virus software test data generator level builders for games simulators or advanced mocking systems Does the team building the core product (in the case above, the game or the anti-virus) should be part of the development of the supp...
The terms rapid web development gets associated with Python/Django and ROR. Why is this not the case with C# ASP.NET?
This is a general topic, How do Event Handlers work? This means behind the scenes - what happens when they are created. I have a rough idea - but would like to have it confirmed.
My problem I am working as a consultant for various companies. Each company provides me with a laptop with their software on and I also have my own, where I have my development environment. I tend to buy a new laptop every second year and find myself spending lots of time configuring and installing software. I also spe...
I have installed PyDev and want to start with GUI apps. Heard about Qt but how to integrate it with PyDev? Is there any Python IDE that comes bundled with Qt or other GUI frameworks and also Visual Studio like ToolBox to add controls on the Form? I don't want to go with IronPython.
I have been given the role to improve development in our company. The first thing I wanted to start was code reviews since that has never been done here before. There are 3 programmers in our company. I am a web programmer, my known languages are mainly PHP, ActionScript and JavaScript. The other 2 developers write int...
I'm currently working on writing a load testing application that takes advantage of Load Test using Visual Studio 2010. The load test will simulate 20 users on the same machine, and I need some data to be shared in-memory between all simulated users. I was suprised I couldn't find documentation answering the following ...
Our team works in an open-space office. Luckily the cubicles are quite big (L shaped tables for everyone!), there is quite a lot of space so we are not sandwiched. Without going into further detail, there are comfortable spots (window), normal spots and stupid spots (near the corridor). Until recently, the development...
Every week, I have a 30 minutes meeting scheduled with my manager to talk about pretty much anything. So far, I haven't taken those one-on-one very seriously. As a new year resolution, I would like to take more seriously my one-on-ones with my manager. One way I though I could do that is to plan in advance (come up wit...
What kind of problems arise from installing a new program while other programs are running? I'd imagine the GAC solved a lot of the old problems of shared dll's being locked. So what kind of issues still arise? I can see issues with upgrading a single program for sure, but outside of this its hard to see why apps wo...
So I'm still on the fence as to whether or not I should be using these or not. I feel its an extreme violation of encapsulation, however I find that I am able to achieve some degree of encapsulation while gaining more flexibility in my code. Previous Java/Swing projects I had used nested classes to some degree, Howeve...
I'm looking for a chart like this: Basically something that tells you whether an app with a given license can be linked with a library of a given license. Does such a thing exist?
Am looking for an open source code for the TCP/IP stack. An explanation along the lines of the stack would also help me in understanding the different modules and their interactions. I tried searching but there is very less information relating to just the TCP/IP stack.
I've just started working on an open source project with around 30 developers in it. I'm working on fixing some of the bugs as a way to get into the "loop" and become a regular committer to the project. The problem is I think I've uncovered a fundamental design flaw that's causing one of the bugs I'm working on. But I ...
This is related to a question I asked earlier - https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/34023/how-to-end-a-relationship-with-a-client-without-pissing-them-off What are your obligations when charging by the hour vs charging by project? If you agree to take on a project, give a rough estimate that it migh...
In Dijkstra's Notes on Structured Programming he talks a lot about the provability of computer programs as abstract entities. As a corollary, he remarks how testing isn't enough. E.g., he points out the fact that it would be impossible to test a multiplication function f(x,y) = x*y for any large values of x and y acros...
Do you know any Key Performance Indicators for Developers? What should be measured and monitored?
Suppose I have a controller class with a bunch of properties. Each time a property is changed, I would like to update the model. Now also suppose that I use the command pattern to perform model updates. Is it common to use command classes within property get and sets of the controller class or is there a better way?...
I have been a server-side programmer for most of my career and have only recently started spending more time on web development. I am amazed at the number of things I need to master in order to write a decent web application. Just to list down a few tools/technologies I need to learn, Server side programming language...
Does anyone know the process of becoming a microsoft partner for an organisation. What the requirements and process are?
Overall I'm in programming for about 8 years now and it seems to me that I'm relying more and more on open source libraries and snippets (damn you GitHub!) to "get the job done". I know that in time I could write me own implementation but I like to focus on the overall design. Is this normal (non corporate environment)...
Today Uncle Bob Martin, a genuine hero, showed this video In this video Bob Martin claims that our programming languages are at the right level for our problems at this time. One of the reasons I get from this video as that Bob Martin sees us as detail managers and our problems are at the detail level. This is the firs...
What is the typical arrangement for the maintenance of applications that are not developed in-house? Note: by maintenance, I mean bug fixes, optimizations, small modifications and future extensions.
So now it's 2011, and as I carry on coding on our active projects it's time to update some copyright notices. eg. Copyright Widgets Ltd 2010 to Copyright Widgets Ltd 2010, 2011 My question is when do you update the copyright notices? Do you change the notice in the head of a file the first time you work on that file? ...
In our company, the developers want to use a proper bug tracking tool to manager issues in our application. The management however insists on using a shared spreadsheet (formeerly a shared excel file, now a spreadsheet on a web base solution allowing concurrent access). Their argument is that the spreadsheet allow them...
i work for a web development company and during the one year i have spent here, there were no improvements in the technologies we used to built our websites. I introduced jquery to them (buying the Novice to Ninja by Sitepoint) and now, i want to get rid of all these crappy PHP from scratch and use a PHP framework inst...
I recently purchased a Samsung Galaxy Tab as a reference implementation (phone and first gen Android tablet), of Android 2.x for app development. I have noticed a slew of Android 3.0 slates being talked about at CES 2011 (Motorola XOOM, etc.). If I had a multitouch PC with the Android SDK/Emulator on it, would this al...
I've been struggling to develop momentum contributing to open source projects. I have in the past tried with gcc and contributed a fix to libstdc++ but it was a once off and even though I spent months in my spare time on the dev mailing list and reading through things I just never seemed to develop any momentum with th...
First, I have already searched the site and read all the previous "self-taught vs. college" topics. The majority of the answers defended that going to college was the best choice, for two main reasons: Going to college gives you the paper, which is essential to landing jobs, especially in tough economic times. Going t...
During our interview process we give the candidate a programming test as well as a programming design problem. Our HR department has told us to stop administering the programming test due to legal concerns. This would really hinder our ability to screen candidates. Are there other HR policies that prevent you from hir...
I had a friend in college who programmed something that worked the first time, that was pretty amazing. But as for me, I just fire up the debugger as soon as I finally get whatever I'm working on to compile - saves me time (kidding of course, I sometimes hold out a little bit of hope or use a lot of premeditated debug...
I have some trouble with picking the right license for my works. I have a few requirements: Not copyleft like the GNU (L)GPL and allows for redistribution under other licenses Allows other people to redistribute your (modified) work but prevents that other people freely make money off my work (they need to ask/buy a c...
Since a long time I have thrived for being able to program something I can take with me - a very small computer like a programmable calculator, gameboy, pocket PC or cellphone. However, I didn't find anything fitting yet! The thing I'm looking at is the price, because I can't afford to spend too much money on it. What...
How does an object oriented programmer understand the word "type"? I'm not aware of there being a type theory for object oriented programming because whenever someone mentions type theory it is always in the context of some kind of functional programming language so what does "type" mean in the object oriented context?...
I started working at my current job about 8 months ago, and its been one of the best experiences I've had as a young programmer. It's a small company, and both my co-developers are brilliant guys. One of the practices that they both have been encouraging is lots of code-reuse. Our code base is mainly C#, and we're usin...
So I just read some fabulous articles by Joel on specs here. (Was written in 2000!!) I read all 4 parts, but I'm looking for some methodical approaches to writing my specs. I'm the only lonely dev, working on this fairly complicated app (or family of apps) for a very well known finance company. I've never made somethi...
I recently watched The Social Network, and this might be a stupid question, but how is it possible for multiple people to work on one website? I mean, if they're working on the same page, how is that possible? And also, is it possible to upload files to an online host without making them live?
Does your team rely on code reviews for approval of work? Is it simply QA that signs off your features and fixes? Do you have a lead programmer (or architect) that reviews code design and implementation? Or is it simply a Works on My Machine paradigm? What would you recommend or have seen that works well?
I've used Adobe Flex to develop a web application and I simply don't have an opinion of it, it looks good to the user and the code can't be seen for most users, but, is that it? What other advantage does Flex has?
Writing a GUI for a program has always been a daunting, depressing, and frustrating task. It doesn't matter which language, its extremely hard to get what I want. Especially in compiled languages like Java where a change takes a minute or two to build. The result is that I increasingly use GUI designers for some of my ...
I have developed a distributed test automation system which consists of two different entities. One entity is responsible for triggering tests runs and monitoring/displaying their progress. The other is responsible for carrying out tests on that host. Both of these entities retrieve data from a central DB. Now, my fir...

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