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I am reading the book Object-Oriented Analysis and Design written by Grady Booch and others. In the Section : I Concepts in a subsection Bringing Order to Chaos authors suggest to separate between a Method and a Methodology: According to the book: A method is a disciplined procedure for generating a set of models that ...
We are planning to develop a database api for our project. I want to know how can we improve our documentation. The Current Structure of a document is : Introduction : Database Objects :List Each Object (Table) Field List List of Common Input Parameters. loop of each command of database api Input Parameter of comman...
Many people have said that C++ is a completely different language than C, but Bjarne himself has said that C++ is a language that is extended from C hence that is where the ++ comes from. So why does everybody keep saying that C and C++ are completely different languages? In what way is C different from C++ other than ...
I have in the last year gotten quite fond of using SpecFlow (which is a .NET port of Cucumber) I have used it both to test a ASP.NET MVC application at the web layer, i.e. using browser automation, but also at the controller layer. The first gives me a higher confidence in the correctness of the application, because J...
Let's say you are planning to create a website of the scale of Facebook (If I am going to cite a website's name then why not Facebook?!). Is it recommended to use SQL Server as your database for such applications? I am asking this question because many colleagues of mine say that SQL server should not be used such appl...
While there are certainly many economic, social and practical decisions to be made when deciding whether a system should be open source, are there any situations in which it is impossible, purely from a technical standpoint, to open source your code? Essentially; a feature which when the code is made public, invalidate...
I know this is a very subjective question and I am the best person to decide this for myself...but I am just looking for your views. I have 5 years of experience as a professional developer. I have a decent background in Maths and have done my bachelors in engineering in CS. I have still not reached a stage in my caree...
Possible Duplicate: Are certifications worth it? I'm curious what experience others have had, both from the perspective of an employer and an employee on Microsoft Certifications. I'm kind of sitting on the fence myself on this issue. I tend to have a cynical view of folks with massive amounts of letters following t...
In my programming career, I have written Java and PHP, Javascript and a little Ruby. I am not a CS major but got into web development from a more broad Internet Professional associates degree, which focused on Design, User Experience, and Development. I started out as Front-end Developer and quickly got great jobs wor...
Since the best way to learn is to work on projects, what are some good software to try making yourself with a purpose of sharpening certain programming skills or learning a new language?
What is the difference between private variables in a clsClass type and using enumeration enum to instantiate the variable. This question arose when I was looking at some C# Class code for serial ports. example: private int SomeClassMember; and private enum TransmissionType{TEXT,HEX} ? Where do...
I see many people using XAuth in their app to authenticate twitter users and I'm wondering what are some situations that I would want to use XAuth in my own apps. Thanks so much for your wisdom!
Background: I'm looking to write some fully functional webservices in Common Lisp as an April Fools prank on the rest of the development team at my company. There are two pieces to this: reading info from / writing it to a MySQL database, and receiving / processing / responding to requests over HTTP. (Actually, there'...
I've been evaluating a number of code review tools (mostly free ones), but they all seem to be aimed at reviewing patches before they are committed. This wouldn't really fit within our workflow with Subversion, so I've been looking for alternatives that better support reviewing committed revisions instead of just diffs...
My company has retained an outside firm to develop an iPhone app for us. As the only internal developer with any knowledge of Objective-C, I've been assigned to develop the relevant APIs on our site, but also to do anything I can to make sure the whole thing comes together on time. Any suggestions for things I should ...
Developing an n-tier app with a team, is it better to divide tasks by module or use case (e.g. Employee 1 creates Admin module, employee 2 creates Payroll module, etc.) or by tier (e.g. Employee 1 creates UI, Employee 2 creates Logic, Employee 3 creates all Data Access)? I'm more inclined towards the former. I think th...
I'm on a shared hosting account which runs cPanel, pretty standard unless you have your own VM. cPanel currently doesn't support Rails 3. My flat mate who has been working with ROR for the last year strongly suggests I set up my own development VM on my machine and learn ROR with Rails 3, and when it comes to putting s...
I've been working with ASP.Net MVC for around a year now and have created my applications in the following way. X.Web - MVC Application Contains Controller and Views X.Lib - Contains Data Access, Repositories and Services. This allows us to drop the .Lib into any application that requires it. At the moment we ...
I'm a bit of a jester so the idea of an easter egg still appeals to me. I have added them in my code before but my group of friends has a running joke of using CTRL-FU to trigger the egg. Now I'm also a bit paranoid about performance so I like removing excess whenever possible. This heavily contradicts with easter eggs...
I can't imagine that there's any reason not to use the OOP features of C++. It's is just as fast as C, and - what's more important to me - it's transparent, just as C. (I mean "transparent" that I know, what is my source is compiled to. Or, I think, I know.) Is there any reason not to use the power of OOP in C programm...
Should there be a "data hygiene" index for software - to indicate how clean the program is? not creating unused temp files, registry entries, environment variables, etc. For example, look in your users folder in Windows, you'll see all manner of work space files used by your applications. For example, this makes it har...
I've been sitting at my computer for about an hour and a half, browsing around and trying to find something worthwhile to do that I'd enjoy. The fact that I'm here shows you that I didn't come up with anything. Anyways, I was wondering about good ways to get involved with open source projects and/or contributing to st...
I'm debating designing a domain specific language to simplify a given, obscure programming model. Part of the debate is whether to build it (as a script) atop an existing language/runtime (e.g. Java) or to make it stand-alone (own compiler, &c). Those of you with DSL design experience, do you have pros/cons and or a s...
I'm reading through the CNN article about the highest paying jobs in America. A software architect is listed as #1. A software engineer listed as #9. And a software developer (programmer) is listed at #35. I think it's valid to replace computer scientist with programmer, right? Prior to this I always saw "Software Engi...
It costs almost nothing to use the commit history maintained by the version control system. However, during a major project refactoring (or reorganization / cleanup) effort, functions and classes and even namespaces will be moved around; sometimes several files will be merged together and other files will be split. The...
I'm conducting technical interviews to fill a few .NET positions. Many of the people I interview really do know .NET pretty well, but I find at least 90% embellish their skillset anywhere between "a little" to "quite drastically". Sometimes they fabricate skills relevant to the position they're applying for, sometimes ...
After some googling I was unable to find out hierarchy of different titles in career development. Especially the connection between Senior Engineer and Software Specialist is unclear to me. Which one is higher? Most of all I would like to see links pointing to some career development paths from the trainee to the highe...
I am maintaining a VB6 application and we are studying how to migrate to .Net We are considering doing this gradually by implementing new features in COM visible .Net classes and migrating existing functionality slowly. I found some instructive 'Hello World' examples about how to do this and it works fine with our App....
How to remove hesitation of interacting with client ? As a Devloper i want to develop my career but this require the better Client Interaction,but as now i haven't done any major client interaction , and i want to do major client interaction, how i can proceed in this way ?
TDD and unit testing seems to be the big rave at the moment. But it is really that useful compared to other forms of automated testing? Intuitively I would guess that automated integration testing is way more useful than unit testing. In my experience the most bugs seems to be in the interaction between modules, and no...
I've read a lot of things about TDD but I still have doubts. For example, I have these class diagrams: It's a simple example, just to learn about TDD and mock objects. Which test should I write first? Product, then Line and last, Order? If I do that, should I use Line and Product to test Order or should I use Mock Obj...
I don't want to make life hard for management. I really don't. They're nice enough guys, but every time I am assigned a new project or task and get asked "how long do you think it will take to do this" I end up sputtering off ridiculous timeframes; "between a day and three weeks". I would like to believe that it's no...
A recent project I worked on was proven to be severely underestimated by the architect. The estimate was out by at least 500%. Unfortunately I was brought onto the project after the estimate had been signed off with the customer. As senior dev, I quickly realised that the functional and technical spec. contained some...
It seems like it is nearly impossible to get close because you could run into any number of issues and things not first anticipated. How close can we be expected to reasonably estimate? Our PM wants to be able to have things like Gant charts and such mapping out weeks at a time and such... So we say we can get these bu...
Say you are developing a desktop application, and you want the user to be able to customize menus, buttons, keymapping, and other commands and components. How much customization should be allowed? I like my environments to be pretty much infinately customizable. I also want the environment to have a good set of default...
I've started reading a book from Head First series about OOP and Design. In a first chapter it is stated I have to worry about design of my application just after basic functionality is ready. Basic functionality is ready means you have something to show to your customer or boss. Do you think this is a correct approach...
My company is giving us the possibility to sign up for some offsite training classes on Design Patterns. Browsing through the brochures, I'm already feeling bored (and somewhat repelled by the marketingy buzzwordy silverbulletty enterprisey managerese) - I already know the basics about design patterns (read the GoF boo...
As I'm building applications I find myself constantly asking if this is best way to perform or implement a certain functionality. Often, I'll post questions on stackoverflow or another forum desiring feedback only to receive comments about how not to "put the cart before the horse" regarding performance. Do most prog...
I read the Python documentation a lot and sometimes I am baffled by this notation: os.path.join(path1[, path2[, ...]]) I somehow make that [, path[,...]] is a list but I would like to know if I am reading it correctly. Bear with me, this is coming from a Java developer who is trying out Python. X)
Does anyone know if a Software Engineer can become a certified Professional Engineer or PE for short? I know that my buddies who are Mechanical, Electrical, or Civil Engineers were able to become PEs by taking an exam. Does such an exam exist in Software Engineering?
I've been looking up this thread on how software piracy can be prevented. It's got a number of interesting suggestions ranging from using copy protection to providing free versions, and not surprisingly, none of them will satisfy you 100%. It will perhaps be apt to experiment with each of the popular anti-piracy measur...
Has the Windows 32 API changed much over time? Does the Charles Petzold book "Programming Windows, 5th Edition" from 1998 still contain relevant information, or is most of it obsolete/outdated? What are some prominent examples of recent additions to the Windows 32 API (if there are any)?
I've been learning C#/.NET 4.0 for about 2/3 months, it's my first serious programming language (I've looked at PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and VBA before but never massively in depth) and I'm starting to become a bit stuck: I have hit a ceiling with my learning due to lack of a 'big' project... Lack of working on com...
I've just started creating my very first little Java Swing app. When the program opens, it brings up a single, simple window with a label and a couple buttons. Clicking one of those buttons is supposed to wipe out the welcome screen and replace it with a totally different panel. I'm not sure what the best way to create...
While doing my pre-research for this question, I found that there isn't much well-organized information about Java Swing best practices out there on the Internet. So I figure I'll give Stack Exchange a shot at building that One Great List. What are the best practices of Java Swing development? What have you found to wo...
Context: I'm an enterprise developer in an all-MS shop. Can anyone recommend a good way of objectively measuring maintainability of a piece of code or an application? Why maintainability: I'm tired of "quality" metrics in my group revolving only around number of bugs and code coverage. Both metrics are easy to game, es...
We have all seen integer, floating point, string, and the occasional decimal type. What are some of the most strange or unique or useful types you have encountered, useful or not?
I don't plan on writing a compiler in the near future; still, I'm quite interested with compiler technologies, and how this stuff could be made better. Starting with compiled languages, most compilers have two error levels: warnings and errors, the first being most of the time non-fatal stuff you should fix, and errors...
What do recruiters expect you to answer when they ask, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" Something like: I want to improve my technical skills ... blah-blah-blah ... architect? Is it just to check your ambitions and if you are not going to leave in a month?
What is a requirement traceability matrix? What are the differences between different requirement types and what are the advantages/disadvantages of using these matrices?
I have seen many times statements like- "Please make this feature a first class citizen in so and so language/platform". For example, it is said about enums in C#/.net. So, when is a feature considered a "First class citizen" in a programming language/platform?
In my current job, there are no coding guidelines. Everyone pretty much codes the way he wants. Which is fine, since the company is small. However, one new guy recently proposed to always use Hungarian Notation. Until now, some of us used some sort of Hungarian Notation, some of us didn't. You know, it's an engineering...
I am a long time experienced Windows Forms developer, but now it's time to move to WPF because a new WPF project is comming soon to me and I have only a short lead time to prepare myself to learn WPF. What is the best way for a experienced Winforms devleoper? Can you give me some hints and recommendations to learn WPF ...
I am highly IDE dependent developer (NetBeans and Eclipse as I am a JAVA dev). I can code properly if I have an IDE. I can rely a lot on that for development, debugging and deployment. But without IDE I can do nothing. Can code a simple hello world program or some simple UI arranging but I need an IDE to do complex thi...
I want to start using Databases in my C# Applications, unfortunately there appears to be lots of different ways of going about this. Which is the 'best' way from a learning perspective? (IE: What is likely to be used in a business setup)? If I want to download mySQL/Postgres and connect to that from C#, is that ok?
UPDATE: I've gotten a lot of feedback, but no info on what percent of time people spend on docs. To keep it simple, say the docs are for developers and peer reviewed; meaning the peer understands how to do it, and the comments are more for the what is being done, not how to do it from scratch; which in my case is the r...
I worked on a project where I did everything from talking about how the software should be and how they are doing the stuff at the moment with the client (end users) ... choosing technology to be used typing code installing the application on the web server previously I was writing in my cv that I worked as a soft...
I'm working on a personal project (Windows desktop application) and started thinking about trying to make some money from the application (not the source). I'm not expecting to make a billion dollars but who knows right? The easiest way I see is give it out for free and allow people to donate but I'm not sure how wel...
In preparation for a new release of software our company maintains, I've been working on what I believe to be a really good approach to solving our scalability issues. I have every intention of putting together a proof of concept to validate the design on paper will actually do what I want. When I briefed it to the t...
I'm wondering how the "evented-io" in node.js any different from the windows async IO model? Is the callback from node.js executed on a thread, if not, where is it run? I don't mean to question the productivity or awesomeness of node, but specifically to understand if the architectural design differs from what is commo...
I have a build computer where Visual Studio not installed, only MSbuild which can build VS2008 projcets without having any Visual Studio installed. I wonder whether it is possible to use MSbuild with VC++ 6.0 project files, although I am thinking this could not be possible. In the past I have used it with a VS2008 sol...
I'm currently tasked with writing a wcf service that, for now, will only used inside the company network, the problem is that I'm not sure how I should handle the operations it exposes. The software that will use this service will have to modify similar tables in different ways. For example a table, that has columns a,...
Obviously, if management buy into spending time with code reviews, then everyone has to do it. But there are always those guys (or gals) who resist with every ounce of their being. How do you effectively manage dealing with this scenario when dealing with it as the peer reviewer?
I love prototyping as a fast effective way to put a UI in front of a user. Many times though, management get their beaks in the way, and the prototype is dragged kicking and screaming into main stream development. How do you manage management into not doing this?
I've always been intrigued by pair programming, but in 12 years development I've never worked in a place they have employed this practice, so I have always been sceptical as to how people see it. I wonder whether this is because of money/time (Pointy haired boss spotting two people at one computer working on the same c...
In the last few days, I've heard the term "fast follower" mentioned several times. It's used in the context of an unresolved bug/issue that (supposedly) will be quickly fixed and implemented. Is this some new corporate jargon? I'm aware of a fast follower strategy, or second mover strategy (as described in this wikiped...
I have an application with multiple threads that may be run on different hardware. To assist with tuning on different hardware I would like to create a "profiler" that can automatically run a fixed amount of data through using different numbers of threads. I've thought of several ways of implementing this: It's a test...
Design patterns help developers to improve the quality of their design, but only GOF patterns are very known, and paterns like GRASP that gives a good concepts like Information Expert,low coupling and high cohesion are less known. I think that GRASP patterns could be a good introduction to patterns for students and dev...
For being a better programmer there are ways to get started like: Get some open source project and start contributing to it. Solve some Project Euler or Yodacode Excercise. But if someone wants to move in the direction of Project/Product Management then in what direction he/she should move and what available options ...
I recently considered contributing to an open-core software (a product which core is released with an open-source license by the company that developed it, but it retained a paid license for more advanced functionality). But some questions occurred about the nature of working with an open-core project, and I would like...
I've got a few choices to make as I develop some business websites that will run for the next two to three years. Currently I run ASP.NET 3.5 with Visual Studio 2008. I do my development rather crudely in WebForms because that's what I learned and am most productive with. I don't use Membership or any other frameworks ...
I have big dreams of writing the next Facebook (unrealistic I know) and I'm in the planning stages as we speak and I'm umming and ahing about using a php framework for this and how many development hours it would actually save me. If any? Also is it unrealistic for one person to hand code an entire social network solo?...
The null-coalescing operator in c# allows you to shorten the code if (_mywidget == null) return new Widget(); else return _mywidget; Down to: return _mywidget ?? new Widget(); I keep finding that a useful operator I'd like to have in C# would be one that allowed you to return a property of an object, ...
I'm a novice programmer and often when I'm working on my own projects, I always get the feeling that the design of my code is not the best it could be, and I hate this feeling. I end up spending time looking things up, but then I become overwhelmed easily with many details, such as design patterns to choose from and wh...
I'm always trying to hone my résumé to the bare-bones essentials -- no fluff. I want to keep as many points as possible to a single line, and to this end I have used the term WinForms in several places. I wanted to check my capitalization against other examples, but this term is not used on the official http://www.wind...
A pet peeve of mine is looking at so many software projects that have mountains of code for character set support. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for compatibility, and I'm happy that text editors let you open and save files in multiple character sets. What annoys me is how proliferation of non-universal character encod...
An executive at my workplace asked me and my group of developers the question: How many lines of code can a C# developer produce per month? An old system was to be ported to C# and he would like this measure as part of the project planning. From some (apparently creditable) source he had the answer of "10 SLOC/mont...
I often encounter this when I am helping out someone who is new to programming and learning it for the first time. I'm talking about really new newbies, still learning about OOness, constructing objects, method calls and stuff like that. Usually, they have the keyboard and I am just offering guidance. On the one hand, ...
I'm a undergraduate in my 3rd year of a Software Engineering degree. From this year on, my university has introduced a new course called 'Compiler Constructions', which teaches you the basics of the theory of building a compiler. What would be the real world advantage for a Software Engineer of learning about compiler ...
I was motivated by the Compiler Construction As A Subject question and thought I would ask this one. I have heard from a few people that they have a good "compiler team" (don't ask where I heard it, I can't remember), so that led me to wonder, how does one get a job on such a team? I know there are classes at in the Un...
Recently I've been working on projects that heavily use threading. I think that I'm OK at designing them; use stateless design as much as possible, lock access to all resources that more than one thread needs, etc. My experience in functional programming has helped that immensely. However, when reading other people's t...
Any product or framework evolves. Mainly it's done to catch up the needs of it's users, leverage new computing powers and simply make it better. Sometimes the primary design goal also changes with the product. C# or .net framework is no exception. As we see, the present day 4th version is very much different comparing ...
One of our senior developers has stated that we should be using a naming convention for stored procedures with an "objectVerb" style of naming such as ("MemberGetById") instead of a "verbObject" type of naming ("GetMemberByID"). The reasoning for this standard is that all related stored procedures would be grouped toge...
Imagine to have this code: class Foo: def __init__(self, active): self.active = active def doAction(self): if not self.active: return # do something f=Foo(false) f.doAction() # does nothing This is a nice code; I actually have (not in Python) a global active variable called "dosomething" and a...
Recently I heard of a company that, for interviews, asks potential employees to stand up and write out code on a whiteboard. Apparently that freaked alot of interviewees out. This got me thinking and even though I consider myself a reasonable programmer, I would be hard pressed to write lengthy code out without referr...
I had a meeting with a software vendor today about their recommended infrastructure for deploying a particular application. The application needs two servers: an app server for server web pages (.NET, Windows), and a database (SQL Server). The vendor claimed that these two servers had to have "bit parity". What they...
I'm working on a normal Java/SWT desktop application I'm planning on distributing to the three primary PC platforms (Windows, OSX, Linux). Obviously, there are slight differences between them, mainly having to do with files. What's the best way to keep those differences separate? I'm thinking three different SVN branc...
I'm just about to start a project using Sencha Touch, and just done some minor testing on my HTC desire device. All tutorial videos at Vimeo seems to be using an iPhone emulator running on a Mac. Im not sure how fast this emulator is compared to a real iPhone device or even an real Android device, but from what i have ...
I haven’t clearly understood the concept of side effect. What is side effect in programming? Is it programming language dependent? Is there such a thing as external and internal side effects? Please give some example of causes that create side effects.
In most of my applications, I have a singleton or static "config" object, in charge of reading various settings from disk. Almost all classes use it, for various purposes. Essentially it's just a hash table of name/value pairs. It's read-only, so I haven't been too concerned with the fact that I have so much global sta...
For a project I am working I want to implement a small prototype to try things out, demonstrate some functionality to the client and learn some frameworks used in the project. Do you have any suggestions or do you know of best practices for implementing such a prototype? Some more details: The application will be a co...
Where did exceptions and exception handling come from? I like how .NET uses it, I like how C++ supports it (but libraries unfortunately use return code or is written in C instead). I know its pretty much standard in all new languages, but who designed it first or where did it come from? Is C++ the first language to use...
There has been a lot of discussion lately about the problems with using (and overusing) Singletons. I've been one of those people earlier in my career too. I can see what the problem is now, and yet, there are still many cases where I can't see a nice alternative - and not many of the anti-Singleton discussions really ...
I'm building a Model-View-Controller framework, and it has come time to decide how I will be creating and using view templates and layouts. Some frameworks use special extensions for these files. CakePHP uses .ctp. I have heard-of/seen .tpl files, though I've never used them myself. There is the .inc extension, which ...
Do you have any particular style of organizing projects? For example, currently I'm creating a project for a couple of schools here in Bolivia, this is how I organized it: TutoMentor (Solution) TutoMentor.UI (Winforms project) TutoMentor.Data (Class library project) How exactly do you organize your project? Do you h...
In their influential team leadership book, "Peopleware", DeMarco and Lister suggest that managers should provide "strategic but not tactical direction" for their IT teams. This is intriguing, but they don't go on to explain exactly what they mean! Any thoughts on what this intriguing idea looks like in practice? Is it...
I'm about to take on the task of reimplementing an already defined interface (a set of C++ header files) in a relatively large and old code base. Before doing this, I would like to have as complete test coverage as possible, so I can detect reimplementation errors as early and easily as possible. The problem is that th...
What would be the reason one learn to make apps for Windows Phone 7 instead of Android phones? Is there any reason why Windows Phone 7 is the platform that a developer choose instead of Android? Thanks heaps
Every now and then I see "closures" being mentioned, and I tried looking it up but Wiki doesn't give an explanation that I understand. Could someone help me out here?
There are three roles defined in Scrum: Team, Product Owner and Scrum Master. There is no project manager, instead the project manager job is spread across the three roles. For instance: The Scrum Master: Responsible for the process. Removes impediments. The Product Owner: Manages and prioritizes the list of work to ...

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