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After reading this, I saw that there seems to be a lot of disagreement over how agile teams should be structured within a group of developers with varying ability (aka almost all teams). Should all the best developers be put on their own teams and be given the highest priority work? This will pretty much ensure that th...
We want to implement a fairly rough outline of test driven development which involves a developer asking themselves the tests at each stage of the development process. I have read here that its impossible to perform TDD without a tool. Is this true?
I am trying to generate a metric for a company cost savings goal. To do this, I want to estimate the savings we realized by using an open source web application rather than building it from scratch or buying a COTS solution. One step in the process is to estimate how much it would have cost us to develop the applicatio...
Coming from a native development background, I'm used to my unit test runners outputting the file and line that caused the test failure. This allowed me to run the tests as a post-build step, and if any test failed the build would fail. Also, I could press the hotkey and jump directly to the offending line. What I'm di...
Given that the current employer knows and has been given appropriate notice ahead of time, how can a programmer make a clean job transition from his old job? What things should the programer consider? How should one tie up unfinished projects? For example, should one make a list of places they have password access, or ...
I'm looking at Google Code, SourceForge, BitBucket, and GitHub, since they seem to be the big players. Now, I haven't broken down all of the features that they provide yet, but I'm really looking for a place to put various code that I write (my solutions for Project Euler, code that I might write for the Code Golf/Prog...
So, I was playing around with MVC3. Correct me if I'm wrong but based on all examples I've seen, it is suggested that you pretty much have a page for every model and Action from the Controller. So for example create a pretty basic management portal for the aspnetdb database. Models UserModel RoleModel Actions CreateU...
I have recently been trying to learn about MVVM and all of the associated concepts such as repositories, mediators, data access. I made a decision that I would not use any frameworks for this so that I could gain a better understanding of how everything worked. I’m beginning to wonder if that was the best idea becaus...
From Microsoft's own built in template for MVC3 The model is extremely skinny, having basically no code. Model public class RegisterModel { [Required] [Display(Name = "User name")] public string UserName { get; set; } [Required] [DataType(DataType.EmailAddress)] [Display(Name = "Email address")...
We are going to be building a new project using Mercurial as our version control system. I'm still trying to fully understand what my workflow should look like, so I've listed below a case that I need some help undertanding. A single application with multiple modules (Each module being hosted in its own repository) Mul...
I work on an agile team at the moment where our stories are written primarily from the user perspective as well as testing. So, for example, we may have a request for a date picker. The story would go something like: User goes to page x and clicks on date to launch a native date picker All fine and good, but the probl...
Suppose I have two lists of N 3 by 3 vectors of integers. I need to find a quick way (say of running time at most N^(1+epsilon)) to find the vectors of the first list that have the same 1st coordinate with a vector of the second list. Of course, I could do the following naive copmarison: for u in list_1 do for v in lis...
I'm developing an ASP.NET 2.0 web service that serves XML data from a database. Almost all data traffic is one-way, from server to client, and there is no user-specific data. All clients will receive the same data. But I only want approved clients to be able to consume the data. In this situation, what are the best...
I graduated with a BS in compsci last September, and I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a job as a project manager ever since. I fell in love with software engineering (the formal practice behind it all, not just coding) in school, and I've dedicated the last 3-4 years of my life to learning everything I can abo...
For a distributed team that uses Git and GitHub as version control, should images also be stored in the git repository? The images in question are small/medium-sized web-friendly images. For the most part, the images won't be changed. The folder containing them will only grow in size as images are added. A concern is t...
I'm working on a system file scanner that reveals info about various files (e.g. size, last used, duplicates, etc). Currently I'm traversing the file system once just to get a good measure of the files I'll be processing, I then loop through doing the actual processing (size info, hash info, etc). Obviously that imme...
I'm taking on my first enterprise-level application. The truth is that I've always skimped in this department and I've never really modeled an application before. What is the standard way to do this? What type of diagrams should be used and what would the documentation look like? When searching I can find numerous thin...
What is the best way for a developer to track his/her hours at work, if no framework exists at that firm which would avoid any complications with internal classified information being stored on a server I own at home? In particular, I would like to hear of any methodologies or software that could be used in this situat...
I am writing a Windows Service (using C# .NET 3.5 VS2008) and my requirement is: When the Windows Service start - it performs record check operation (in Database) @ every 30 second interval (I have used a timer for this) If the appropriate record was found in the database - then it starts multiple threads and performs...
I am a fairly good programmer, my boss is also a fairly good programmer. Though he seems to underestimate some tasks such as multi-threading and how difficult it can be (I find it very difficult for anything more than running a few threads, waiting for all to finish, then return results). The moment you start having to...
I have been tasked by my boss to look at a system where we create Python scripts and upload them to a server and store details in the DB. He also wants me to implement versioning, so that if any changes are made to a script then the updated version has an incremented version number. This is the area where I am not so...
I am very new to smalltalk. And I am currently trying to wrap my head around GNU smalltalk (pharo environment). Upon browsing through the introductory session of pharo by example, I came to know that there is a lot of code base in the squeaksource repository submitted by the programmers. The pharo site very well says t...
I was reading a programming article and it mentioned the Decorator pattern. I've been programming for awhile but without any kind of formal education or training, but I'm trying to learn about the standard patterns and such. So I looked up the Decorator, and found a Wikipedia article on it. I now understand the concept...
I work on a web application to file a specific kind of county taxes. Our company wants our state to mandate that counties must accept electronic filings (as opposed to paper) from any system that meets some sensible requirements for uptime, security, data validation, etc. (Yes, this would help us as a business, but it ...
For my own amusement and instruction I've been developing a C# / .NET library that is basically a wrapper around the Google Geocoding API. It simplifies the entire process and enables users to perform geocoding entirely within .NET code. At some point I was thinking of making the library freely available and, possibly,...
Here's my predicament. One of several programs I've recently inherited is built with a horrible database on the backend. The esteemed creators of it apparently did not appreciate relational concepts. A table for each and every client, named as a unique client ID. Eighty-three cryptically named fields. The code is all p...
Data input validation always was quite an internal struggle to me. On the verge of adding a real security framework and code to our legacy application rewrite project (which so far pretty much keeps the card-castle-strong legacy security code and data validation), I'm wondering again about how much should I validate, w...
Recently, I forgot to merge changes from trunk to our maintenance branch. This caused us to rebuild - twice - and put QA on hold for two days while we fixed the mess. Normally, when committing to both branches, I commit a single changeset to trunk, and immediately merge it over to the maintenance branch. However, this...
A few do, but not any of the popular ones as far as I know. Is there something bad about nesting comments? I plan to have block comments nest in the (small) language I'm working on, but I would like to know if this is a bad idea.
I have read this question and after a very long time it's clear I still don't understand anti-patterns. perhaps, it raised a new level of curosity to know why should I read Anti design pattern if they are actually nothing but a "Bad Practice". Is there any chance I should implement those anti design patterns in my appl...
I'm planning to work/start on a few personal projects that could end up as my daily job. It made me think, which way should I start? Just prototype—write just working basic code that could cost me tons of time optimizing and refactoring for easy expansion. Write clean, optimized and documented code from the very begin...
I am having someone develop a program for me and I want to sell it for like $10. I was wondering what's the best way to create a trial version that I can tell my programmer to do. Like 30 day trial. And what's one way I can make it so once they pay, I can send them a unlock code. What's done in the program to allow th...
I'm one of those developers that has the mindset that the code written should be self-explanatory and read like a book. HOWEVER, when developing library code for other people to use I try to put as much documentation in the header files as possible; which brings up the question: Is documenting methods that are non-Publ...
The object level capabilities that show up in E seem like an interesting addition to the Javascript language, especially considering the security issues that Javascript programs face. Has anyone tried implementing an object-capability type security system in Javascript, or by modifying a javascript VM?
Say I have an idea for a desktop application with unusual interface requirements. I need: Pixel-level control over the look and feel. Finely specified custom controls. Platform-independence. My typical solution in this scenario would be to use SDL (or SDL+OpenGL) as a graphics framework upon which to build the interf...
Having been programming in PHP for a year, I now want to start learning Java. I am in a Windows environment. I want to develop a GUI with Java that would query a MySQL database. I know I would use JFC to accomplish this, but my questions are: Will it be difficult to adapt to Java? Do I benefit for learning Java beca...
What are some techniques in determining if a particular piece of source code is malicious or vulnerable to malicious attack? I am currently using cppcheck and I am waiting on an install of Rational AppSource. Aside from that and reviewing the US-CERT Secure Coding Guidelines, what else should I be looking at? This is f...
I have a rails app. I'm writing code to integrate it with a third-party service, "Foo Bar". The integration affects many parts of the system -- models, controllers, and an API wrapper. Thus far I've been putting the integration stuff into the modules of each model and controller. So inside app/models/user/foo_bar.rb is...
I have written a small Java program which i'd like to distribute on my website. I have used a few external librarys which declare following licences: Apache License (2.0), LGPL and one API doesn't declare any licence.. It's open source though. I have spent a lot of time and effort developing my program. That's why I t...
Possible Duplicate: Is it better to specialize in a single field I like, or expand into other fields to broaden my horizons? Looking at job postings, the vast majority ask for extremely specific qualifications and requirements and a great deal of experience in very narrow areas. Having written a job description or t...
The Apache HTTP server is a fairly large project—much larger than, say, lighthttp or nginx or certainly the "simple HTTP servers" you see floating around in C/C++ tutorials. What is the extra code for? Does it add security/stability (and if so, how?) or is it just for doing things like parsing Apache conf files/.htacce...
Do you think flash performance is bad mainly due to the fact that most people build flash applications using the flex framework? As opposed to the problem having everything to do with the lower level flash system. What percent of flash apps are built with flex?
I have been reading The Early History of Smalltalk and there are a few mentions of "assignment" which make me question my understanding of its meaning: Though OOP came from many motivations, two were central. The large scale one was to find a better module scheme for complex systems involving hiding of details, and th...
One of things that makes Ruby shine is the ability to create Domain Specific Languages better, like Sinatra Rspec Rake Ruby on Rails' ActiveRecord Though one can duplicate these libraries in LISP through macro, I think Ruby's implementation is more elegant. Nonetheless, I think there are cases that LISP's macro can b...
These days is it required to test a desktop website for IE6 and IE7? Or is IE8 and IE9 enough? I heard that IE8 has replaced IE7.
Context I am looking for work as a contractor in my field of expertise and would prefer to earn less money and have less benefits working as a short-term contractor. The problem: Companies say I need to be an in-house employee for intellectual property reasons. The question: Wouldn't it be easy for them to just have m...
How do you test the web applications (both server side and client side code)? The testing method has to work irrespective of the framework used (struts, spring web mvc) etc. I am using Java for the server side code, Javascript and HTML for the client side code. This is the sample test case of what I am talking about: ...
Even as a student I am asked to review the code of programmers who have (not) passed a test (create a list of Fibonacci numbers on android). While I am very strict on coding style I just read about the "block" style someone used (read the comments!). In my position I would recommend to not hire a guy using this kind of...
This might be a philosophical kind of question, but I believe that there is an objective answer to it. If you read the wikipedia article about Haskell, you can find the following: The language is rooted in the observations of Haskell Curry and his intellectual descendants, that "a proof is a program; the formula it pr...
If I have a database that stores the login credentials of 1,000,000 users in PLAINTEXT, how much effort will it take me to md5 hash these passwords?
I usually read a lot about programming related stuff. When the topic I read is not related to my work directly ,(say reading about some Algorithms which I don't use in everyday work), I forget them. One way to reinforce what has been learnt is to write blogs. I am a beginner in writing blogs. When I started writing, I ...
If I have n rows in a database, and I want to compare every row against each other, how many loops (or processes) would I need to do. Is it n2? (so if I have 30,000 rows then it would be 900,000,000) Or is it: for (i = 0; i < 30000; i++) { for (j = i + 1; j < 30000; j++) [ // Process } } If it is the ...
How can I encourage my coworkers to track the time they spend resolving issues and implementing features? We have software to do this, but they just don't enter the numbers. I want the team to get better at providing project estimates by comparing our past estimates to actual time spent. I suspect that my coworkers don...
The question jQuery plugin file including the jQuery library came up today on stackoverflow, and I strongly advised against including jQuery in the plugin. I didn't really get any support from others on this; in fact there was more support to include jQuery than not. Is this ok or are there good reasons not to do this?...
Recently a new director of my department came in and expressed his wish that we become a "center of excellence". I expected that since he is my first boss who actually has a programming background that there would be some description of this. However, it was left at that. As I reflected on this over the last few days, ...
I have a small utility library of useful stuff written in Java that I plan on releasing open source. I've been wavering on what license to use. I quite like the BSD license, which is short and easy to understand, but I don't want/need the clause about including the disclaimer in their product's documentation. Consid...
Sony was recently hacked with a SQL injection and the passwords of their user's was stored in plain text. These are rookie mistakes. In such a large company, how does this pass QA? How do they not have better teams than to know better than this? The sheer size of the company that was hacked makes this different. It aff...
Maybe I'm doing it wrong, but in my experience, developing and maintaining heavily ajax-based web apps is much more difficult then a "more standard" web app. I'm not talking about an app that uses ajax to load in some data here and there, but the style where the page the server sends out is just a frame, and all the da...
You are in the process of looking for candidates for a software development position, all the resumes are reviewed, and you made a couple of interview invites. Now, the folks show up in the conference room onsite, and you begin the back-and-forth talking about past experience, reviewing the resume, the personal develop...
Salutations. Dijkstra wrote that even a few lines of seemingly simple code could be hopelessly ambiguous. In at least one work, which I can't find now to save my life, he gave a little example program to demonstrate this ambiguity. Can anybody point me to a paper of his where he includes one of these examples?
Wikipedia defines Enterprise Architecture as follows: An enterprise architecture (EA) is a rigorous description of the structure of an enterprise, its decomposition into subsystems, the relationships between the subsystems, the relationships with the external environment, the terminology to use, and th...
So there is a lot of cool stuff in the html5/css3 specs which should be able to replace a lot of the stuff that have been traditionally done with javascript. Does anyone know if any of the major js libraries (jquery, mootools, extjs, etc) or any newer js libraries are going to be implementing their libraries in such a ...
I have been an active professional software developer (mostly utilizing .NET) for the past five years and, without being too full of myself, I would say I'm a very competent developer. I stay intimately up to date with the latest tools, the industry, and modern standards/practices. I work for a fairly high-level IT com...
I work in mobile development. I've just been promoted to a project manager. The problem is that I just have 4 months of experience in development. This was my first job and I didn't even finished school. I need some advice or maybe some software to help me manage my team and my projects.
The title sums up my question, but to elaborate basically what I want to understand is why the Android designers want apps that need to work with shared data to use a Content Provider rather than just accessing the SQLite database directly? The only reason I can think of is security because certain files can by accesse...
There are few academic papers addressing the relationship between lean software development and the practices covered by ISO 9001. Most articles says that the divergence between these approaches is big, but some also point that these concepts can be complementary and gains are much higher when using both approaches. Ac...
I have been working as a software QA analyst for 6 years. I will be finishing a Masters degree in computer science this year. I’m just not sure how to advance my career after my graduation. I like programming, solving puzzles, but in the meantime, I don’t dislike software testing that much. Actually, sometimes it’s fu...
This is a tactical implementation question about usage of Vaadin or in some part of my application. Vaadin is a great framework to login users and implement sophisticated web applications with many pages. However, I think it is not very well suited to desgin pages to register new users for my application. Am I right? A...
I'm assuming that after a while, many developers come to know/love a particular VCS. What happens if you find yourself on a team using an incompatible system - do you learn the new system and adapt your workflow to the team's, or do you keep your old system, and try to get both working in tandem? It strikes me that thi...
So, I have recently had on-site interviews with Google and Amazon and received polite rejection letters letting me know I was close, but not quite right for the skills they were looking for. I've made it to the final round for all the interviews I've done (except for some offers from small uninteresting positions that ...
To clarify, what I'm asking about is public class A{ private/or public/ B b; } vs. public class A{ private/or public/ class B{ .... } } I can definitely think of some reasons to use one or the other, but what I would really like to see are convincing examples that show that the pros and cons...
There are many vcs available. Which of them are typically used in JavaEE world?
I use MS Visio for most of my design/architecting work when I need to be able to save the diagram somewhere and edit it later. I'm not the biggest fan of Visio, but it gets the job done (and it's free at work). I was wondering if there were any good alternatives to the fairly expensive Visio software, maybe something e...
I'm trying to understand the transition people make with their apps in the App Engine SDK and how/why/what they move to the Google Plugin for Eclipse. It seems you can create a web application using the App Engine SDK, or you can do the same with Eclipse. Why offer both? How do people transition App Engine into Ecli...
In computer science, what are the differences in meaning between interface and layer? For example, an interface between A and B must belong to either A or B or both, while a layer between A and B must be a third thing that is neither part of A or of B?
I have just graduated from college and have about 2 months time before I start working at the company. I have experience in C, C++, Java and a bit of Android (developed an app last summer, stopped working on that later). I just want to learn something new while improving on my basic C , C++ and Java skills. I really n...
I'm doing some early-stage research towards architecting a new software application. Concurrency and multithreading will likely play a significant part, so I've been reading up on the various topics. The producer-consumer model, at least how it is expressed in Java, has some surface similarities but appears to be deepl...
Microsoft showed off a demo of Windows 8, including a new platform that allows developers to use HTML5 and JavaScript. Is this new platform the main way to develop for Windows 8? Is Microsoft phasing out the .NET platform in favor of the HTML 5 stack? What does Windows 8 mean for .NET developers?
I have a new site/app going live next week (or somewhere close). I know there will be a relatively small (15,000?) very dedicated group of people on Facebook who will be very likely to be interested in the site, so I know I need Facebook integration of some kind. I won't be doing Facebook logins or pulling/posting to ...
I want to make excellent estimations about, how much effort is required for a particular task. The constraint is, that I have already solved the problem and written down steps required to solve it. Also I have the description of what kind of problems it solves, compiled example program, it's source code with comments,...
This is almost embarrassing ask...I have a degree in Computer Science (and a second one in progress). I've worked as a full-time .NET Developer for nearly five years. I generally seem competent at what I do. But I Don't Know How Computers Work! Please, bare with me for a second. A quick Google of 'How a Computer Wor...
What are the best python programming patterns and practices you are using every day? I don't mean only design patterns (there are lot of OO design patterns that can be used in python), I mean pure coding patterns and practices like: the best way to organize modules the best way for data parsing (performance wise) usa...
Sometimes when I'm working with a class (usually one that represents a database model), I'll have about 15 different properties on it, usually of different types. These are properties that need to be accessed by the users, as well, so each property will typically need some function like T getPropertyName(); setPropert...
Possible Duplicate: How often do you use Formal UML? I'm currently following a study UML called UML Fundamentals. While studying, I wondered if companies even bother creating system documentation in UML because the companies I've visited as an intern didn't seem to bother with a class diagram. They just went straig...
I've been studying Zend Framework's MVC for a few weeks, and am having a really, really difficult time with it. I'm new to OOP, but I understand OOP in PHP without too much difficulty; I understand how to use some of the packages in Zend's library, etc. I understand interfaces, abstract classes, composition, etc. etc. ...
We're a small software company, developing projects for manufacturing facilities about analysis, traceability, reporting etc. We're using Access for front end, SQL Server for back end. We've quite big customers too and our company is growing. So far it is working fine but I wonder should we move to more influential tec...
A friend of mine told me that .NET Framework is memory hungry and he gave me an example that if I make an application (in .NET web forms) which will take 20 mb of your RAM, it will be actually wasting 1.5 MB This means that it will leak 15 mb for 200 MB application which is way too much. Is it true? Can anyone provide ...
I have found a GPL library (no dual license), which does exactly what I need. Unfortunately, the GPL license on the library is incompatible with the license of a different library I use. I have therefore decided to rewrite the GPL library, so the license can be changed. My question is: How extensive do the changes nee...
Currently, there is a discussion in the PHP-Internals mailing list regarding the implementation of a short syntax for arrays and objects, mainly [1, 2, ...] for standard arrays, ['one'=>1, 'two'=> 2, ...] for associative arrays, and {'one'=>1, 'two'=> 2, ...} for objects and there is one general disagreement that bothe...
Just as many people believe tenaciously in small functions, some people believe lambdas should only contain small code fragments. An often overlooked advantage of lambdas however, is using them you can encapsulate behavior which you would otherwise have to make available to the entire class. Isn't it is a true advantag...
I have been asked to develop a client-server application (requires database) for a company. I am very handy with java so would like to go with it. Its up to me how I develop the application. It may be an JSP web application or Java Swing GUI based application. I have following queries/doubts. So if I go on to develop a...
Reading a few "Why a DVCS is better" answers to several question on Programmers.SE they all seem to say that in general, DVCS is better since you don't have a commit race in large projects, IE commit, out of date so update, commit, out of date again, commit, still out of date, etc. DVCS limit this with the concept of t...
I will not bother you with details of my discussion so I will present it in the form of a short instance. A java guy has been following articles and publications of a famous programmer (a kind of Martin Fowler of my country). He says that he is sharing some secrets which other famous programmers don't share. I never be...
I have a plan to start a small business soon. It is going to be a type of freelancing to build websites and applications using ASP.NET. I want to focus on one thing Web forms or MVC. However, I have no idea if that has any importance to the client. I mean do the clients know about MVC or web forms? Do they prefer one o...
I'm about to begin a big PHP project with a friend. It's my first time using PHP and I've been wondering wether I should try developing on Linux since it's so popular. I've had some past experience with Linux and the choice of an editor won't be hard since I know vim (though I've looked at VS.PHP and it's putting me b...
I have had many occasions recently where I have needed to maintain complex stored procedures and functions. These were broken already, usually in fairly subtle ways - there were very few occasions where you would call the SP with valid parameters and it just plain didn't work. My solution was to evolve a framwork that ...
Are there new API's in Windows Phone 7 (Mango) which need new phone hardware? Gyroscope stuff? BTW, is AppHub the only Microsoft's official forum for WP7? Registration page is asking for 'Publisher name', website and payment? I just want to ask questions in the forum.
I heard that we have to build with the highhest warning level. Is it true? why? And how to change default .NET warning level?
In the past months I've asked for people here on SE and on other sites offer me some constructive criticism regarding my code. There's one thing that kept popping out almost every time and I still don't agree with that recommendation; :P I'd like to discuss it here and maybe things will become clearer to me. It's regar...
Having finally begun seriously trying to learn some basic patterns (very late in the career, but that's a different story), I'm trying to get my head around the differences between the Factory Pattern and Abstract Factory. What are the key differences between these two patterns? I understand that the Factory Method cre...

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