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I am considering utilizing Python for creating an application. The purpose of this application is solely to interact with the Windows API. My question, therefore, is: Is PyWin32 mature and complete enough to be relied upon, or would I be better off doing this in C++? The reasons why I wanted to use Python are: Easier ...
I am an individual developer working, largely, on web-projects (W/LAMP) and, at times, on C/C++ (non-GUI) projects of about average scale. I often struggle with structuring my source-code tree. In fact, usually, I don't complete a project without dumping the entire tree and rearranging the pieces three-four times which...
What is the proper or standard way to layout a class. If a class where to have attributes, methods, private attributes, private methods, class property (methods), and class methods. I am done 99% of my coding procedurely and beyond working with ORM haven't focused to much on OOP. I am changing that in a current project...
Some companies selling software or libraries simply put their licensing model on their web page and be done with it. (Many also contain a disclaimer that there are volume discounts and special arrangements possible.) Other companies (most notably those placing themselves in the "enterprise" market) don't disclose their...
As with most things, I'm sure this concept has been tried before - I just haven't come across editors that use what I've termed 'Virtual Formatting'. The principle is that there's a floating left-margin that simulates the effect of the padding space/tab characters that are conventionally inserted by the developer or th...
I am thinking of releasing libraries and frameworks which I have written in Java to other developers. I've spent a lot of time researching what open source licenses are available, and the differences between them, however some advice from real people specifically on this matter would be nice. Basically, I want somethin...
It seems like a lot of my clients get roped into buying less-than-adequate enterprise software then dumping it on us (as consultants) to implement. I've seen some of these slick vendor demos where they show off a heavily customized demo app and pass it off as an off-the-shelf solution that does exactly what you need wh...
I'm in the beginning phases of creating a QA system and I want to make sure that the design decisions that I'm making now make sense and won't bite me in the butt later on. If you have even the slightest nit-picky thing or whatever, please post, I'd appreciate hearing any feedback about this (I'm quite new to it all)....
After graduating from college I was hired as a junior programmer a little over a year ago. I quickly noticed that I was degrees of magnitude faster than all the other programmers; this seems to be because I simply don't waste time "in general". The majority of other people however seem to enjoy staring at the ceiling, ...
We currently use JIRA to track our development work. My management wants to format and categorize everything as "User Stories," including non-software development related tasks. For example: "As a test manager, can I perform testing of the application using only automated tests and no manual testing so that I can test ...
I have the following situation. I have a factory method that returns a matrix. This matrix can be calculated at two levels of accuracy: level1 and level2. In order to calculate the matrix, I need to pass a bunch of information to the factory method, and this information is nicely packed in another object Info. Info is ...
Why is jQuery released under MIT and not LGPL? What are the benefits of using MIT compared to LGPL for a framework?
For example, I'm changing color pallettes throughout a site i'm coding and would love it if i could reference that color somehow instead of replacing the hex value for every item. I know the following doesn't work but i'd like something similar. color1 = red; color2 = blue; color3 = green; h1 { color: color1; backgrou...
Let's say I have a class called Country and two subclasses called AI and Player. The Country class has a number of virtual methods to allow player-specific or AI-specific behavior. I want to make it possible for the player to switch countries during a game. To this end, I am refactoring the inheritance relation to comp...
This answer[link] to another question here talks about OpenID and data espionage. I quote: [Data espionage] Why let them gather the detailed statistics from many consumer site and help them build personal profiles of people? Who knows what they'll do with it? Sell it, use it to adjust their marketing tactic...
There are some names, where if you find yourself reaching for those names, you know you've already messed something up. For example: XxxManager This is bad because a class should describe what the class does. If the most specific word you can come up with for what the class does is "manage," then the class is too big. ...
What are the symptoms in a code base that indicate that an event-listener approach is required? It seems to me that when there are classes that need to be called by multiple, not defined at design-time set of other classes, you need some sort of signaling framework, but I would like to hear what other situations are t...
Do you think that power failure is a scenario to implement? At what time that scenario should be taken into consideration? If power failure will cause some data loss so do you care about it ? if(IsImportant(data)) ... else .. ? What do you think If our application doesn't work anymore even power failure scenario shoul...
We accept leads from lead providers. We only allow certain providers to post leads to us during certain days/times. Currently, we have 3 schedules, but we might add 1 or n more in the future: Sunday @ 8AM - Friday @ 3PM -- all hours in between. Monday - Friday from 8AM - 5 PM. 24 hours a day, every day. In addition, ...
I am trying to choose the right license for a project that I would like to release as open-source later this year but I am unsure as to what the most appropriate license would be. I was originally thinking of the GPLv2 license, but I don't think that it is what I am after. I have been working on this project for over a...
I just ran across an answer to another question that references the Halting Problem. He starts with this snippet: def halts( code_block ): # Some magical code def whistler(): while halts(whistler): sys.whistle( 1 ) and then explains how the routine halts cannot be defined correctly because it essent...
In OOP, static scope means the scope is linked to the class, and instance scope is linked to a specific instance of the class. Some languages support static locals, which allow a value to be retained from one call of a function to another, however still in static scope. As you might conclude from some other posts by me...
I'm planning on making a website that will have mainly articles and videos. I'm going to post the videos on YouTube and use the YouTube API on my site. What I am wondering, is if I can make a page like this without using any server-side technology, or if I would need server-side programming(PHP, MySQL, etc...) would it...
With software products taking whole teams of people to develop, how much can one programmer accomplish on his/her own? In other words, could a single person write Photoshop, MS word, etc...? And if they couldn't, would web development be an area where one programmer could do a lot?
My team leader has this terrible habit of mucking with the database schema, and making changes that would cause severe breakage on the code base (without really consulting me on how the changes would affect the code base). Normally, I would just live with it, but we have a deadline in 2 weeks and this has been happeni...
Let's assume that my client (C) has a corporate website, created by an agency (A). A created a pretty simple, yet well designed website which uses plain HTML and no backend to edit any of the data. C has to issue (and of course pay) A every time they want any changes to their website which has become pretty expensive. ...
I was going through some tutorials on TortoiseHg. Despite having a rich GUI, the first examples are given using command line options. Does the ideal usage involve command line or it was started that way so one has idea of what is happening under the hood and GUI internally uses this command anyway.
There are numbers 1 to N present in a list, and an additional number that has been included by mistake. So, in total there are N+1 numbers. Assume that the largest integer that the language can handle is N. What is the fastest algorithm to find the repeat digit? Note: This is not a homework problem.
If we decide to use a piece of open sourced software that is currently released under a license that allows inclusion in an internal closed source system, what protection are we offered if the owners of the open source software decide to change the license? Typically I'm thinking of where the new license does not allo...
I have been working on asp.net applications for 6 years but almost all of it has been extending and maintaining existing applications. I now have the need to develop a new application and I am scratching my head :( There is a lot of material on Software Design principles and patterns but not much content on organisati...
Possible Duplicates: Prototyping vs. Clean Code at the early stages Frankly, do you prefer Cowboy coding? After working in a number of companies, I am starting to realize that my commitment to writing high quality, well tested software, does not necessarily lead to career advancement, especially when managers with n...
I've started my company in UK. Used to work as a freelancer, therefore legal issues didn't use to be a big headache. Now, I'd like to see an example of the document a company would sign with a client when starting to build them a website. This should include a project quote, project overview, agreed upon things, deadli...
I recently saw a comment here, that the signs of a bad hire is when he says "I worked with this and that", but then doesn't elaborate when asked. And the question is why? Hypothetical scenario: Say you work for company X that develops rockets for space trips, then you walk to an interview for position Z in company Y. I...
This is not really a question on how to develop all three, I know various cross platform ways and so on. But I more want to know from developer standpoint how hard it is to basically develop iOS, Android and web apps? I am currently in my first job as a mobile/web developer. I have already developed my first iPhone/iP...
Possible Duplicate: Programming Puzzles Looking for ways to help me improve my C# coding skills. I thought it would be handy if there was a site that asked you to write a new method every day to perform a task (maybe even one for beginners, intermediate & advanced developers). Seeing comments as to how everyone pu...
After building mainly Java desktop apps and some small GWT services, I'm trying to learn how to build Web Services in Java but I feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of buzzwords, terms, specifications and technologies. Besides, I'm not able to find a comprehensive, yet correct source to learn. Is this normal when star...
I read that there exists three main types of databases * Transactional (Client-Server database// OLTP database) * Decision support system (DSS) (Data warehouse database // Data mart // Reporting database) * Hybrid What is the type of database considered for a social network, like Facebook or Twitter? I guess the categ...
Is there any difference between naming a class "Handler", "Manager" or "Controller"? IE: PurchaseManager, PurchaseHandler, PurchaseController. Do these suffices convey the same meaning or is there a clear difference between them? If there isn't a language-agnostic answer, consider Java as the language.
Let's say you need to implement a new programming language and BCL designed specifically for operating in the cloud (it won't be used on client machines ever). It should be optimized for cloud computing; easy to learn, fast, efficient, powerful, modern. What it would look like? What would be it's major differences from...
I am in the process of making a webpage in the pyramid framework (python) and I am going to make it opensource so that people can add to it, take from it, learn from it, etc. But I don't want them to just take the code and not accredit my friends and I for writing the code they are using. I was wondering how to go abou...
When do you draw the line between relational tables, and fields holding multiple values of a particular type. Let me illustrate in an example below where a PokeMaster can be associated to multiple pokemon of unknown number. TablePokeMasters PokeMasterId PokeMasterName TablePokeMastersToPokemon <- Side questi...
After going through many SO questions and answers on "Architects" , I am now basically confused with the various terms and their roles. Could any one please explain the terms clearly and their roles A) Technical Architect B) Solution Architect C) Domain Architect D) Enterprise Architect E) Project Architect F) Sy...
I'd like to use the VLC's DLL in one of my programs. VLC is under the GPL license. Do I have to redistribute all the sources under GPL or can I redistribute only the modified sources of VLC under these terms while redistributing the rest of my program in the license I want? Thank you, Sébastien Edit: And what if I only...
According to this question and it's replies What is the purpose of the "non-endorsement clause" in the New BSD license? it seems smarter to pick the BSD license over the MIT, to prevent people using your name in an unwanted way. If that is the case, why do people still pick the MIT license over BSD license?
A company that I work with has asked me to do candidate phone screenings to make sure they aren't completely embarrassed when sending over someone to a potential client. It turns out that a fair number of people were being placed for a C++ developer role. I don't spend much time in C++, but I have done a few trivial an...
I work at a large company, and we are stuck with a crappy home-baked bug tracking tool, which does too many things half-decently, but it search functionality is next-to-impossible to use (has about 80 fields that one has to / can fill out) and the search needs to be precise. We have many duplicate bugs filed that are n...
I'm a newbie programmer and I've been reading Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails 3 Tutorial. I'm enjoying the book very much. It's easy to follow and doesn't assume I know much. I'd also like to learn to code iOS apps (both iPhone and iPad) and would appreciate any recommendations on books or courses that could help me to ...
I'm in the process of writing a mail server stack and it's a fairly critical design decision as to whether a unique message can appear in more than one message box. Simple cases are easy to make a decision on (e.g. a message obviously cannot exist in the "Inbox" and the "Trash" mailbox) but a more subtle situation like...
Assume that in my free time I have developed library X before signing a contract or being employed by company A. I then sign a contract with company A and begin working. It becomes apparent that library X will be incredibly useful and save the company lots of time and money. What is the industry standard practice in th...
It is one thing to log something that happened in code, a process, or procedure. It is another thing to log something that didn't happen. For example, if your ETL system is supposed to receive a file every hour for import, and a file did not arrive at the usual appointed time, then it would be good to log "what didn'...
When working with a resource-based site (such as an MVC application or REST service), we have two main options when a client tries to GET a resource that they don't have access to: 403, which says that the client is unauthorized; or 404, which says that the resource does not exist (or couldn't be located). Common wis...
Should properties in C# have side effects beside notifying of a change in it's states? I have seen properties used in several different ways. From properties that will load the value the first time they are accessed to properties that have massive side effects like causing a redirect to a different page.
Most of you already know that the output of ASP.NET web forms is quite ugly when you compare it to the output of ASP.NET MVC. My question is what could the problems of that ASP.NET web forms' output cause to the end users? Is it the slow of browsing and the load time?, but do you think that could be a problem in today...
At work I come across a lot of Japanese text files in Shift-JIS and other encodings. It causes many mojibake (unreadable character) problems for all computer users. Unicode was intended to solve this sort of problem by defining a single character set for all languages, and the UTF-8 serialization is recommended for use...
I'm looking for suggestions on whether we should build or are there readymade applications that do the following: Allow admins to build a structured workflow of support Q & A, similar to Windows Troubleshooting i.e. when you try one tip, you then get the next one. Allow end-users to search and follow the Q & A We hav...
I am currently working in an Agile + SCRUM based project. I work on a lower level module. This leads to a peculiar problem. The work I do cannot be directly associated with a user story many times. Since I cannot relate a user story directly to my work I often face the problem that my requirements are unclear. Also I t...
I am completely clueless about the inner workings of an operating system, but I can more or less guess the approximate behaviour of many functions. One thing that I am not able to figure out, though, is multitasking. In theory, the operating system manages time, according the CPU for small intervals to the various prog...
I've heard of Silverlight 5 from Microsoft. But what about WPF? Is Microsoft planning to discontinue WPF or will there be a new version? We just switched from winforms to WPF and now another transition is going to be tough. Please point me with any links with information on the next version of WPF. Thank you.
There are so many programmers out there who are also an expert at Query writing and Database design. Should this be a core requirement to be an expert programmer or software engineer? Though there are lots of similarities in the way queries and codes are developed, my personal opinion is, Queries seem to have a differ...
A suggestion from Bob Martin's "Clean code" has me scratching my head.. "If once function calls another, they should be vertically close and the caller should be above the callee" So far, I've been more or less sticking close to the .Net guidelines, which group class members by type (properties, ctors, functions) and v...
Suppose you want to develop an application, in midst of development you find out that one similar application already exists, highly recognized and used. It's a cross platform application but it's unknown whether this application is open source or not. However you decide to reverse engineer it without taking care of i...
Is it too much to ask for when I ask the IT department to give my development team an environment where we can use whatever software that we can download without having to have security check those tools? Of course, the software can be checked by security before deploying to Test, and the development environment can be...
My company has been licensing a commercial application to fulfill our need for the past few years. The programmers (myself included) have been modifying (with permission) the software to better suit our needs. Now we're talking about replacing the licensed software with an in-house solution we create ourselves. We w...
I'm writing a paper about the C# (and Go) type system with focus on the dynamic aspect. Does anybody have suggestions for papers/literature? The things I found don't go much into detail. I would like to add some paragraphs on how it's implemented, comparisons with other languages, speed, memory allocation etc.
i've been facing a common situation at work that has happened quite often when handling objects. The situation goes like this: You have to realted classes A and B, class A has an instances of class B. Now, imagine that we want to call methodB of class B, but we only have access to an intance of class A. What's the best...
I am creating a service to be exposed on the internet. One of those things you would normally say "Web 2.0", but that I want to expose as a SOAP webservice, with desktop clients. I know that it may sound a little bit outdated, but despite the apparent "uncool" factor, is there any real reason why this approach shouldn'...
I am currently working on a project where we use a framework that combines code generation and ORM together with UML to develop software. Methods are added to UML classes and are generated into partial classes where "stuff happens". For example, an UML class "Content" could have the method DeleteFromFileSystem(void). W...
I want to add logging to an application I'm currently working on. I've added logging before, that's not an issue here. But from a design perspective in an object-oriented language, what are the best practices for logging that follow OOP and patterns? Note: I'm currently doing this in C#, so examples in C# are obviously...
I am trying to start learning the J2EE part of Java. But I don't know where to start. I am familier with Core Java and mainly, I want to learn JPA and basics of Hibernate and Spring Framework. The main reason for this is I am working on a project which is using all these things. And most of the code is being developed ...
On one project we are looking at where to implement workflows. Does anyone have experience with both FileNet and WPS (or know of any studies), that could say anything about the amount of effort required to create a workflow in the 2 products?
I just came across this while searching on Google for HTML/CSS tutorials. Does anyone recommend this software for building websites? Or should I just stick to learning pencil and paper hand coding instead? I just want to put my focus in the right area. Heres the link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb964635.a...
I'm trying to figure out a way to analyze code longevity in open source projects: that is, how long a specific line of code is active and in use. My current thinking is that a line of code's lifespan begins when it is first committed, and ends when one of the following occurs: It's edited or deleted, Excluded from bu...
I've taken quite a few intro programming classes in my day, mostly just to get my feet wet in every different kind of programming I find. Not surprisingly, just about every class runs through the same format : intro to hardware, intro to software, and then you get into the actual programming. While understanding how ...
I picked up Julia Lerman 1st edition book: https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/18212/entity-framework-book-1st-edition I started reading that and it was pretty good, but I'm wondering if there is even a more higher level book for EF? From what I was reading in the 1st edition it was pretty technica...
I'm young and wasn't alive during the 60's and 70's to experience networking and programming as it once was. I have been watching some talks by Van Jacobson on Content Centric Networking, and in these talks he gives a historical perspective stating that in the 60's and 70's, networking was designed to solve the proble...
My workflow has always been to write one logical step and then run the program and inspect the output. This process have served me incredibly well for assignments in university. However, as I do more development, there are often times when simply compiling and running your code takes 1 to 2 minutes. Examples include up...
I'm continually becoming overwhelmed by large projects, once they reach a certain level of complexity. Once I reach a certain point in a project, my progress slows to a crawl and I find myself constantly retracing my steps and sorting out all kinds of confusion. I've gotten really good at refactoring due to this weakne...
I'm a scientific person needing to document complex Matlab code to hand to a developer for him/her to understand and program in a different language. In the past, I've used MS Word (explaining each program step as a new row in a table), and then Excel, but didn't find either particularly well suited to displaying my Ma...
I was taking a look at some node.js code earlier, and I noticed that the guy who wrote it seemed to favour the following syntax: var fn = function (param) { var paramWithDefault = null == param ? 'Default Value' : param; } Over what I consider to be the more concise: var fn = function (param) { var paramWithDe...
In situations where I need to write observer/subscriber code, how would I choose between the following approaches? A) Declaring an event that simply notifies a client something happens but requires the client to make a query for data e.g. class SoothSayer{ int DaysUntilApocalypse{get;} event EventHandler<Even...
Most programming languages support operators similar to the following 6, which are spelled here as in C. == != < <= > >= I'm aware of several terms used to include all of these operators. In approximately my perceived best-first order, these are... EDIT list fixed after Jerry Coffins answer... Relational oper...
I have some experience regarding IPhone and Android development but I am now struggling to solve a new class of problem: apps that involve a client/server chatroom feature. That is, an app when people can exchange text over the internet, and without having the app to constantly “pull” content from the server. So that p...
If so, at what stage? or it is also an iterative process? If iterative, how formal? Also, how useful is UML for a solo programmer doing open source? While I like to see a picture of the system, it feel so formal and a bunny trail for TDD. Thanks.
What do you call source code valid in several languages? There was a specific word for it and really crazy examples.
One of my roles in my team is the build person. I am responsible for maintaining/updating our build scripts and making sure we are building 'smoothly' on the continuous integration server. I usually do not mind this job, though often it feels like I am constantly babysitting the CI server. This job can be annoying at ...
Is there a line between readability vs compile or processing speed? Aside from the extreme cases, I wouldn't think it would be even worth saving that little bit extra in favor of legibility... For example; a bad idea, in my opinion would be removing all the comments on a 'finished' product to gain a little extra speed....
I am very eager to study best practices when it comes to space hardening. For instance, I've read (though I can't find the article any longer) that some core parts of the Mars rovers did not use dynamic memory allocation, in fact it was forbidden. I've also read that old fashioned core memory may be preferable in space...
So I've had a few situations now where programmers have passed the interview teams with flying colors, only to find when they arrive on scene, they demonstrate an extreme touchiness any time any criticism is leveled their way. I'm not talking about off-day irritability, but a 24/7 bruised ego thing. For certain employe...
You have an idea of a software/app/webapp/website that you would like to spend some effort and implement. Your idea uses a cloud system to keep things up and you think you could earn some money by distributing your product and charging a small one-time fee. But there is a problem: the first thing you realize is that on...
I want to know what a server does to run a php application. Below is what I think: client A types www.blahblahblah.blah/ Server resolves url and directory etc. Server go the index.php index.php has a Singleton Pattern Class in it with a static variable called instance. Now does the server allocate the memory to th...
Note on the question: this is not a duplicate, Efficient try / catch block usage? was asked after this one. The other question is the duplicate. I was wondering what was the best way to use try/catch. Is it better to limit the content of the try block to the minimum or to put everything in it? Let me explain myself wit...
I have been asked to help estimate the time it would take to develop a web application. I will not be involved in the actual programming, but I am participating as an "experienced" programmer. The actual work will probably be handed over to a consulting company, but the client (a university department) wants to have an...
We are in the middle of our first Sprint and something dawn on us: we over estimated! We had planned 114 ideal hours for this 2 weeks iteration and at the end of the first week we finished the whole Sprint. What do we do now? The "book" says we should, and we will, get the next high priority items from the backlog. Th...
Some Scrum software management tools give you this option to explicitly name your sprints. Do you have a preferred way of naming your sprints or do you just use a simple scheme like 1, 2, 3, ...?
We're designing a RESTful API to open up our customer's account information. We have representations that contain references to other resources related to the current resource. This is from a number of best practices we were able to find in public APIs as well as published materials. The representations can be either X...
We have finished our Sprint in half the expected time and now we want to compute our focus factor to use in the next Sprint. Though, by doing the math by the book, we get an awful number. How are we calculating it wrong? Please take a look bellow: Team composition: 3 Sprint length: 2 weeks Team availability: 28 da...
I understand the difference between the two, but I get questioned by my colleagues of the benefit of labeling requirements as functional or nonfunctional (or transitional). Why bother to do so? He spent what he said was two days going through a list of requirements for one project, and saw no benefit to it, because t...
I'm an undergraduate student studying computer science. I have been working at a company as a student researcher and next week I am to demo my complete project to my boss and the other developers. It is the most complex and largest program I have developed. My questions are: What is the most effective way to demo? Are ...
I'm just getting started in Android development and am working on a few small "practice" apps. As an example, one is a live wallpaper. The others are similar in terms of development effort. When these apps are done I would like to list them in the market. I may list them for free (or maybe not), and they're simple app...
I read the following question: Tips for a first year CS student looking for a summer internship to gain experience? But rather than how to get and/or look for internships, my questions concerns of how to filter companies looking for free labor to do their website VS companies that might not offer a paid check, but it w...

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