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• Is it common to lie in job ads regarding the technologies in use?

  - by Desolate Planet

  Wanted: Experienced Delphi programmer to maintain ginormous legacy application and assist in migration to C# Later on, as the new hire settles into his role... "Oh, that C# migration? Yeah, we'd love to do that. But management is dead-set against it. Good thing you love Pascal, eh?" I've noticed quite a lot of this where I live (Scotland) and I'm not sure how common this is across IT: a company is using a legacy technology and they know that most developers will avoid them to keep mainstream technology on their resumes. So, they will put out a advertisement saying they are looking to move their product to some hip new tech (C#, Ruby, FORTRAN 99) and require someone who has exposure to both - but the migration is just a carrot on a stick, perpetually hung in front of the hungry developer as he spends each day maintaining the legacy app. I've experienced this myself, and heard far too many similar stories to the point where it seems like common practice. I've learned over time that every company has legacy problems of some sort, but I fail to see why they can't be honest about it. It should be common sense to any developer that the technology in place is there to support the business and not the other way round. Unless the technology is hurting the business in someway, I hardly see any just cause for reworking the software stack to be made up whatever is currently vogue in the industry. Would you say that this is commonplace? If so, how can I detect these kinds of leading advertisements beforehand?

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• Is "White-Board-Coding" inappropriate during interviews?

  - by Eoin Campbell

  This is a somewhat subjective quesiton but I'd love to hear feedback/opinions from either interviewers/interviewees on the topic. We split our technical part into 4 parts. Write Code, Read & Analyse Code, Design Session & Code on the white board. For the last part what we ask interviewees to do is write a small code snippet (4-5 lines) on the whiteboard and explain as they go through it. Let me be clear the purpose is not to catch people out. We're not looking for perfect syntax. Hell it can even be pseudo-code. but the point is to give them a very simple problem and see if their brain can communicate the solution to us. By simple problems I mean "Reverse a string", "FizzBuzz" etc... EDIT Just with regards the comment about Pseudo-Code. We always ask for an explicit language first. We;re a .NET C# house. we've only said "pseudo-code" where someone has been blanking/really struggling with the code. My question is "Is it innappropriate / unreasonable to expect a programmer to write a code snippet on a whiteboard during an interview ?"

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• What do you do if you reach a design dead-end in evolutionary methods like Agile or XP?

  - by Dipan Mehta

  As I was reading Martin Fowler's famous blog post Is Design Dead?, one of the striking impressions I got is that given the fact that in Agile Methodology and Extreme Programming, the design as well as programming is evolutionary, there are always points where things need to get refactored. It may be possible that when a programmer's level is good, and they understand design implications and don't make critical mistakes, the code continues to evolve. However, in a normal context, what is the ground reality in this context? In a normal day given some significant development goes into product, and when critical change occurs in requirement isn't it a constraint that how much ever we wish, fundamental design aspects cannot be modified? (without throwing away major part of the code). Is it not quite likely that one reaches dead-end on any further possible improvement on design and requirements? I am not advocating any non-Agile practice here, but I want to know from people who practice agile or iterative or evolutionary development methods, as for their real experiences. Have you ever reached such dead-ends? How have you managed to avoid it or escaped it? Or are there measures to ensure that design remains clean and flexible as it evolves?

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• C++ Numerical Recipes &ndash; A New Adventure!

  - by JoshReuben

  I am about to embark on a great journey – over the next 6 weeks I plan to read through C++ Numerical Recipes 3rd edition http://amzn.to/YtdpkS I'll be reading this with an eye to C++ AMP, thinking about implementing the suitable subset (non-recursive, additive, commutative) to run on the GPU. APIs supporting HPC, GPGPU or MapReduce are all useful – providing you have the ability to choose the correct algorithm to leverage on them. I really think this is the most fascinating area of programming – a lot more exciting than LOB CRUD !!! When you think about it , everything is a function – we categorize & we extrapolate. As abstractions get higher & less leaky, sooner or later information systems programming will become a non-programmer task – you will be using WYSIWYG designers to build: GUIs MVVM service mapping & virtualization workflows ORM Entity relations In the data source SharePoint / LightSwitch are not there yet, but every iteration gets closer. For information workers, managed code is a race to the bottom. As MS futures are a bit shaky right now, the provider agnostic nature & higher barriers of entry of both C++ & Numerical Analysis seem like a rational choice to me. Its also fascinating – stepping outside the box. This is not the first time I've delved into numerical analysis. 6 months ago I read Numerical methods with Applications, which can be found for free online: http://nm.mathforcollege.com/ 2 years ago I learned the .NET Extreme Optimization library www.extremeoptimization.com – not bad 2.5 years ago I read Schaums Numerical Analysis book http://amzn.to/V5yuLI - not an easy read, as topics jump back & forth across chapters: 3 years ago I read Practical Numerical Methods with C# http://amzn.to/V5yCL9 (which is a toy learning language for this kind of stuff) I also read through AI a Modern Approach 3rd edition END to END http://amzn.to/V5yQSp - this took me a few years but was the most rewarding experience. I'll post progress updates – see you on the other side !

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• Perfomance of 8 bit operations on 64 bit architechture

  - by wobbily_col

  I am usually a Python / Database programmer, and I am considering using C for a problem. I have a set of sequences, 8 characters long with 4 possible characters. My problem involves combining sets of these sequences and filtering which sets match a criteria. The combinations of 5 run into billions of rows and takes around an hour to run. So I can represent each sequence as 2 bytes. If I am working on a 64 bit architechture will I gain any advantage by keeping these data structures as 2 bytes when I generate the combinations, or will I be as well storing them as 8 bytes / double ? (64 bit = 8 x 8) If I am on a 64 bit architecture, all registers will be 64 bit, so in terms of operations that shouldn´t be any faster (please correct me if I am wrong). Will I gain anything from the smaller storage requirements - can I fit more combinations in memory, or will they all take up 64 bits anyway? And finally, am I likley to gain anything coding in C. I have a first version, which stores the sequence as a small int in a MySQL database. It then self joins the tabe to itself a number of times in order to generate all the possible combinations. The performance is acceptable, depending on how many combinations are generated. I assume the database must involve some overhead.

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• I Blame SNMP!

  - by brendonpage

  Anyone who has been reading my blog would have noticed that I have deviated slightly from my original post plan! This post was meant to be on uploading files in Silverlight, so what happened you may ask? Well last weekend I had some friends over for a LAN and one of them brought a managed switch with, which he had just been purchased for work. He proceeded show me how cool it was, how he planned on improving his work network and how it can be monitored remotely via SNMP. After this explanation he started to google for a free SNMP graphing tool. After a few hours of hearing disgruntled mutterings from him I asked what was wrong, he proceeded to rant about how he couldn’t find any tools that suited his needs. It was at this point I though the most dangerous thing a programmer can ever think “I wonder how hard it would be to make one”, of course the answer at the time is always “It can’t be that hard”, and so started my journey into SNMP. I am still in the early stages of this journey so I don’t have to much to report yet, but once I have finished the first version of my SNMP graphing tool I will definitely be posting about it! For now if there are any of you who are interested in doing any SNMP development in C# I would recommend looking at the #Sharp project on CodePlex (http://sharpsnmplib.codeplex.com/), it is the SNMP library I have decided to use and thus far it works beautifully.

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• Google ranking, page crawl

  - by Nawaf Mubarak

  please don't mind me for asking this newbie question about Google ranking. I know that in order to get ranked the page has to be crawled by Google bots, I have had a page example of which I will get a better understanding of how the system works with Google. I have made a page on my website last month, it got indexed pretty quickly, then I found that it's in Google's page 15 on my keyword as a start, next day it made it to page 13, then after a week it was jumping back and forth in page 17/18 up to 20. Now a month passed by, when and it isn't listed in any position of that 'keyword' sometimes I will find it in page 30, but later I won't find it anywhere, keep happening this way these days. Even if it isn't listed in any page for my keyword if I do a search for "site:thepageadress" it will be listed which means I'm not penalized and my page is there for google to see, but it isn't in the search result for my keyword. But when I write "site:thepage_adress" and I hit "search tools" option and click on "Past day" or "past week" it isn't listed, it is only listed when I click on "Past month" which I think means that Google indexed the page, looked at it once when I published it, and never looked at it again, is this a fair statement? So two questions that comes to mind here. 1- Should Google keep looking at a page even if I haven't changed any info for it? and is this an indication for me that my page is doing fine? or is it normal that Google see's it once and thats it? 2- Why and how to fix the fact that my page keeps jumping back and forth in the ranking result for keyword, and sometimes it isn't even listed, what does that mean? Sorry for the long msg, I hope to god that somebody help me with this. Thank you!

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• What is the best way to track / record the current programming project you work on? [duplicate]

  - by user2424160

  This question already has an answer here: Methodology for Documenting Existing Code Base 6 answers When do you start documenting the code? 13 answers Where should a programmer explain the extended logic behind the code? 5 answers I have been in this problem for long time and I want to know how it's done in real / big companies project? Suppose I have the project to build a website. Now I divide the project into sub tasks and do it. But you know that suppose I have task1 in hand like export the page to pdf. Now I spend 3 days to do that , came across various problems, many Stack Overflow questions and in the end I solve it. Now 4 months after someone told me that there is some error in the code. Now by that I completely forgot about (60%) of how I did it and why I do this way. I document the code but I can't write the whole story of that in the code. Then I have to spend much time on code to find what was the problem so that I added this line etc. I want to know that is there any way that i can log steps in completing the project. So that I can see how I end up with code, what errors I got, what questions I asked on SO and etc. How people do it in real time? Which software to use? I know in our project management software called JIRA we have tasks but that does not cover what steps I took to solve that tasks. What is the best way so that when I look back at my 2 year old project, I know how I solve particular task?

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• Radeon 9200 Driver?

  - by usuhh86

  I've been using Linux for a while, but haven't really done more than installed programs. I have Ubuntu 12.04 with an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics card. Ubuntu didn't recognize it during the install. All I want is a driver. Preferably the proprietary driver, but I'll settle for an open-source one if I need to. I went to the AMD support website, and whenever I click on the download link for "ATI Proprietary Linux x86 Display Driver 8.28.8" I get redirected to the main AMD website. I tried this on Firefox, Chrome, even booted up my netbook and tried it on IE9. Does anybody have a download link? And if not, a link to download an open-source alternative? Any help will be greatly appreciated. I'm pretty much still a newbie at this. OpenGL vendor string: Tungsten Graphics, Inc. OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R200 (RV280 5961) x86/MMX/SSE2 TCL DRI2 OpenGL version string: 1.3 Mesa 8.0.2 Not software rendered: yes Not blacklisted: yes GLX fbconfig: yes GLX texture from pixmap: yes GL npot or rect textures: yes GL vertex program: yes GL fragment program: no GL vertex buffer object: yes GL framebuffer object: yes GL version is 1.4+: no Unity 3D supported: no

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• Basic Google Analytics Click Tracking and/or Overview

  - by Alan Storm

  This is a really basic Google Analytics question. Apologies in advance if it's not appropriate here, but I've had a lot of luck on Stack Overflow and this seems like the best Stack Exchange site for a question like this. I'm trying to understand how Google Analytics goals work, or if they're the right feature to be using for my situation. Most of the documentation I find online refers to the old version of the UI, not the new one. I have a website, let's call is blog.example.com. This website drives traffic to an ecommerce store, let's call that store.example2.com. I want to get reports on which links from blog.example.com are being clicked through leading to store.example2.com. How do you do this in Google analytics? Are goals the right area to be looking? Do I setup the goals on store.example2.com or blog.example.com? Or both? Is there any canonical user guide (free or paid) that covers how this works? I'm a competent programmer, but it's years since I dealt with conversion tracking on any serious level, and we've progressed well beyond my frozen caveman pixel tracking knowledge. Thanks in advance

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• Using prefix incremented loops in C#

  - by KChaloux

  Back when I started programming in college, a friend encouraged me to use the prefix incrementation operator ++i instead of the postfix i++, citing that there was a slight chance of better performance with no real chance of a downside. I realize this is true in C++, and it's become a general habit that I continue to do. I'm led to believe that it makes little to no difference when used in a loop in C#, regardless of data type. Apparently the ++ operator can't be overridden. Nevertheless, I like the appearance more, and don't see a direct downside to it. It did astonish a coworker just a moment ago though, he made the (fairly logical) assumption that my loop would terminate early as a result. He's a self-taught programmer, and apparently never came across the C++ convention. That made me question whether or not the equivalent behavior of pre- and post-fix increment and decrement operators in loops is well known enough. Is it acceptable for me to continue using ++i in looping constructs because of style preference, even though it has no real performance benefit? Or is it likely to cause confusion amongst other programmers? Note: This is assuming the ++i convention is used consistently throughout all code.

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• System in low-graphics mode

  - by Artem Moskalev

  I am totally new to Linux, and Ubuntu. I bought ASUS X53E Notebook, erased Windows and installed Ubuntu. First it worked ok. Then when I started working with it, i opened the terminal, entered sudo chmod 666 usr and then all the icons from the main panel disappeared + the whole system stopped responding. I decided to restart the system. When restarted, a message appears: the system is running in low graphics mode and below it: Your screen, graphics card and input device setting could not be detected correctly. You will need to configure it yourself. But the "OK" button is disabled and if I press any buttons nothing happens. If I enter Ctrl-Alt-F2 it opens the bash terminal. But there commands sudo or apt-get are not found and it says that permission denied if i try to enter any folder like cd /usr If I enter the su command it asks for the password I don't know. When encountering this problem first, I reinstalled the whole Ubuntu. but today it happened again just the same. What shall I do? maybe there is something wrong with the hardware? If I need to install another distribution of Linux could you recommend one? but I'd rather stick to Debian releases like Ubuntu. so how do I fix the problem? PS: Please give answers in simple terms because am a newbie so i don't know what goes where yet.

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• Is dependency injection by hand a better alternative to composition and polymorphism?

  - by Drake Clarris

  First, I'm an entry level programmer; In fact, I'm finishing an A.S. degree with a final capstone project over the summer. In my new job, when there isn't some project for me to do (they're waiting to fill the team with more new hires), I've been given books to read and learn from while I wait - some textbooks, others not so much (like Code Complete). After going through these books, I've turned to the internet to learn as much as possible, and started learning about SOLID and DI (we talked some about Liskov's substitution principle, but not much else SOLID ideas). So as I've learned, I sat down to do to learn better, and began writing some code to utilize DI by hand (there are no DI frameworks on the development computers). Thing is, as I do it, I notice it feels familiar... and it seems like it is very much like work I've done in the past using composition of abstract classes using polymorphism. Am I missing a bigger picture here? Is there something about DI (at least by hand) that goes beyond that? I understand the possibility of having configurations not in code of some DI frameworks having some great benefits as far as changing things without having to recompile, but when doing it by hand, I'm not sure if it's any different than stated above... Some insight into this would be very helpful!

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• Removed Java replaced with newest "Sun Java", disc won't boot, and won't let me re-install grub using boot repair disc

  - by Al Rowe

  Had a minor problem with my Stock market platform. Set-up screen would freeze program. Called their tech support, got their "Linux guy", who advised remove all Java and replace, not with synaptic version, but newest Sun Java. After removing, computer auto rebooted, and went to blue mem-test screen. Showed no errors, but couldn't get back in. Tried two versions of boot repair disc from iso (checked md5sum, showed good.), but fix aborted, giving apt-error detected. Opened a terminal and typed (or copy/paste): sudo chroot "/mnt/boot-sav/sda1" apt-get -f install. My system is Ubuntu 12.04. Had a few very minor issues from install, all fixed. Also added some of my favorite gnome tricks just to make life easier, but none that could have caused this. Added script to add shortcuts to desktop, open terminal in any menu from inside it, access root terminal, etc. System was firewalled and using avast antivirus (o.k., I'm paranoid. Used to do Windows sys-op and security.) But relative newbie to Linux.

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• Docker vs ESXi for Startup Projects - Deploying Code for Dev Testing

  - by JasonG

  Why hello there little programmer dude! I have a question for you and all of your experience and knowledge. I have an ESXi whitebox that I built which is an 8 dude that sits in the corner. I made a mistake recently and took the key that had ESXi, formatted it and used it for something else. No big deal because the last project I worked on had stalled out. I'm about to pick up another project and now I need to spin up a whole bunch of stuff for CI, qa + db, ticket tracker, wikis etc etc. I've been hearing a lot about Docker recently and as this is just a consumer grade machine, I'm wondering if it may make more sense for me to use Docker on OpenOS and then put everything there - bamboo or hudson, jira, confluence, postgress for the tools to use, then a qa env. I can't really seem to find any documents that directly compare traditional VM infrastructure vs docker solutions and I'm wondering if it is fair to compare. Is there any reason why CoreOS w/ containers would be a strictly worse solution? Or do you have any insight into why I may want to stick with ESXi? I've looked on multiple occasions and can't find a good reason not to. I'm not going to run a production env on the server so I don't need to have HA if updating security or OS for example where esxi would allow me to restart one vm at a time. I can just shut the thing down and bring it back up if I need a reboot no problem. So what's up with this container stuff? Is it a fair replacement for ESXi? I'm guessing the atlassian products would run much better and my ram would go a lot farther using docker. Probably the CPU would run much cooler too and my expensive HDD space would be better utilized.

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• Strategies for managUse of types in Python

  - by dave

  I'm a long time programmer in C# but have been coding in Python for the past year. One of the big hurdles for me was the lack of type definitions for variables and parameters. Whereas I totally get the idea of duck typing, I do find it frustrating that I can't tell the type of a variable just by looking at it. This is an issue when you look at someone else's code where they've used ambiguous names for method parameters (see edit below). In a few cases, I've added asserts to ensure parameters comply with an expected type but this goes against the whole duck typing thing. On some methods, I'll document the expected type of parameters (eg: list of user objects), but even this seems to go against the idea of just using an object and let the runtime deal with exceptions. What strategies do you use to avoid typing problems in Python? Edit: Example of the parameter naming issues: If our code base we have a task object (ORM object) and a task_obj object (higher level object that embeds a task). Needless to say, many methods accept a parameter named 'task'. The method might expect a task or a task_obj or some other construct such as a dictionary of task properties - it is not clear. It is them up to be to look at how that parameter is used in order to work out what the method expects.

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• School vs Self-Taught [duplicate]

  - by Joan Venge

  This question already has an answer here: Do I need a degree in Computer Science to get a junior Programming job? [closed] 8 answers Do you think university is a good learning environment or is it better to be autodidact? [closed] 3 answers Do you think formal education is necessary to gain strong programming skills? There are a lot of jobs that aren't programming but involves programming, such as tech artists in games, fx tds in film for example. I see similar patterns in the people I work where the best ones I have seen were self-taught, because of being artists primarily. But I also see that while the software, programming knowledge is varied and deep, hardware knowledge is very basic, including me, again due to lack of formal education. But I also work with a lot of programmers who possess both skills in general (software and hardware). Do you think it's necessary to have a formal education to have great programming skills? Would you think less of someone if he didn't have a degree in computer science, or software engineering, etc in terms of job opportunities? Would you trust him to do a software engineering job, i.e. writing a complex tool? Basically I feel the self-taught programmer doesn't know a lot of things, i.e. not knowing a particular pattern or a particular language, etc. But I find that the ability to think outside the box much more powerful. As "pure" programmers what's your take on it?

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• Apache DVB http video Streaming bandwidth or priority problem

  - by igino manfre'

  I'm streaming few precompressed DVB videos from cloud. The streams are generated from VLC on "impossible" ports (such as 64085, 64086 etc) reverse proxed by Apache on port 80 and 8080. All the generated streams are listed in "http://95.110.164.61/indexv.html". From an ADSL connection with enough downlink bandwidth, recalling the stream generated by VLC (such as "http://95.110.164.61:64087/mpg2_6.4") it flows fluently. Recalling the same stream proxed by Apache ("http://95.110.164.61/mpg2_6.4") the stream stops and goes. The only situation in which the Apache proxed streams flow regularly is from a site connected through 64 Mbps warranted bandwith with RTT to the server less than 10 mseconds. Please note that streams below 2 Mbps are fluently proxed. The system is a single core xeon with windows 2008 R2 on 4 GB of RAM with 1 Gbps of network bandwidth. The drain of computational and bandwidth resources is negligeable, the RAM usage always lower than 50%. On the system I run many VLC streamers. Any of them drains a variable amount of RAM (from about 25 to 70 MB). On the contrary the couple of httpd.exe processes drain no more than 7 MB. Using Wireshark (on the server) I see that VLC directy send to the client much more packets than Apache, and the stream is framgmented on many frames. I'm not a programmer, a newby of Apache. Can anyone please address me to a specific portion of the Apache's huge documentation? Thank you. igino

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• Analyzing Memory Usage: Java vs C++ Negligible?

  - by Anthony

  How does the memory usage of an integer object written in Java compare\contrast with the memory usage of a integer object written in C++? Is the difference negligible? No difference? A big difference? I'm guessing it's the same because an int is an int regardless of the language (?) The reason why I asked this is because I was reading about the importance of knowing when a program's memory requirements will prevent the programmer from solving a given problem. What fascinated me is the amount of memory required for creating a single Java object. Take for example, an integer object. Correct me if I'm wrong but a Java integer object requires 24 bytes of memory: 4 bytes for its int instance variable 16 bytes of overhead (reference to the object's class, garbage collection info & synchronization info) 4 bytes of padding As another example, a Java array (which is implemented as an object) requires 48+bytes: 24 bytes of header info 16 bytes of object overhead 4 bytes for length 4 bytes for padding plus the memory needed to store the values How do these memory usages compare with the same code written in C++? I used to be oblivious about the memory usage of the C++ and Java programs I wrote, but now that I'm beginning to learn about algorithms, I'm having a greater appreciation for the computer's resources.

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• Circle to Circle collision, checking each circle against all others

  - by user14861

  I'm currently coding a little circle to circle collision demo but I've got a little stuck. I think I currently have the code to detect collision but I'm not sure how to loop through my list of circles and check them off against one another. Collision check code: public static Vector2 GetIntersectionDepth(Circle a, Circle b) { float xValue = a.Center.X - b.Center.X; float yValue = a.Center.Y - b.Center.Y; Vector2 depth = Vector2.Zero; float distance = Vector2.Distance(a.Center, b.Center); if (a.Radius + b.Radius > distance) { float result = (a.Radius + b.Radius) - distance; depth.X = (float)Math.Cos(result); depth.Y = (float)Math.Sin(result); } return depth; } Loop through code: Vector2 depth = Vector2.Zero; for (int i = 0; i < bounds.Count; i++) for (int j = i+1; j < bounds.Count; j++) { depth = CircleToCircleIntersection.GetIntersectionDepth(bounds[i], bounds[j]); } Clearly I'm a complete newbie, wondering if anyone can give any suggestions or point out my errors, thanks in advance. :)

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• Overwhelmed by complex C#/ASP.NET project in Visual Studio 2008

  - by Darren Cook

  I have been hired as a junior programmer to work on projects that extend existing functionality in a very large, complex solution. The code base consists of C#, ASP.NET, jQuery, javascript, html and xml. I have some knowledge of all these in addition to fair knowledge of object-oriented programming and its fundamental concepts of inheritance, abstraction, polymorphism and encapsulation. I can follow code up through its base classes, interfaces, abstract classes and understand a large part of the code that I read while doing this. However, this solution is so humongous and so many things get tied together whenever I navigate through the code that I feel absolutely overwhelmed. I often find myself unable to fully follow everything that is going on with objects being serialized, large amounts of C# and javascript operating on the same pages and methods being called from template files that consist mainly of markup. I love learning about code, but trying to deal with this really stresses me out. Additionally, I do know that a significant amount of unit testing has been done but I know nothing about unit testing or how to utilize it. Any advice anyone could offer me regarding dealing with a large code base while using Visual Studio 2008 would be greatly appreciated. Are there tools that I can use to help get a handle on what is going on? Perhaps there are things even in Visual Studio that I am not aware of. How can I follow the code to low level functionality in order to get a better grasp of what is going on at a high level?

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• How to show or direct a business analyst to do data modelling?

  - by AaronLS

  Our business analysts pushed hard to collect data through a spreadsheet. I am the programmer responsible for importing that data. Usually when they push hard for something like this, I never know how well it will work out until a few weeks later when I have time assigned to work on the task of programming the import of the data. I have tried to do as much as possible along the way, named ranges, data validations, etc. But I usually don't have time to take a detailed look at all the data and compare to the destination in the database to determine how well it matches up. A lot of times there will be maybe a little table of items that somehow I have to relate to something else in the database, but there are not natural or business keys present that would allow me to do so. Make the best of this, trying to write something that can compare strings and make a best guess at it and then go through the effort of creating interfaces for a user to match the imported data to the destination. I feel like if the business analyst was actually creating a data model, they would be forced to think about these relationships, and have an appreciation for the need of natural or business keys to be part of the spreadsheet for the purposes of smoothly importing the data. The closest they come to business analysis is a big flat list of fields, and that would be fine if it were like any other data dictionary and include data types+relationships, but it isn't. They are just a bunch of names. No indication of what type of data they might hold, and it is up to me to guess. When I have pushed for more detail, they say that it is just busy work. How can I explain the importance of data modelling? How can I tell them what it is and how to do it? It feels impossible, because they don't have an appreciation for its importance. They do however, usually have an interest in helping out in whatever way they can, it's just this in particular has never gotten a motivated response.

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• How to provide value?

  - by Francisco Garcia

  Before I became a consultant all I cared about was becoming a highly skilled programmer. Now I believe that what my clients need is not a great hacker, coder, architect... or whatever. I am more and more convinced every day that there is something of greater value. Everywhere I go I discover practices where I used to roll my eyes in despair. I saw the software industry with pink glasses and laughed or cried at them depending on my mood. I was so convinced everything could be done better. Now I believe that what my clients desperately need is finding a balance between good engineering practices and desperate project execution. Although a great design can make a project cheap to maintain thought many years, usually it is more important to produce quick fast and cheap, just to see if the project can succeed. Before that, it does not really matters that much if the design is cheap to maintain, after that, it might be too late to improve things. They need people who get involved, who do some clandestine improvements into the project without their manager approval/consent/knowledge... because they are never given time for some tasks we all know are important. Not all good things can be done, some of them must come out of freewill, and some of them must be discussed in order to educate colleagues, managers, clients and ourselves. Now my big question is. What exactly are the skills and practices aside from great coding that can provide real value to the economical success of software projects? (and not the software architecture alone)

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• How will my Electronic Engineering degree be received in the Canadian Game Development market? [closed]

  - by Harikawashi

  I have a Electronic Engineering with Computer Science Degree from a reputable South African university. The EE with CS degree is basically Electronic Engineering, with some of the high voltage subjects thrown out and replaced with computer science subjects - mostly quite theoretical, but not in too much depth. I went on to earn a Masters Degree in Digital Signal Processing, focussing on Speech Recognition in Educational Applications. I have always loved programming - I taught myself QBASIC when I was in primary school, I learned Java at school, did some low level C at University, and taught myself C# and Python while doing my post graduate degree. C# is currently my strong suit, I think I am pretty capable with it. I have two years work experience in Namibia - working as a consulting electrical engineer (no software content whatsoever) and also developing C# desktop applications for the company I work for. I would like to move to Canada next year and work in the Game Development Industry as programmer or software engineer. My interests in particular are towards the more mathematical applications, like game and physics engines, or statistical disciplines like artificial intelligence. However, these are passions - not areas in which I have any work experience. So the question: How well will my BEngEE&CS and MScEng be received in the game industry? Seeing as it's not a pure software degree and I have no official software development work experience?

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• Basics of Website development [closed]

  - by user975234

  I have read this post: What should every programmer know about web development? but I have some more questions... I will be developing a content related website very soon and I am confused about some technology stuff. I am thinking about developing the site using ruby on rails. So when I'll be buying hosting, do I need to ask for something special? Like for example, we need to specify what kind of hosting we need, windows or linux. So for ruby on rails do I need some extra facilities from the hosting provider? Is ruby on rails a good choice for a large content related website? This may be a bit stupid but how do I choose my backend, scripting languages etc? Thing is I am really new to website development. And the flow of making websites is not clear. Any links will be helpful. EDIT: I know this question has been voted as non constructive. But if any one still has some precise knowledge about how the flow of website development goes, please comment your views.. That will be helpful!

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