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• Compiled code spreadsheet-like cell management? (auto-updating)

  - by proGrammar

  Okay so I am fully aware how spreadsheets manage cells, they build dependency graphs where when one cell changes it tells all the other cells that are dependent on it that it changed. So they can from there update. How they update I think involves either re-evaluating the formulas stored as strings, or re-evaluating the abstract syntax tree which I think is stored differently and might be faster. Something like that. What I'm looking to do is manage a few variables in my code so I don't have to update them in the correct way, which would be a nightmare. But I also want it much faster than spreadsheets. And since I'm not looking for any functionality as great as are in these spreadsheets, I just figured from that thought point that there has to be a way to have a very fast implementation of this functionality. Especially since I don't have to modify cells after compiling unless that would be an option. I'm very new to programming so I have no idea. One example might be to have a code-generator that generates code that does this for me. But I have no clue what the generated code would look like. Specifically, how exactly would variables inform others that they need to update, and what do those variables do to update? I'm looking for any kind of ideas. Programming is not my job but nonetheless I was hoping to have some kind of system like this that would greatly help me with some stuff. Of course I have been programming plenty lately so I can still program. I just don't have the full scope on things. I'm looking for any kind of ideas, thank you very much in advance! Also, please help me with the tags. I know C# and Java mainly and I'm hoping to implement this in either of those languages and I'm hoping this can stay in those tags. Forcing this into some kind of spreadsheet tag wouldn't be accurate.

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• @CodeStock 2012 Review: Leon Gersing ( @Rubybuddha ) - "You"

  "YOU"Speaker: Leon GersingTwitter: @Rubybuddha Site: http://about.me/leongersing I honestly had no idea what I was getting in to when I sat down in to this session. I basically saw the picture of the speaker and knew that it would be a good session. I was completely wrong; it was the BEST SESSION of CodeStock 2012.  In fact it was so good, I texted another coworker attending the conference to get over and listen to Leon. Leon took on the concept of growth in the software development community. He specifically referred David Hansson in his ability to stick to his beliefs when the development community thought that he was crazy for creating Ruby on Rails. If you do not know this story Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest growing web languages today. In addition, he also touched on the flip side of this argument in that we must be open to others ideas and not discard them so quickly because we all come from differing perspectives and can add value to a project/team/community. This session left me with two very profound concepts/quotes: “In order to learn you must do it badly in front of a crowed and fail.” - @Rubybuddha I can look back on my career so far and say that he is correct; I think I have learned the most after failing, especially when I achieved this failure in front of other. “Experts must be able to fail.” - @Rubybuddha I think we can all learn from our own mistakes but we can also learn from others. When respected experts fail it is a great learning opportunity for the entire team as well as the person who failed. When expert admit mistakes and how they worked through them can be great learning tools for other developers so that they know how to avoid specific scenarios and if they do become stuck in the same issue they will know how to properly work their way out of them.

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• Going on 15 months for me...

  - by Ratman21

  About 5 face to face interviews, 4 telephone ones and except for the two weeks Census Job. But, after 15 months looking for work, I am still with out a JOB. What is wrong here or with me? Let’s see, hard worker (check), self motivated to do well on a Job (Check), Certified CompTIA A+, Security+  and Network+ Technician (Check), 20 + years experience in “IT” (CHECK), in good health, in 20 years of work only 15 days off due to health issues (Check), 18 years experience as technical Help Desk support (Check), can still work better than younger personal (Check), Strong trouble shooting skills for software, computer hard ware and circuit issues (Check) and Multiple software languages (Hey I have done some programming) Check. Hmm I don’t see any problem with me (of course I could have missed something, please let me know if you see what I am missing).    Now as to what have I been up to since I last blogged. The same things of course, Job hunting, job hunting and study.   I have set up sim of my home LAN and will be adding a wireless print server to the sim and in real life, soon.  I was able to pull up and copy the examples of Cisco router commands that I had on my old lap top, to my newer PC. Every time I used a new command while working the NOC on my last job.   I would cut and past a copy of the command on the router (and what it did) I was working on.  Along with notes on the problem and commands use for same router. I used these to make documentation for on how to handle these types of issues, for the other Operation Techs. My old notes are helping me in studying for the CCENT test.    As to Love Dare, I think it will take more like 40 weeks, than the 40 days of the book. Yes I am making progress, slow but, it is progress. I will have more on that in my next blog.

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• Why can't I create direct3d objects?

  - by quakkels

  I've been programming professionally for years using languages like VBScript, JavaScript, and C#. As a hobby, I'm getting into some c/c++ and games programming with DirectX. I am running into an issue where I cannot create direct3d objects. I am using Visual C++ 2010 Express. After I installed vc++2010express I then installed the June 2010 release of DirectX. I am trying to include DirectX via #pragma statements. This is the code I have so far in my winmain.cpp source file: #include <Windows.h> #include <d3d11.h> #include <time.h> #include <iostream> using namespace std; #pragma comment(lib, "d3d11.lib") #pragma comment(lib, "d3dx11.lib") // program settings const string AppTitle = "Direct3D in a Window"; const int ScreenWidth = 1024; const int ScreenHeight = 768; // direct3d objects LPDIRECT3D11 d3d = NULL; // this line is showing an error The type LPDIRECT3D11 is showing an error: Error: Identifier "LPDIRECT3D11" is undefined Am I missing something here to get VC++2010Express to recognize and load the DirectX libs? Thanks for any help.

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• Kids and programming: ScratchKara

  - by Mike Pagel

  Ever now and then I kept wondering how to share with my kids the excitement of creating something with your computer. Of course, today this is a bit more difficult, as they have seen 3D animation games and well-edited websites. I guess that's why they weren't all that hyped when I found my first computer model at our local recycling facilities (an 8-bit Laser VZ-200 with rubber keys). When I finally got it up and running with an old analog TV set they finally asked whether we could play soccer on it. Needless to say that my showing them how it remembers some BASIC commands and lists and executes them did not make any impression. So the question is for real: How do you get today's kids excited about programming? And just recently I looked again for environments that allow even young kids (mine are 7 and 9 years old now) to do something and have fun. Obviously any real, text-oriented programming language wouldn't work well. To cut it short: Something really nice was built by University of Oldenburg: ScratchKara. It is the perfect mixture of Kara, a simulation of a little ladybug and Scratch, an authoring environment from MIT. ScratchKara allows kids to initially simply explore how the bug moves and turns by pressing the action buttons, then move towards sequencing commands through drag & drop, and eventually end up building algorithms with procedures and functions. Even through it is built for kids and beginners, the environment comes with debugging and refactoring, which I found more than amazing. My kids love it and I have to admit I keep thinking about how to solve a bit more advanced problems with this language, which does not allow you to store any state information (other than your call stack). Yes, I am hooked, too... Once the language is understood you can then move to one of the original Kara versions, where you can define the bug's behavior through finite statemachines, Turing tables, Java and other textual languages. And from there, anything is possible.

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• Google sitemap HrefLang tag without the main site url

  - by Rashmi Pandit

  We have websites with multilingual content. e.g. http://www.example.com/about-us/ http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us/ http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us/ http://www.example.com/zn-CH/about-us/ We need to configure the hreflang tags in sitemap for Google to know that there are alternate links for the same pages in different languages. I know for the above example that my sitemap url tag would look like this: <url> <loc>http://www.example.com/about-us</loc> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us"/> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-HK" href="http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us"/> <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="zn-CH" href="http://www.example.com/zn-CH/about-us"/> <changefreq>daily</changefreq> <priority>0.8</priority> </url> However, if I don't have the main url but just the last three ones with en-HK, en-GB and zn-CH, then how should my url tag look? Should I just skip the loc tag and keep the three xhtml:link tags? Or can I specify any url in the loc tag and put the remaining two in xhtml:link tags? I am new to Google sitemaps. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Rashmi Edit: From the answer posted on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18423624/sitemap-for-domain-with-multilanguage-site/18423803#18423803, for my example with sites in en-HK, en-GB and zn-CH, should there be three url tags, with each of them assigned to loc with the other two in xhtml:link?

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• Storing data for use on Android and Windows Applications

  - by Andy Mepham

  I posted this last night on StackOverflow and was advised to move it over to StackExchange, thank you for taking a moment to look at my question. I'm developing a project proposal for my final year project at University and as I aim to use programming languages I am currently not too familiar with I'm looking for some guidance - I can't include details of my project but hopefully you will understand what I'm after. I'm going to be creating an Android application (in Java) and a Windows Application (in C#) that will ideally access, query and update a remotely hosted Database or set of XML files (this would most likely be over the Internet). I've done some looking around the internet and SQLite seems like a safe-bet for cross-platform manipulation of the database; however I would like to keep the system as lightweight as possible and I'm wondering whether XML files may provide a better alternative? Anyone out there that has experience using SQLite and/or remotely hosted XML for the purposes of Android and/or C# development that could point me in the right direction? If there is an alternative solution other than those I have mentioned I would be interested to hear about them too. Thank you for taking the time to read my question. Edit: The purpose of this application is for a small scale business, the data source would not need to be updated by more than one source but may be view from multiple sources (i.e. through multiple phones and a desktop PC). The database wouldn't be updating masses of data at a time (most likely single rows of a few tables at the most).

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• Migration of PowerBuilder application to multiplatform

  - by Alex Bibiano

  I developed a client/server application with PowerBuilder in the past for medical clinics and done maintenance for it until now. Now, some clients are asking me to develop a release for Mac/Linux and need some advice about what programming language/technology is best suited for it and the learning curve. It’s not a very very big program but I’m the only developer and have done it in my spare time. PowerBuilder is very productive for this kind of projects (database centric), but it’s not multiplatform and it’s hard to sell PowerBuilder application now days (web, .NET, java sells a lot better with his marketing). My programming skills: - I studied C and C++ in the past (university) but never used it on real projects - Have some Java experience but not in desktop applications - Some experience with Ruby on Rails for web projects - Good skills with PowerBuilder and C# (.NET) (there are my main developing languages) My first dilemma is if I change the desktop application to a web interface, but I think the user will lose some user-experience, and some doctors don’t have a clinic (they are alone at home with my software). I think installing a web application (with webserver) for one user will be overwhelming. If I continue developing desktop application, what is at the moment a good framework/toolset to learn having my skills? Somebody has had similar experiences? A lot of thanks

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• C++ Iterator lifetime and detecting invalidation

  - by DK.

  Based on what's considered idiomatic in C++11: should an iterator into a custom container survive the container itself being destroyed? should it be possible to detect when an iterator becomes invalidated? are the above conditional on "debug builds" in practice? Details: I've recently been brushing up on my C++ and learning my way around C++11. As part of that, I've been writing an idiomatic wrapper around the uriparser library. Part of this is wrapping the linked list representation of parsed path components. I'm looking for advice on what's idiomatic for containers. One thing that worries me, coming most recently from garbage-collected languages, is ensuring that random objects don't just go disappearing on users if they make a mistake regarding lifetimes. To account for this, both the PathList container and its iterators keep a shared_ptr to the actual internal state object. This ensures that as long as anything pointing into that data exists, so does the data. However, looking at the STL (and lots of searching), it doesn't look like C++ containers guarantee this. I have this horrible suspicion that the expectation is to just let containers be destroyed, invalidating any iterators along with it. std::vector certainly seems to let iterators get invalidated and still (incorrectly) function. What I want to know is: what is expected from "good"/idiomatic C++11 code? Given the shiny new smart pointers, it seems kind of strange that STL allows you to easily blow your legs off by accidentally leaking an iterator. Is using shared_ptr to the backing data an unnecessary inefficiency, a good idea for debugging or something expected that STL just doesn't do? (I'm hoping that grounding this to "idiomatic C++11" avoids charges of subjectivity...)

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• How to REALLY start thinking in terms of objects?

  - by Mr Grieves

  I work with a team of developers who all have several years of experience with languages such as C# and Java. Most of them are young enough to have been shown OOP as a standard way to develop software in university and are very comfortable with concepts such as inheritance, abstraction, encapsulation and polymorphism. Yet, many of them, and I have to include myself, still tend to create classes which are meant to be used in a very functional fashion. The resulting software is often several smaller classes which correctly represent business objects which get passed through larger classes which only supply ways to modify and use those objects (functions). Large complex difficult-to-maintain classes named Manager are usually the result of such behaviour. I can see two theoretical reasons why people might write this type of code: It's easy to start thinking of everything in terms of the database Deep down, for me, a computer handling a web request feels more like a functional operation than an object oriented operation when you think about Request Handlers, Threads, Processes, CPU Cores and CPU operations... I want source code which is easy to read and easy to modify. I have seen excellent examples of OO code which meet these objectives. How can I start writing code like this? How I can I really start thinking in an object oriented fashion? How can I share such a mentality with my colleagues?

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• Which Bliki (Blog+Wiki) solution can you recommend?

  - by asmaier

  I'm searching for a good Bliki solution, meaning a combination of blog and wiki that I can install on my own web space. I would like to be able to write articles in the wiki style much like with media wiki. So I want to use a wiki markup language, have a revision history, comments, internal links to other pages (maybe in other languages) and be able to collaboratively edit the articles. On the other side I would like to have a blog-like view on my articles, showing new articles (and changes to existing articles) in a time ordered fashion. It would be nice if it would be possible to search through the articles and also tag the articles, so one could generate a tag cloud for the articles. A nice feature would also be to be able to order the articles according to views or even a voting system for the articles. Good would also be a permission system to keep certain articles private, showing them only to people logged in to the platform. Apart from these nice to have features an absolute must have feature for the Bliki platform I'm searching is the possibility to handle math equations (written in LaTeX syntax) and display them either as pictures like media wiki or even better using Mathjax. At the moment I'm using a web service called wikiDot which offers some of the mentioned features, however the free version shows to much advertisements, the blog feature is not mature, the design is quite ugly and loading of the page is often slow. So I want to install a Bliki solution on my own webspace. Can you recommend any solution for that?

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• What did programmers do before variable scope, where everything is global?

  - by hydroparadise

  So, I am having to deal with seemingly archiac language (called PowerOn) where I have a main method, a few datatypes to define variables with, and has the ability to have sub-procedures (essentially void methods) that does not return a type nor accepts any arguements. The problem here is that EVERYTHING is global. I've read of these type of languages, but most books take the aproach "Ok, we use to use a horse and cariage, but now, here's a car so let's learn how to work on THAT!" We will NEVER relive those days". I have to admit, the mind is struggling to think outside of scope and extent. Well here I am. I am trying to figure out how to best manage nothing but global variables across several open methods. Yep, even iterators for for loops have to be defined globaly, which I find myself recycling in different parts of my code. My Question: for those that have this type experience, how did programmers deal with a large amount of variables in a global playing field? I have feeling it just became a mental juggling trick, but I would be interested to know if there were any known aproaches.

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• Does immutability entirely eliminate the need for locks in multi-processor programming?

  - by GlenPeterson

  Part 1 Clearly Immutability minimizes the need for locks in multi-processor programming, but does it eliminate that need, or are there instances where immutability alone is not enough? It seems to me that you can only defer processing and encapsulate state so long before most programs have to actually DO something. If a program performs actions on multiple processors, something needs to collect and aggregate the results. All this involves multi-process communication before, after, and possibly during some transformations. The start and end state of the machines are different. Can this always be done with no locks just by throwing out each object and creating a new one instead of changing the original (a crude view of immutability)? What cases still require locking? I'm interested in both the theoretical/academic answer and the practical/real-world answer. I know a lot of functional programmers like to talk about "no side effect" but in the "real world" everything has a side effect. Every processor click takes time and electricity and machine resources away from other processes. So I understand that there may be more than one perspective to answer this question from. If immutability is safe, given certain bounds or assumptions, I want to know what the borders of the "safety zone" are exactly. Some examples of possible boundaries: I/O Exceptions/errors Interfaces with programs written in other languages Interfaces with other machines (physical, virtual, or theoretical) Special thanks to @JimmaHoffa for his comment which started this question! Part 2 Multi-processor programming is often used as an optimization technique - to make some code run faster. When is it faster to use locks vs. immutable objects? Given the limits set out in Amdahl's Law, when can you achieve better over-all performance (with or without the garbage collector taken into account) with immutable objects vs. locking mutable ones? Summary I'm combining these two questions into one to try to get at where the bounding box is for Immutability as a solution to threading problems.

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• Liberate Your Laptops! The Return of Virtual Developer Day

  - by Justin Kestelyn

  Many enterprises are reducing travel, conference, and training budgets for their developers without any change in expectation for the results those developers must deliver. How can you keep up? Well, some months back we offered you a Virtual Developer Day on the subject of building Rich Enterprise Applications, the key piece of which was free access to a cloud development environment for hands-on. Now it's back, new and improved! Join us for a FREE, online, multi-language event series for developers (English version is on July 27) at Oracle Technology Network 's Virtual Developer Day. This unique one-day event provides you the opportunity to: 1. Get trained on Oracle Tuxedo from the comfort of your laptop 2. Get hands-on, locally with Oracle VM VirtualBox or via the Cloud 3. Learn what Python, Ruby, and PHP have to do with Oracle Tuxedo 4. Network online with peers, Oracle Tuxedo architects and developers worldwide 5. Sessions, Labs, and Live Help in LOCAL Languages! Review the agenda details, dates, and language support options. Space is limited, so register for this event now! For information and to register go to: www.oracle.com/goto/otnvdd

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• Is it recommended to use more than one language at a startup?

  - by GoofyBall

  I work for a mobile startup where, for historical reasons, our chosen language was C#. I was recently assigned to a small project to build a tool that would be used by us internally. When I explained my intention to use Python to build this tool I was heavily criticized for this because introducing new languages, and technologies (Debian, Apache, Python and Django) into our ecosystem would make it harder for other developers to maintain (because only two other people know more than one language besides C#). I countered that this project would take far longer to develop in C# (which I think is an inherent problem with the language/.NET framework) and that the project was small and designed to solve a very particular problem. Of course it is necessary that the ecosystem be as a homogeneous as possible but if your are developing tooling, infrastructure, and internal systems when there are better things to build them with than C# then you should consider using them. By using one language you exclude a lot of other great libraries and frameworks out there, and this case it was the difference between taking one week to build in Python as opposed to a month in C#. Do you think it is acceptable to understand and use only only one language at a startup or even a larger company? Am I perhaps being naive??

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• What is the point of dynamic allocation in C++?

  - by Aerovistae

  I really have never understood it at all. I can do it, but I just don't get why I would want to. For instance, I was programming a game yesterday, and I set up an array of pointers to dynamically allocated little enemies in the game, then passed it to a function which updates their positions. When I ran the game, I got one of those nondescript assertion errors, something about a memory block not existing, I don't know. It was a run-time error, so it didn't say where the problem was. So I just said screw it and rewrote it with static instantiation, i.e.: while(n<4) { Enemy tempEnemy = Enemy(3, 4); enemyVector.push_back(tempEnemy); n++; } updatePositions(&enemyVector); And it immediately worked perfectly. Now sure, some of you may be thinking something to the effect of "Maybe if you knew what you were doing," or perhaps "n00b can't use pointers L0L," but frankly, you really can't deny that they make things way overcomplicated, hence most modern languages have done away with them entirely. But please-- someone -- What IS the point of dynamic allocation? What advantage does it afford? Why would I ever not do what I just did in the above example?

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• Middle tier language for interfacing C/C++ with db and web app

  - by ggkmath

  I have a web application requiring a middle-tier language to communicate between an oracle database and math routines on a Linux server and a flex-based application on a client. I'm not a software expert, and need recommendations for which language to use for the middle-tier. The math routines are currently in Matlab but will be ported to C (or C++) as shared libraries. Thus, by default there's some C or C++ communication necessary. These routines rely on FFTW (www.fftw.org), which is called directly from C or C++ (thus, I don't see re-writing these routines in another language). The middle tier must manage traffic between the client, the math routines, and the Oracle database. The client will trigger the math routines aynchronously, and the results saved in the db and transferred back to the client, etc. The middle-tier will also need to authenticate user accounts/passwords, and send out various administrative emails. Originally I thought PhP the obvious choice, but interfacing asychronously multiple clients with the C or C++ routines doesn't seem straightforward. Then I thought, why not just keep the whole middle tier in C or C++, but I'm not sure if this is done in the industry (C or C++ doesn't seem as web-friendly as other languages). There's always Jave + JNI, but maybe that introduces other complications (not sure). Any feedback appreciated.

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• Web Hosting Checklist

  - by Chris

  Hello, I am a web developer that is starting to look into hosting his own website. I would like to showcase my programming skills (PHP, MySQl, C#, Wordpress). My knowledge of languages I am OK with but the actually hosting site is where my knowledge starts to get a little shaky. I know the basics (bandwidth, sub-domains, re-write rules) but I would love your input, to help me formulate a check list of certain web-hosting services that I should be on the look-out for. Also I was wondering if there were any reliable hosting providers who give you the option to host both c# code-behinds and PHP code. As I would like to have two versions of my site, one in C# and one in PHP the hope is that if I need to look for another job this website will help me show possible employers my server side knowledge. I hope this is enough info, I did some researching online but found a bunch of unless articles and I've always have had luck on the StackExchange sites. So hopefully you, can help me. Thanks alot.

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• How do you encode Algebraic Data Types in a C#- or Java-like language?

  - by Jörg W Mittag

  There are some problems which are easily solved by Algebraic Data Types, for example a List type can be very succinctly expressed as: data ConsList a = Empty | ConsCell a (ConsList a) consmap f Empty = Empty consmap f (ConsCell a b) = ConsCell (f a) (consmap f b) l = ConsCell 1 (ConsCell 2 (ConsCell 3 Empty)) consmap (+1) l This particular example is in Haskell, but it would be similar in other languages with native support for Algebraic Data Types. It turns out that there is an obvious mapping to OO-style subtyping: the datatype becomes an abstract base class and every data constructor becomes a concrete subclass. Here's an example in Scala: sealed abstract class ConsList[+T] { def map[U](f: T => U): ConsList[U] } object Empty extends ConsList[Nothing] { override def map[U](f: Nothing => U) = this } final class ConsCell[T](first: T, rest: ConsList[T]) extends ConsList[T] { override def map[U](f: T => U) = new ConsCell(f(first), rest.map(f)) } val l = (new ConsCell(1, new ConsCell(2, new ConsCell(3, Empty))) l.map(1+) The only thing needed beyond naive subclassing is a way to seal classes, i.e. a way to make it impossible to add subclasses to a hierarchy. How would you approach this problem in a language like C# or Java? The two stumbling blocks I found when trying to use Algebraic Data Types in C# were: I couldn't figure out what the bottom type is called in C# (i.e. I couldn't figure out what to put into class Empty : ConsList< ??? >) I couldn't figure out a way to seal ConsList so that no subclasses can be added to the hierarchy What would be the most idiomatic way to implement Algebraic Data Types in C# and/or Java? Or, if it isn't possible, what would be the idiomatic replacement?

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• How to write constructors which might fail to properly instantiate an object

  - by whitman

  Sometimes you need to write a constructor which can fail. For instance, say I want to instantiate an object with a file path, something like obj = new Object("/home/user/foo_file") As long as the path points to an appropriate file everything's fine. But if the string is not a valid path things should break. But how? You could: 1. throw an exception 2. return null object (if your programming language allows constructors to return values) 3. return a valid object but with a flag indicating that its path wasn't set properly (ugh) 4. others? I assume that the "best practices" of various programming languages would implement this differently. For instance I think ObjC prefers (2). But (2) would be impossible to implement in C++ where constructors must have void as a return type. In that case I take it that (1) is used. In your programming language of choice can you show how you'd handle this problem and explain why?

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• @CodeStock 2012 Review: Leon Gersing ( @Rubybuddha ) - "You"

  "YOU"Speaker: Leon GersingTwitter: @Rubybuddha Site: http://about.me/leongersing I honestly had no idea what I was getting in to when I sat down in to this session. I basically saw the picture of the speaker and knew that it would be a good session. I was completely wrong; it was the BEST SESSION of CodeStock 2012.  In fact it was so good, I texted another coworker attending the conference to get over and listen to Leon. Leon took on the concept of growth in the software development community. He specifically referred David Hansson in his ability to stick to his beliefs when the development community thought that he was crazy for creating Ruby on Rails. If you do not know this story Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest growing web languages today. In addition, he also touched on the flip side of this argument in that we must be open to others ideas and not discard them so quickly because we all come from differing perspectives and can add value to a project/team/community. This session left me with two very profound concepts/quotes: “In order to learn you must do it badly in front of a crowed and fail.” - @Rubybuddha I can look back on my career so far and say that he is correct; I think I have learned the most after failing, especially when I achieved this failure in front of other. “Experts must be able to fail.” - @Rubybuddha I think we can all learn from our own mistakes but we can also learn from others. When respected experts fail it is a great learning opportunity for the entire team as well as the person who failed. When expert admit mistakes and how they worked through them can be great learning tools for other developers so that they know how to avoid specific scenarios and if they do become stuck in the same issue they will know how to properly work their way out of them.

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 4: Application Development Considerations

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions.  What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire.  If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone.  You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers.  If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform.  How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware?  This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth.  When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way.  This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to.  You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use.  The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model).  This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns.  The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible.  Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible.  This leads to UI patterns.  While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application.  If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together.  This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications.  You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data.  Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality.  This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts.  This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements.  You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge.  Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself.  Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times.  This includes both local storage and across the wire.  This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data.  You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity.  Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations.  What do you do if you lose the network?  Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform.  Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated.  This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions.  What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them.  Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets.  In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs.  This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder.  You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications.  I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing.  Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies.  They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously.  Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

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• I want to be a programmer, work in corporate environment, earn well, learn fast and eventually become a great programmer [on hold]

  - by Shin San

  I'll try to keep this simple: I'm 29, been dabbling with computers for the past 10 years, had entry level jobs in tech support for different apps, been fixing computers for a while and now want to specialize in something. I'm not 100% stranger to programming but haven't gone past if/then/else with anything. A bit of JavaScript, PHP, Python and currently checking out the "SELECT" statement in SQL :)) I'm curious about programming, I enjoy it and I'm thinking of making a living out of it. So, while I'm at it, why not earn a bit more than the average Joe? So, that's why I'm checking what the best solution, the best learning path and the most useful languages are considering: a) how easy/fast can you find a job by knowing it b) how much would I be able to earn c) how fast can I learn it By reading 10-20 articles online I've come up with an example, but I'm here for some expert advice. Example: * ratings from a) and b) point of view #1 sql ; #2 java ; #3 html (please don't start the markup language debate) ; #4 javascript From this ratings, I'd say a good way to go is learn html/css/(javascript or php) for the web part of apps, some SQL/MySQL/whateverSQL for holding data and loads of Java for the program itself. Please let me know if this is a good idea and if so, what should be the order for learning all of the above. Else, please let me know a better way and why it would be better. Many thanks for taking the time to read my question. Best wishes to you guys Edit: if I think Java + SQL + HTML&JavaScript is the way to go, does the order I'm learning them in matter? Or can I try to learn them all at once?

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• What's the proper term for a function inverse to a constructor? Deconstructor, destructor, or something else?

  - by Petr Pudlák

  Edit: I'm rephrasing the question a bit. Apparently I caused some confusion because I didn't realize that the term destructor is used in OOP for something quite different - it's a function invoked when an object is being destroyed. In functional programming we (try to) avoid mutable state so there is no such equivalent to it. (I added the proper tag to the question.) Instead, I've seen that the record field for unwrapping a value (especially for single-valued data types such as newtypes) is sometimes called destructor or perhaps deconstructor. For example, let's have (in Haskell): newtype Wrap = Wrap { unwrap :: Int } Here Wrap is the constructor and unwrap is what? I've seen both, for example: ... Most often, one supplies smart constructors and destructors for these to ease working with them. ... at Haskell wiki, or ... The general theme here is to fuse constructor - deconstructor pairs like ... at Haskell wikibook (here it's probably meant in a bit more general sense). The questions are: How do we call unwrap in functional programming? Deconstructor? Destructor? Or by some other term? And to clarify, is this terminology applicable to other functional languages, or is it used just in the Has

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• Multilingual website without language component in the URL

  - by user359650

  I'm working on a website for Canada which will have French and English versions. For SEO purposes, I would like to avoid using any language tag in URLs because I believe it will have more impact (e.g. example.ca/products better than en.example.ca/products or example.ca/en/products). I believe this is technically possible because the2 languages are sufficiently different that the URLs won't be conflicting with one another (e.g. if you want a "product" page, it will be /products in English, and /produits in French so you know which language the URL is about). Since Google (and most likely others) doesn't rely on the URL (nor HTML tags) to determine the content language I don't see any problems with search engines. To make this possible I've thought about using a cookie distinct from the session cookie (e.g. example.org_language) with long term expiry (e.g. N years) that will memorize the language chosen by the user. That way when people visit the website with a new browser session, they get served the proper language. I have already given up on users being able to switch one page from English to French: when people will chose English or French from the menu they will be redirected to the corresponding version of the home page. Do you foresee any problems with not using a language component in the URL (whether domain or path)? (as long as one makes sure URLS don't conflict).

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