Search Results

Search found 5353 results on 215 pages for 'this curious geek'.

Page 158/215 | < Previous Page | 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165  | Next Page >

• What type of career path / jobs for a developer to have best work life balance?

  - by programmx10

  I know some people may look down on a question like this but I've been thinking lately a lot about what direction I can take my career to have a good work life balance, since I have been working for a startup where hours tend to drag on, etc and I find it often drains the life out of me. I have been going to interviews and some other companies are also startups / new companies and seem to have a similar attitude about working long hours. Maybe its the technologies I use, the type of development, I don't know but I'm curious if anyone can offer advice on what a path is to be a programmer / developer but work for a company that respects a regular work week and would only rarely find the need to move past this. I realize this won't lead to being the highest paid in my field but I'm ok with that and feel the tradeoff would be worth it as it would also give me time for my own projects, etc. I know some people may say this is too general but I believe it is a programmer specific question because I believe there tends to be a higher than average rate of working overtime, etc and people working in "startup" venture situations than in many other fields and there is definitely a mindset among a lot of people in the field of working long hours that doesn't exist in every industry.

  Read the article

• asp.net mvc vs angular.js model binding

  - by aw04

  So I've noticed a trend lately of .net web developers using angular.js on the client side of applications and I've become more curious as I play around with angular and compare it to how I would do things in asp.net mvc. I'll give a quick example of what really got me thinking. I recently came across a situation at work (I work in a .net environment) where I needed to create a table bound to a collection of objects that had the ability to add and remove rows/items from the collection. I had an add button that created a new object and appended a row to the end of the table, and a remove button in each row to remove a particular object/row. Using asp.net mvc, I first found myself making an ajax call to the server for each operation, updating the server side model, and refreshing part of the page to show the result in the table. This worked but I didn't really like the idea of calling the server to update the model each time, so I tried to come up with a solution to do this on the client side. It turned out to be quite a task, as I had to generate the html on add with validation and all and the correct indexing for the model binding to work. It got worse on remove, as I ended up with a crazy string replace function to recreate the indexes on each item to satisfy the binding requirements (if an item other than the last is removed, the indexes are no longer correct). Now out of curiosity, I tried to recreate this at home in angular (which I had no experience with) and it took me all of about 10 minutes with simple functions to add and remove items from the client side model. This is just one example, but it seems to me that I'm able to achieve the same results with far fewer calls to the server in angular because of the fact that it binds to a client side model. So my question is, is this a distinct advantage of using a javascript mvc framework or am I somehow under utilizing the power of asp.net mvc and am I right in thinking that these operations should be done on the client and have no business requiring calls to the server?

  Read the article

• What are the boundaries of the product owner in scrum?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  In another question, I asked about why I feel scrum turns active developers into passive developers, and it seems that the overall problem is not scrumy (related to scrum), and rather it's related to the bad implementation of scrum. So, here I have some questions about the scope of the responsibilities of PO (product owner) and the limitations he/she shouldn't pass. Should PO interfere the UI design, when there are designers at work in scrum team? (an example of this which has happened to us, is to replace checkboxes with a drop down list with two items, namely, yes and no; or to make some boxes larger, or to left-align some content instead of centering them on the page, or stuff like that). If yeah, to what extent? Colors? Layout? Should PO interfere in Design and architecture of coding? This hasn't happened to us yet, but I'm really curious about the boundaries. For example does PO has the right to change the platform (moving from ASP.NET MVC to PHP, or something like that), or choosing the count of servers (tier architecture), etc. Should PO interfere in validation mechanisms? For example, this field should be required, or we don't need to get this piece of information from user. Sometimes, analyzers and designers confirm that something can be handled behind the scene, like extracting the user profile info from another source, instead of asking for it in UI. How granular could/should PO get into the analysis and design? For example, a user story might be: "As a customer, I'd like to be able to buy new domains online". However, scrum team can implement this user story in a wizard of five steps, or in one single page. To which level PO should monitor, or govern, or supervise the technical analysis, design, and implementation? I asked these questions to judge whether our implementation is right or wrong?

  Read the article

• Career paths after web development?

  - by Mike

  I know this is open ended, but I'm just curious what you've done after your web development career, or if you've stayed loyal. I have a feeling/read/heard that web development salaries top out at a certain amount.. even after 10-15 years of experience. Reason I ask is that I graduated last summer with a BS in Chemical Engineering.. but have not been able to find a job in California. I've been web designing/developing since high school and thought that I should start a career, even if its not related to my major and not lose more time. Even though I'd really like to have an engineering career, I don't think that will happen. Do you guys have any suggestions or experiences for choices after/ways to enhance your career after several years in web development? Thanks! Update: Thanks for the responses guys! One more question: Is it likely to be accepted into a MS/PhD program if you've been out of uni for a couple years? Or with semi-related job experience? Would I be a bit of a misfit with a BS in ChemE studying CS/CompE for an MS?

  Read the article

• Creating a retro-style palette swapping effect in OpenGL

  - by Zack The Human

  I'm working on a Megaman-like game where I need to change the color of certain pixels at runtime. For reference: in Megaman when you change your selected weapon then main character's palette changes to reflect the selected weapon. Not all of the sprite's colors change, only certain ones do. This kind of effect was common and quite easy to do on the NES since the programmer had access to the palette and the logical mapping between pixels and palette indices. On modern hardware, though, this is a bit more challenging because the concept of palettes is not the same. All of my textures are 32-bit and do not use palettes. There are two ways I know of to achieve the effect I want, but I'm curious if there are better ways to achieve this effect easily. The two options I know of are: Use a shader and write some GLSL to perform the "palette swapping" behavior. If shaders are not available (say, because the graphics card doesn't support them) then it is possible to clone the "original" textures and generate different versions with the color changes pre-applied. Ideally I would like to use a shader since it seems straightforward and requires little additional work opposed to the duplicated-texture method. I worry that duplicating textures just to change a color in them is wasting VRAM -- should I not worry about that?

  Read the article

• Is there a design pattern for chained observers?

  - by sharakan

  Several times, I've found myself in a situation where I want to add functionality to an existing Observer-Observable relationship. For example, let's say I have an Observable class called PriceFeed, instances of which are created by a variety of PriceSources. Observers on this are notified whenever the underlying PriceSource updates the PriceFeed with a new price. Now I want to add a feature that allows a (temporary) override to be set on the PriceFeed. The PriceSource should still update prices on the PriceFeed, but for as long as the override is set, whenever a consumer asks PriceFeed for it's current value, it should get the override. The way I did this was to introduce a new OverrideablePriceFeed that is itself both an Observer and an Observable, and that decorates the actual PriceFeed. It's implementation of .getPrice() is straight from Chain of Responsibility, but how about the handling of Observable events? When an override is set or cleared, it should issue it's own event to Observers, as well as forwarding events from the underlying PriceFeed. I think of this as some kind of a chained observer, and was curious if there's a more definitive description of a similar pattern.

  Read the article

• SQL SERVER – Validating Unique Columnname Across Whole Database

  - by pinaldave

  I sometimes come across very strange requirements and often I do not receive a proper explanation of the same. Here is the one of those examples. Asker: “Our business requirement is when we add new column we want it unique across current database.” Pinal: “Why do you have such requirement?” Asker: “Do you know the solution?” Pinal: “Sure I can come up with the answer but it will help me to come up with an optimal answer if I know the business need.” Asker: “Thanks – what will be the answer in that case.” Pinal: “Honestly I am just curious about the reason why you need your column name to be unique across database.” (Silence) Pinal: “Alright – here is the answer – I guess you do not want to tell me reason.” Option 1: Check if Column Exists in Current Database IF EXISTS (  SELECT * FROM sys.columns WHERE Name = N'NameofColumn') BEGIN SELECT 'Column Exists' -- add other logic END ELSE BEGIN SELECT 'Column Does NOT Exists' -- add other logic END Option 2: Check if Column Exists in Current Database in Specific Table IF EXISTS (  SELECT * FROM sys.columns WHERE Name = N'NameofColumn' AND OBJECT_ID = OBJECT_ID(N'tableName')) BEGIN SELECT 'Column Exists' -- add other logic END ELSE BEGIN SELECT 'Column Does NOT Exists' -- add other logic END I guess user did not want to share the reason why he had a unique requirement of having column name unique across databases. Here is my question back to you – have you faced a similar situation ever where you needed unique column name across a database. If not, can you guess what could be the reason for this kind of requirement?  Additional Reference: SQL SERVER – Query to Find Column From All Tables of Database Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL System Table, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

  Read the article

• Questions for Oracle GlassFish and Middleware Executives

  - by arungupta

  GlassFish Community Event is planned, as part of JavaOne, on Sep 30, 2012. If you are involved in the GlassFish community, this is a perfect opportunity to engage with the Oracle GlassFish Team. Agenda 11:00 - 11:05: Introduction 11:05 - 11:30: Roadmap and Community Updates 11:30 - 12:15: Q&A with Executive Speaker Panel from Oracle and the GlassFish Team 12:15 - 01:00: Customer Testimonials Location: Moscone West, Room 2005 One of the highlights of the event is a speaker panel with executives from Oracle GlassFish and Middleware. This will be your chance to ask tough questions and expect a honest and frank answer from them. If you are attending JavaOne, then you can register for the Community Event and ask the questions in person. However, if are you are not attending the conference then we would still like give you an option to ask your questions. Are you excited, nervous, curious, confused, thrilled about the future of Java EE, GlassFish, and in general about middleware at Oracle ? This is your chance to leave a comment on this blog with your question. We'll pick some of the questions and ask them for you. And then post a response after the conference. Have you registered for JavaOne ?

  Read the article

• Gimpshop 2.8. Available for Win & Mac. No Linux version?

  - by Jorge M. Treviño

  Finally got around to upgrading 12.04 to 12.10. One of the nice things about the new version is that Gimp 2.8 is in the repositories. Installed and it's a far cry from the 2.2, 2.4 and 2.6 versions which were —at least from my untrained point of view– next to unusable. Now 2.8 is a much more intuitive, for Photoshop users at least, and I'm trying to really learn it. Browsing around, I found that there's s new version of Gimpshop, something that was a sorely amateurish attempt to a PS interface over an old Gimp version and sure to mess up your system. Seeing "2.8" prominently displayed in the page, I decided to try the Windows version. Oddly, there's a Mac version too but no Linux one. The link directs one to a non-existent file in one of the cloud storage sites. After the Win version was installed, I fired it up and, surprise!, it's exactly the same as I can tell without diving into menus and dialogs, as the plain vanilla Ubuntu version I have installed. Can anybody shed light on what goes on here? Is this a scheme to get inadvertent users to install some "optional extras" that come with the installer? Very curious about it (thanks God I'm not a cat ).

  Read the article

• Is defining every method/state per object in a series of UML diagrams representative of MDA in general?

  - by Max

  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). Which could be implemented like this: public partial class Content { public void DeleteFromFileSystem() { File.Delete(...); } } All methods are designed like this. Everything happens in these gargantuan logic-bomb domain classes. Is this how MDA or DDD or similar usually is done? For now my impression of MDA/DDD (which this has been called by higherups) is that it severely stunts my productivity (everything must be done The Way) and that it hinders maintenance work since all logic are roped, entrenched, interspersed into the mentioned gargantuan bombs. Please refrain from interpreting this as a rant - I am merely curious if this is typical MDA or some sort of extreme MDA UPDATE Concerning the example above, in my opinion Content shouldn't handle deleting itself as such. What if we change from local storage to Amazon S3, in that case we would have to reimplement this functionality scattered over multiple places instead of one single interface which we can provide a second implementation for.

  Read the article

• How can I calculate a vertex normal for a hard edge?

  - by K.G.

  Here is a picture of a lovely polygon: Circled is a vertex, and numbered are its adjacent faces. I have calculated the normals of those faces as such (not yet normalized, 0-indexed): Vertex 1 normal 0: 0.000000 0.000000 -0.250000 Vertex 1 normal 1: 0.000000 0.000000 -0.250000 Vertex 1 normal 2: -0.250000 0.000000 0.000000 Vertex 1 normal 3: -0.250000 0.000000 0.000000 Vertex 1 normal 4: 0.250000 0.000000 0.000000 What I'm wondering is, how can I determine, taken as given that I want this vertex to represent a hard edge, whether its normal should be the normal of 1/2 or 3/4? My plan after I glanced at the sketch I used to put this together was "Ha! I'll just use whichever two faces have the same normal!" and now I see that there are two sets of two faces for which this is true. Is there a rule I can apply based on the face winding, angle of the adjacent edges, moon phase, coin flip, to consistently choose a normal direction for this box? For the record, all of the other polygons I plan to use will have their normals dictated in Maya, but after encountering this problem, it made me really curious.

  Read the article

• Xfce gets really confused about session saving, etc

  - by Pointy

  I'm getting a new laptop running with 11.04 Ubuntu. I've got the xfce4 packages all installed, which is something I've had no problems with on any of my other machines. On this new laptop, however, though I can log in and use an xfce session without any problems, logging out of a session is problematic: I click the "Log out" widget from the panel and then "Log out" from its option dialog. Then the thing just sits there, not logging out. Subsequent attempts to open the "Log out" widget fail with an error about the session manager being busy. After maybe a minute or so, it logs out. Though I've got the "Save session" option checked in the log out dialog, xfce just makes a complete hash of the business. It does remember the applications that I had running, but it seems to forget about the window manager (!!) and the workspace configuration. I don't log in/out that often, and generally I don't care much about restarting applications, but the window manager being missing is of course pretty annoying. I like xfce because it's simple and unobtrusive and usually works pretty well. I've never experienced this, and I've got two other machines also running 11.04 with pretty much the same setup (straight Ubuntu install with xfce4 packages added). Is there some good way to diagnose stuff like that? edit — well I nuked my session cache, did an explicit save from the session widget, and now it works. Well, it doesn't save the workspace location for each client and instead opens them all up on the first workspace, but I think that may be because, in the session, xfwm4 is the last thing in the "Client" list, so before it's started all the other clients just pile up in the first (and only) workspace. I'm still curious about how exactly it gets so messed up. I certainly wasn't knowingly attempting anything fancy or unorthodox, though I may have done something fishy inadvertently.

  Read the article

• Good Freelance models for web developers

  - by Matthew Underwood

  I am a web developer with four years of experience in PHP, MYSQL and experience in Javascript etc. One day I hope to develop a freelance career in web development. Areas of freelance that I am thinking of going towards includes Wordpress, Magento development along with bespoke applications. I am also thinking of doing some consultancy work for clients and businesses when I build up some more experience and technical knowledge. I want to offer a web development service to potential clients that plays on my strengths in what I know but most importantly has a market. Web development can cover so many subjects that its difficult to pick out the areas that have demand. I am also curious to find out if web developers offer services that bring in a monthly income e.g application maintenance or database maintenance? Is there a market for certain areas like WordPress plugins or bespoke applications? Are there certain things to avoid because of work duration, unrealistic client expectations or the fact that its impossible to find a market for it? As professional and experienced freelance web developers have you learned some important do's and don'ts? Is there certain services that the majority of web developers offer because its in high demand? This is the one area of web development freelancing that I cant get my head around. I know there is never a definitive answer but there must be some good practises and general consensus on this subject. Web designers design websites they offer a lump sum and get paid monthly sometimes to add new content, PPC and SEO consultants market sites to the top this will involve monthly payments, web development doesn’t seem so clear cut.

  Read the article

• Algorithm to use for shop floor layout?

  - by jkohlhepp

  I ran into a classroom problem yesterday (business oriented class, not computer science) and I found it interesting from an algorithmic perspective. The problem goes something like this: Assume there is a shop floor with N different rooms, and you have N different departments that need to go in those rooms. The departments and the rooms are all the same size, so any department could go in any room. There is a known travel distance from each room to each other room. There is also a known amount of trips necessary from one department to another (trips are counted the same regardless which room they originate from, so a trip from A to B is equivalent to a trip from B to A). Given those inputs, determine a layout of departments into rooms which minimizes travel time. What is the best way to approach this problem algorithmically? Is there already a particular algorithm or class of algorithms designed to solve this type of problem? Does this type of problem have a name in computer science? I am not looking for you to design an algorithm to solve this, although feel free to do so if you would like. I'm wondering if this is a problem space that has already been well defined and studied algorithmically and if so get some links to research further. I can see a lot of different data structures and algorithms that might apply to this and I'm curious which approach would be "best". And don't worry, you are not doing my homework for me. This is not a homework problem per se, as this is a business course and we were simply discussing the concepts and not trying to solve the problem algorithmically.

  Read the article

• Is Intellisense faster in Visual Studio 2012 compared to Visual Studio 2010 for C++ projects?

  - by syplex

  We switched to VS2010 from VS2003 a few months ago, and there are many many improvements. But the speed of Intellisense is not one of them (although it does generate higher quality results, which is great). I read that Intellisense and the MSDN help system were being improved in VS2012, so I'm curious if its actually faster? The only data I could find were graphs of an early release (VS2011). For the record, I am using a vanilla install of VS2010 with SP1 on Windows 7 SP1 (x64). No plugins or add-ins running. What I'm looking for specifically: Has the speed of intellisense autocomplete improved? Has the speed of F12 (goto definition) improved? The answers to these questions will help in determining if VS2012 is worth the money to upgrade at this time as the intellisense slowness would be the only major reason for upgrading. I'd also be interested in knowing if the help system has improved. I'm currently using MSDN help from VS2008SP1 because it has filtering and is faster.

  Read the article

• Why, in WPF, do we set an object to Stretch via its Alignment properties instead of Width/Height?

  - by Jonathan Hobbs

  In WPF's XAML, we can tell an element to fill its container like this: <Button HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" /> Why is it that when we set an element to Stretch, we do it via the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment properties? Why did the WPF design team decide to take this approach over having Width="Stretch" and Height="Stretch"? I presume it was a calculated decision, and I'm curious about the reasoning. CSS, among other technologies, follows the convention that stretching is done via the width and height properties, and that alignment affects positioning exclusively. This seems intuitive enough: stretching the element is manipulating its width and height, after all! Using the corresponding alignment property to stretch an element seems counter-intuitive and unusual in comparison. This makes me think they didn't just pick this option for no reason: they made a calculated decision and had reasons behind it. Width and Height use the double data type, which would ordinarily mean assigning it a string would be silly. However, WPF's Window objects can take Width="Auto", which gets treated as double.NaN. Couldn't Width="Stretch" be stored as double.PositiveInfinity or some other value?

  Read the article

• Inheriting projects - General Rules?

  - by pspahn

  This is an area of discussion I have long been curious about, but overall, I generally lack the experience to give myself an answer that I would fully trust. We've all been there, a new client shows up with a half-complete project they are looking to finish and launch. For whatever reason, they fired their previous developer, and it's now up to you to save the day. I am just finishing up a code review for a new client, and in my estimation is would be better to scrap what the previous developers built since and start from scratch. There's a ton of reasons why I am leaning toward this way, but it still makes me nervous since the client isn't going to want to hear "those last guys built you a big turd, and I can either polish it, or throw it in the trash". What are your general rules for accepting these projects? How do you determine whether it will be better to start from scratch or continue with the existing code base? What other extra steps might you take to help control client expectations, since the previous developer may have inflated those expectations beyond a reasonable level? Any other general advice?

  Read the article

• Sort algorithms that work on large amount of data

  - by Giorgio

  I am looking for sorting algorithms that can work on a large amount of data, i.e. that can work even when the whole data set cannot be held in main memory at once. The only candidate that I have found up to now is merge sort: you can implement the algorithm in such a way that it scans your data set at each merge without holding all the data in main memory at once. The variation of merge sort I have in mind is described in this article in section Use with tape drives. I think this is a good solution (with complexity O(n x log(n)) but I am curious to know if there are other (possibly faster) sorting algorithms that can work on large data sets that do not fit in main memory. EDIT Here are some more details, as required by the answers: The data needs to be sorted periodically, e.g. once in a month. I do not need to insert a few records and have the data sorted incrementally. My example text file is about 1 GB UTF-8 text, but I wanted to solve the problem in general, even if the file were, say, 20 GB. It is not in a database and, due to other constraints, it cannot be. The data is dumped by others as a text file, I have my own code to read this text file. The format of the data is a text file: new line characters are record separators. One possible improvement I had in mind was to split the file into files that are small enough to be sorted in memory, and finally merge all these files using the algorithm I have described above.

  Read the article

• Did Microsoft designers got their butts kicked 3 years ago?

  - by John Conwell

  This is something I've been wondering about for about a year now.  Microsoft has a history of creating very useful products, with lots of useful features.  But useful does not mean usable.  A lot of stuff coming out of Redmond the past 10 years don't really seem to have been well thought out from a user design point of view.  Lots of extra steps, lots of popup windows...very little innovative thinking going on about the user experience of these products.But about a year ago I started seeing changes in the new products coming out of Microsoft.  Windows 7 is a good example of a big change.  They really got their asses handed to them on Vista, so they had to make a change.  But it looks like this change in philosophy has bled over to other areas.  The new Office (2010) lineup has a lot of changes in it to make it way more usable. Given that big changes like this take about 3 years to go from start to actually shipping product, I'm curious what happened internally at Microsoft that really drove this change in product design.  I think that Microsoft got so focused on just adding new functionality for so long, they forgot about the little things that can really make or break a product.  Office 2010 is full of these little things that make it much nicer to use.  I just hope its not too late for them.

  Read the article

• Why is it that software is still easily pirated today?

  - by mohabitar

  I've always been curious about this. Now I wouldn't call myself a programmer yet, but I'm learning, so maybe the answer to this is obvious. It just seems a little hard to believe that with all of our technological advances and the billions of dollars spent on engineering the most unbelievable and mind-blowing software, we still have no other means of protecting against piracy then a "serial number/activation key". I'm sure a ton of money, maybe even billions, went into creating Windows 7 or Office and even Snow Leopard, yet I can get it for free in less than 20 minutes. Same for all of Adobe's products, which are probably the easiest. I guess my question is: can there exist a fool proof and hack proof method of protecting your software against piracy? If not realistically, how about theoretically possible? Or no matter what mechanisms these companies deploy, hackers can always find a way around it? EDIT: So apparently, the answer is no. There's pretty much no way. And so I'm sure these big companies have realized this as well. Should they adopt another sales model rather than charging a crapload for their software (I know its justified and they put a lot of hard work into their software, but its still a lot of money). Are there any alternative solutions that will benefit both the company and the user (i.e. if you purchase our product, we'll apply $X dollars to your account that will apply to future purchases from our company)?

  Read the article

• New college grad, psychology major, wants to code professionally. Should I get Sun Java-certified?

  - by Anita

  I just graduated from a fairly well-known liberal arts college in May. Interestingly, I majored in psychology, with a concentration in social psychology. In college I took Intro to Computer Science and hated it (used to blame it on myself; now I blame it on the professor :) However, I've always wanted to be a programmer, and finally got my wish by getting hired by a company that was willing to let me learn coding from scratch in exchange for low pay. Well, what do you know, I just got laid off this morning, and need a new job by November to pay the bills. I loved the coding part of my job at the company, and managed to learn enough Java to feel competent in the job and curious to learn more. I think my goal now is to become a professional programmer. I still know very little (never used Swing, for example) but nothing that a good book can't fix. That's the background anyway; sorry for the rambling - I'm still in shock from the layoff :( It seems to me the quickest way to get noticed by companies, without a CS degree, is by getting certification. I'm halfway through studying for the SCJP and can probably sit for an exam in a week or two. Am I right in my assumption that certs will help in my case? And in general, do I have a bat's chance in hell of making it against formally trained programmers? My assets are really just raw intelligence and intense curiosity; well, maybe a love for problem-solving too. Thanks all - feel free to edit/tag the post!

  Read the article

• Inheriting projects - General Rules? [closed]

  - by pspahn

  Possible Duplicate: When is a BIG Rewrite the answer? Software rewriting alternatives Are there any actual case studies on rewrites of software success/failure rates? When should you rewrite? We're not a software company. Is a complete re-write still a bad idea? Have you ever been involved in a BIG Rewrite? This is an area of discussion I have long been curious about, but overall, I generally lack the experience to give myself an answer that I would fully trust. We've all been there, a new client shows up with a half-complete project they are looking to finish and launch. For whatever reason, they fired their previous developer, and it's now up to you to save the day. I am just finishing up a code review for a new client, and in my estimation is would be better to scrap what the previous developers built since and start from scratch. There's a ton of reasons why I am leaning toward this way, but it still makes me nervous since the client isn't going to want to hear "those last guys built you a big turd, and I can either polish it, or throw it in the trash". What are your general rules for accepting these projects? How do you determine whether it will be better to start from scratch or continue with the existing code base? What other extra steps might you take to help control client expectations, since the previous developer may have inflated those expectations beyond a reasonable level? Any other general advice?

  Read the article

• Small-scale database options for .NET

  - by raney

  I have a .NET 4.0/WPF based application I've developed and maintain for my company that acts as a friendly GUI central-point-of-information, combining information pulled from a couple of SQL databases, as well as CSV exports from a few other applications. I would like to build out my own database to support the entirety of the information that the application accesses, so that I could have a service running on my server that would read in necessary remote SQL info and file exports, to provide the user's application with a single database to connect to, as well as to remove all of the file handling currently involved in the program (copying new CSV resources from network location, reading them into memory each launch.) I have complete control and flexibility here as long as the user's experience isn't affected, and this is as much a learning experience as it is tidying up. Caveat being, I don't have much in the way of a budget. Right now I recognize my options to be: SQL Express - I'm comfortable with the server setup, I like ADO.NET and LINQ to SQL. I feel that I have the least to learn here, but it would let me focus on SQL in a familiar environment. Perhaps in conjunction with Entity Framework? MongoDB - I don't know a whole lot about, but I've heard the name enough to make me curious. Brief research seems friendly enough, and there is .NET support. I like working with open source projects. My questions are: What's popular and extensible right now? I'm not far from starting to job-hunt, and I'd like this project to be relevant going forward. What am I missing? Pros, cons? Other options? What plays well with .NET? What are the things I should be considering, the questions I should be asking, when making a decision like this? Thanks for your time.

  Read the article

• Self-referencing anonymous closures: is JavaScript incomplete?

  - by Tom Auger

  Does the fact that anonymous self-referencing function closures are so prevelant in JavaScript suggest that JavaScript is an incomplete specification? We see so much of this: (function () { /* do cool stuff */ })(); and I suppose everything is a matter of taste, but does this not look like a kludge, when all you want is a private namespace? Couldn't JavaScript implement packages and proper classes? Compare to ActionScript 3, also based on EMACScript, where you get package com.tomauger { import bar; class Foo { public function Foo(){ // etc... } public function show(){ // show stuff } public function hide(){ // hide stuff } // etc... } } Contrast to the convolutions we perform in JavaScript (this, from the jQuery plugin authoring documentation): (function( $ ){ var methods = { init : function( options ) { // THIS }, show : function( ) { // IS }, hide : function( ) { // GOOD }, update : function( content ) { // !!! } }; $.fn.tooltip = function( method ) { // Method calling logic if ( methods[method] ) { return methods[ method ].apply( this, Array.prototype.slice.call( arguments, 1 )); } else if ( typeof method === 'object' || ! method ) { return methods.init.apply( this, arguments ); } else { $.error( 'Method ' + method + ' does not exist on jQuery.tooltip' ); } }; })( jQuery ); I appreciate that this question could easily degenerate into a rant about preferences and programming styles, but I'm actually very curious to hear how you seasoned programmers feel about this and whether it feels natural, like learning different idiosyncrasies of a new language, or kludgy, like a workaround to some basic programming language components that are just not implemented?

  Read the article

• In agile environment, how is bug tracking and iteration tracking consolidated.

  - by DXM

  This topic stemmed from my other question about management-imposed waterfall-like schedule. From the responses in the other thread, I gathered this much about what is generally advised: Each story should be completed with no bugs. Story is not closed until all bugs have been addressed. No news there and I think we can all agree with this. If at a later date QA (or worse yet a customer) finds a bug, the report goes into a bug tracking database and also becomes a story which should be prioritized just like all other work. Does this sum up general handling of bugs in agile environment? If yes, the part I'm curious about is how do teams handle tracking in two different systems? (unless most teams don't have different systems). I've read a lot of advice (including Joel's blog) on software development in general and specifically on importance of a good bug tracking tool. At the same time when you read books on agile methodology, none of them seem to cover this topic because in "pure" agile, you finish iteration with no bugs. Feels like there's a hole there somewhere. So how do real teams operate? To track iterations you'd use (whiteboard, Rally...), to track bugs you'd use something from another set of products (if you are lucky enough, you might even get stuck with HP Quality Center). Should there be 2 separate systems? If they are separate, do teams spend time creating import/sync functionality between them? What have you done in your company? Is bug tracking software even used? Or do you just go straight to creating a story?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165  | Next Page >