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• How to manage and estimate unstructured requirements received from customers

  - by user20358

  A lot of the times I receive a software system's requirements from our customers in a very unstructured format. It is usually a bunch of "product development" guys from the customer's who come up with these "proposed solutions" to the business problems they have. While they are the experts at the business domain, a lot of the times they don't have the solutions right. This results in multiple versions of the same requirement mixing up of two requirements into one a few versions of the requirement later down the line, the requirements which were combined together get separated out again, each taking with it some of the new additions How do you work with such requirements coming in and sort them out into proper use cases and before development begins? What tools can we use to track a particular requirement's history, from the first time it was conceived till the time it gets crystallized into a proper use case? Estimating work against requirements received in such a fashion is a nightmare which ends up in making mistakes in understanding the requirement correctly and estimating the effort against it correctly. Any tips, tools, tricks to make this activity more manageable? I'm just trying to get some insights from someone more experienced than I am in requirements management and effort estimation.

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• I am looking to create realistic car movement using vectors

  - by bobthemac

  I have goggled how to do this and found this http://www.helixsoft.nl/articles/circle/sincos.htm I have had a go at it but most of the functions that were showed didn't work I just got errors because they didn't exist. I have looked at the cos and sin functions but don't understand how to use them or how to get the car movement working correctly using vectors. I have no code because I am not sure what to do sorry. Any help is appreciated. EDIT: I have restrictions that I must use the TL engine for my game, I am not allowed to add any sort of physics engine. It must be programmed in c++. Here is a sample of what i got from trying to follow what was done in the link I provided. if(myEngine->KeyHeld(Key_W)) { length += carSpeedIncrement; } if(myEngine->KeyHeld(Key_S)) { length -= carSpeedIncrement; } if(myEngine->KeyHeld(Key_A)) { angle -= carSpeedIncrement; } if(myEngine->KeyHeld(Key_D)) { angle += carSpeedIncrement; } carVolocityX = cos(angle); carVolocityZ = cos(angle); car->MoveX(carVolocityX * frameTime); car->MoveZ(carVolocityZ * frameTime);

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• How to improve Minecraft-esque voxel world performance?

  - by SomeXnaChump

  After playing Minecraft I marveled a bit at its large worlds but at the same time I found them extremely slow to navigate, even with a quad core and meaty graphics card. Now I assume Minecraft is fairly slow because: A) It's written in Java, and as most of the spatial partitioning and memory management activities happen in there, it would naturally be slower than a native C++ version. B) It doesn't partition its world very well. I could be wrong on both assumptions; however it got me thinking about the best way to manage large voxel worlds. As it is a true 3D world, where a block can exist in any part of the world, it is basically a big 3D array [x][y][z], where each block in the world has a type (i.e BlockType.Empty = 0, BlockType.Dirt = 1 etc.) Now, I am assuming to make this sort of world perform well you would need to: A) Use a tree of some variety (oct/kd/bsp) to split all the cubes out; it seems like an oct/kd would be the better option as you can just partition on a per cube level not a per triangle level. B) Use some algorithm to work out which blocks can currently be seen, as blocks closer to the user could obfuscate the blocks behind, making it pointless to render them. C) Keep the block object themselves lightweight, so it is quick to add and remove them from the trees. I guess there is no right answer to this, but I would be interested to see peoples' opinions on the subject. How would you improve performance in a large voxel-based world?

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• Remote Debugging

  - by Pemdas

  Obviously, the easiest way to solve a bug is to be able to reproduce it in house. However, sometimes that is not practical. For starters, users are often not very good at providing you with useful information. Costumer Service: "what seems to be the issue?" User: "It crashed!" To further compound that, sometimes the bug only occurs under certain environmentally conditions that can not be adequately replicated in house. With that in mind, it is important to build some sort of diagnostic framework into your product. What type of solutions have you seen or used in your experience? Logging seems to be the predominate method, which makes sense. We have a fairly sophisticated logging frame work in place with different levels of verbosity and the ability to filter on specific modules (actually we can filter down to the granularity of a single file). Error logs are placed strategically to manufacture a pretty good representation of a stack trace when an error occurs. We don't have the luxury of 10 million terabytes of disk space since I work on embedded platforms, so we have two ways of getting them off the system: a serial port and a syslog server. However, an issue we run into sometimes is actually getting the user to turn the logs on. Our current framework often requires some user interaction.

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• GCC: assembly listing for IA64 without an Itanium machine

  - by KD04

  I need to try the following thing: I would like to compile some simple C code samples and see the assembly listing generated by GCC for IA64 architecture, i.e. I just want to run GCC with the -S switch and see the resultant .s file. I don't have an Itanium machine, so in order to do it myself I'll probably need a cross-compiling version of GCC built for x86 RedHat. I'm not interested in full cross-compilation, meaning that I don't need to generate the binaries at all. The easiest way, of course, would be to find an Itanium machine with with GCC and just try it there. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have access to any. Another option is to build a cross-compiling version GCC on my RedHat, but apparently that's quite an endeavor for someone who hasn't done it before (I assume that the fact that I only need .s output doesn't make it simpler). What other options are there, if any? Maybe there's some sort of a web front to an Itanium GCC compiler on the Net (something like Comeau Online or ideone.com, but with .s output)? Anything else? I would appreciate any help.

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• Sorting objects before rendering

  - by dreta

  I'm trying to implement a scene graph and in all the articles i've come across there is talk about object sorting. So you'd sort your objects by "material" for example. Now untill i sat down and started implementing it, i kind of took this for granted, because it made sense. But now i'm wondering what does sorting actually change? In my engine, i have a manager for UBOs, i use those to store data that'll be shared between programs, at the moment that only involves time, camera and projection matrices and lights (i'm not worrying about managing which lights affect which objects ATM). Now for each model i have to change the model to world matrix uniform, no sorting is going to change that. So is the jump from changing this matrix to also setting a material for each object that bad? I vaguely remember reading somewhere that each time you change something in the pipeline, it has to get flushed and that can cause performance issues. But for each drawing call i'm setting up a model to world matrix anyway, so what sense does it make to ever be concerned about this? BTW is there any information about whether changing a uniform and calling glBufferSubData is more (or less) expensive.

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• how to properly implement alpha blending in a complex 3d scene

  - by Gajet

  I know this question might sound a bit easy to answer but It's driving me crazy. There are too many possible situations that a good alpha blending mechanism should handle, and for each Algorithm I can think of there is something missing. these are the methods I've though about so far: first of I though about object sorting by depth, this one simply fails because Objects are not simple shapes, they might have curves and might loop inside each other. so I can't always tell which one is closer to camera. then I thought about sorting triangles but this one also might fail, thought I'm not sure how to implement it there is a rare case that might again cause problem, in which two triangle pass through each other. again no one can tell which one is nearer. the next thing was using depth buffer, at least the main reason we have depth buffer is because of the problems with sorting that I mentioned but now we get another problem. Since objects might be transparent, in a single pixel there might be more than one object visible. So for which Object should I store pixel depth? I then thought maybe I can only store the most front Object depth, and using that determine how should I blend next draw calls at that pixel. But again there was a problem, think about 2 semi transparent planes with a solid plane in middle of them. I was going to render the solid plane at the end, one can see the most distant plane. note that I was going to merge every two planes until there is only one color left for that pixel. Obviously I can use sorting methods too because of the same reasons I've explained above. Finally the only thing I imagine being able to work is to render all objects into different render targets and then sort those layers and display the final output. But this time I don't know how can I implement this algorithm.

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• Use jQuery and ASP.NET to Build a News Ticker

  Many websites display a news ticker of one sort or another. A news ticker is a user interface element that displays a subset of a list of items, cycling through them one at a time after a set interval. For example, on Cisco's website there is a news ticker that shows the company's latest news items. Each news item is a one sentence link, such as "Desktop Virtualization Gathers Steam," or "Cisco Reports First Quarter Earnings." Clicking a headline whisks you to a page that shows the full story. Cisco's news ticker shows one headline at a time; every few seconds the currently displayed headline fades out and the next one appears. In total, Cisco has five different headlines - the ticker displays each of the five and then starts back from the beginning. This article is the first in a series that explores how to create your own news ticker widget using jQuery and ASP.NET. jQuery is a free, popular, open-source JavaScript library that simplifies many common client-side tasks, like event handling, DOM manipulation, and Ajax. This article kicks off the series and shows how to build a fairly simple news ticker whose contents can be specified statically in HTML markup or created dynamically from server-side code. Future installments will explore adding bells and whistles, such as: stopping the news ticker rotation when the mouse is hovered over it; adding controls to start, stop and pause the headlines; loading new headlines dynamically using Ajax; and packaging the JavaScript used by the ticker into a jQuery plugin. Read on to learn more! Read More >

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• Should you always pass the bare minimum data needed into a function

  - by Anders Holmström

  Let's say I have a function IsAdmin that checks whether a user is an admin. Let's also say that the admin checking is done by matching user id, name and password against some sort of rule (not important). In my head there are then two possible function signatures for this: public bool IsAdmin(User user); public bool IsAdmin(int id, string name, string password); I most often go for the second type of signature, thinking that: The function signature gives the reader a lot more info The logic contained inside the function doesn't have to know about the User class It usually results in slightly less code inside the function However I sometimes question this approach, and also realize that at some point it would become unwieldy. If for example a function would map between ten different object fields into a resulting bool I would obviously send in the entire object. But apart from a stark example like that I can't see a reason to pass in the actual object. I would appreciate any arguments for either style, as well as any general observations you might offer. I program in both object oriented and functional styles, so the question should be seen as regarding any and all idioms.

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• Is ZeroMQ a good choice to make a Python app and a C# managed assembly work together?

  - by Alex Bausk

  I have a task that involves talking to a .NET-based API (namely AutoCAD) to retrieve data, send commands, and react to events. I want to separate the API operations and the proper program logic (largely already implemented in Python) by using natural tools for both: a C# DLL for the former and a Python app for the latter. To connect these two pieces, I began exchanging JSON in ZeroMQ messages. I'm at early development stages but having recently discovered that ZeroMQ does not guarantee message delivery/order, I have reservations about whether this is a feasible way to go. Right now my app is a very basic REQ/REP pair and I plan to handle reacting to events and executing different commands by adding some sort of 'recipient-function' field to my message format. The reason that I want to use ZMQ is that I might be able to scale the software into a larger, multi-user, distributed solution sometime. I am a lay programmer so I would ask for your advice about this architecture. Should I just go ahead with it and plan to deal with message reliability/ordering when problems appear? Should I consider developing some kind of a REST wrapper around ZMQ?

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• How to effectively design a piece of software

  - by ti83plus

  Im a compsci student and ive got some experience in various languages and paradigms c/java/python/ruby/html/css/scheme/sql/asp(classic). I realise that i want to have some software in my portfolio for future job hunting even tho i still have 2 years left of my education. Ive got a pretty good idea of what i want to make, its a webapp. Most shops around here are either .net or java and since i know java best and dont have access to ms developer tools im thinking i should go with java. Even tho i feel i know the principles of OOP pretty good ive got no clue how to go from my idea to a working solution. Where can i access information about designing the underlying architechture of my solution? Also i would like to know what other technologies i should train on, my current list includes javascript(and possibly a javascript library) some sort of java web framework tips are appreciated. I would like to add support for android/iphone apps in the future and this is something i have to take into account when designing the app. I have done a course on software engineering but i found this to be more centered around project management ideas then the actual design and implementation. So i would like tips on technologies i should focus on to get the most out of my time without the massive overhead of huge config processes but at the same time keep my project viable in a business sense, so that i use technologies that are relevant for business (java developer jobs). And i would also like tips on where i can learn more about the design process around a software project, i will be working mostly alone. But i find the approach ive used up until now (start coding and figure it out as you go) wont suffice.

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• Strange spam posts not making sense

  - by Paaland

  I'm running a web site with a forum where one small part is open for posting from unregistered users. The site uses captcha, but still some spam posts get through every day. Here is the thing. All of the messages follow the same pattern, but all also come from different IP's. That makes me thing this is some sort of automated scripted "attack" from a botnet of some sorts. The strange thing is that all the messages start with six random characters and contains a couple of links. The words have no meaning and the domains in the links does not even exist. Why would anyone use time and resources spreading these things? Below you can see two of these messages: A5Zfs6 exrzvrbspntz, [url=http://nktqoqllnuab.com/]nktqoqllnuab[/url], [link=http://wtrenldadvsy.com/]wtrenldadvsy[/link], [http://rnlrqfgdvdot.com/] O2oLpL nqeffxhryfdk, [url=http://jutyurbpfxow.com/]jutyurbpfxow[/url], [link=http://jpcdtmdalpow.com/]jpcdtmdalpow[/link], [http://qopqwqxwjdjx.com/] Since all the messages come from different IP's I can't see blocking those will help much. For now I'm considering just dropping all messages following this pattern since it's quite easy to match with a regexp. Have anyone else seen these kinds of messages or know the point of posting them?

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• White screen with pointer after removing Unity

  - by Sameer Pandit

  I have the same problem . I am a newbie. I added the repository with sudo add apt-get-repository ppa:canonical-dx-team/une then i went to ubuntu software center and installed "unity interface of ubuntu netbook edition" . after installing i found a problem with User interface as it kept on flashing when mouse points to side panel . so i decided to remove it . I removed it form Ubuntu software center . there were other unity related apps installed , but i did not remove then as i had no idea what they were about . Now i ended up with a blank white screen with mouse pointer whenever i login. though i m able to login using gdm , but the screen is blank white. I tried to these commands also sudo apt-get remove gnome-shell sudo apt-get remove unity sudo restart gdm but they did not work at all i also tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg it too did not work. Note:I donot have any sort of graphics card or video card on my pc please help !!!

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• Conflict resolution for two-way sync

  - by K.Steff

  How do you manage two-way synchronization between a 'main' database server and many 'secondary' servers, in particular conflict resolution, assuming a connection is not always available? For example, I have an mobile app that uses CoreData as the 'database' on the iOS and I'd like to allow users to edit the contents without Internet connection. In the same time, this information is available on a website the devices will connect to. What do I do if/when the data on the two DB servers is in conflict? (I refer to CoreData as a DB server, though I am aware it is something slightly different.) Are there any general strategies for dealing with this sort of issue? These are the options I can think of: 1. Always use the client-side data as higher-priority 2. Same for server-side 3. Try to resolve conflicts by marking each field's edit timestamp and taking the latest edit Though I'm certain the 3rd option will open room for some devastating data corruption. I'm aware that the CAP theorem concerns this, but I only want eventual consistency, so it doesn't rule it out completely, right? Related question: Best practice patterns for two-way data synchronization. The second answer to this question says it probably can't be done.

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• LOD in modern games

  - by Firas Assaad

  I'm currently working on my master's thesis about LOD and mesh simplification, and I've been reading many academic papers and articles about the subject. However, I can't find enough information about how LOD is being used in modern games. I know many games use some sort of dynamic LOD for terrain, but what about elsewhere? Level of Detail for 3D Graphics for example points out that discrete LOD (where artists prepare several models in advance) is widely used because of the performance overhead of continuous LOD. That book was published in 2002 however, and I'm wondering if things are different now. There has been some research in performing dynamic LOD using the geometry shader (this paper for example, with its implementation in ShaderX6), would that be used in a modern game? To summarize, my question is about the state of LOD in modern video games, what algorithms are used and why? In particular, is view dependent continuous simplification used or does the runtime overhead make using discrete models with proper blending and impostors a more attractive solution? If discrete models are used, is an algorithm used (e.g. vertex clustering) to generate them offline, do artists manually create the models, or perhaps a combination of both methods is used?

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• What kind of language will replace C++ as C++ replaced C ? [closed]

  - by jokoon

  I think I'm not totally wrong when thinking that C++0x (or C++1x) is still C++, just better, with functionnalities coming from boost. I can't stop thinking that computer sciences, even with all that has been made so far, have to evolve again. I don't really like D since it just try to be some sort of "what C++ should have been", and Go seems to be too sophisticated when I dig a little into it, especially after watching some presentation video like this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rKnDgT73v8s The first thing that come into my mind is a new kind of syntax to directly handle specific datatypes and containers such as map, vectors, queues... What kind of things are researchers thinking about ? What are the real features that could make C++ better or a new C-like language could invent ? Does Go features such things ? Would there be a new kind of syntax that would "unbloat" C++ while keeping its advantages ? Could C++ have some of the interesting stuff of languages such as C# and ObjC ? EDIT: Please consider that I'm talking about a system language, not a VM/CLI/bytecode thing.

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• What are my choices for server side sandboxed scripting?

  - by alfa64

  I'm building a public website where users share data and scripts to run over some data. The scripts are run serverside in some sort of sandbox without other interaction this cycle: my Perl program reads from a database a User made script, adds the data to be processed into the script ( ie: a JSON document) then calls the interpreter, it returns the response( a JSON document or plain text), i save it to the database with my perl script. The script should be able to have some access to built in functions added to the scripting language by myself, but nothing more. So i've stumbled upon node.js as a javascript interpreter, and and hour or so ago with Google's V8(does v8 makes sense for this kind of thing?). CoffeeScript also came to my mind, since it looks nice and it's still Javascript. I think javascript is widespread enough and more "sandboxeable" since it doesn't have OS calls or anything remotely insecure ( i think ). by the way, i'm writing the system on Perl and Php for the front end. To improve the question: I'm choosing Javascript because i think is secure and simple enough to implement with node.js, but what other alternatives are for achieving this kind of task? Lua? Python? I just can't find information on how to run a sandboxed interpreter in a proper way.

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• Create a thread in xna Update method to find path?

  - by Dan

  I am trying to create a separate thread for my enemy's A* pathfinder which will give me a list of points to get to the player. I have placed the thread in the update method of my enemy. However this seems to cause jittering in the game every-time the thread is called. I have tried calling just the method and this works fine. Is there any way I can sort this out so that I can have the pathfinder on its own thread? Do I need to remove the thread start from the update and start it in the constructor? Is there any way this can work. Here is the code at the moment: bool running = false; bool threadstarted; System.Threading.Thread thread; public void update() { if (running == false && threadstarted == false) { thread = new System.Threading.Thread(PathThread); //thread.Priority = System.Threading.ThreadPriority.Lowest; thread.IsBackground = true; thread.Start(startandendobj); //PathThread(startandendobj); threadstarted = true; } } public void PathThread(object Startandend) { object[] Startandendarray = (object[])Startandend; Point startpoint = (Point)Startandendarray[0]; Point endpoint = (Point)Startandendarray[1]; bool runnable = true; // Path find from 255, 255 to 0,0 on the map foreach(Tile tile in Map) { if(tile.Color == Color.Red) { if (tile.Position.Contains(endpoint)) { runnable = false; } } } if(runnable == true) { running = true; Pathfinder p = new Pathfinder(Map); pathway = p.FindPath(startpoint, endpoint); running = false; threadstarted = false; } }

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• how to create a mirror of minimum size to install Ubuntu

  - by Registered User

  I need to create an http url at my laptop to have a Ubuntu installation begin within my laptop on a Xen environment. This is how the final thing will look like http://bderzhavets.wordpress.com/2008/10/28/install-ubuntu-intrepid-server-pv-domu-at-xen-33-port-via-httpgetco-centos-52-dom0/ the host and client are both going to be my laptop, I Google d and came across apt-mirror and some other packages. I do not want to archive entire 15 GB Ubuntu repositories on my machine. It is not possible to use a CD,ISO,loop mounted disk (reason mentioned below). I have tried using netboot image on local machine which failed because if you are attempting to create a virtual machine on a hardware which does not support VT virt-manager installer necessarily needs a URL of this sort http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/hardy/main/installer-i386/current/images/netboot/ any other option to create guest OS is simply grayed out. The unfortunate part is my Ethernet connections do not work when I boot with Xen-4.0 and a pv-ops Dom0 kernel from Jeremy's tree.Which is where I have to do this work.So I have to create a URL structure which is similar to Ubuntu mirrors.So how can I do this in bare minimum so that at least the console boots and once the console comes I can do some work.

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• Architecture a for a central renderer rather than self-rendering

  - by The Communist Duck

  For the architectural side of rendering, there's two main ways: having each object render itself, and having a single renderer which renders everything. I'm currently aiming for the second idea, for the following reasons: The list can be sorted to only use shaders once. Else each object would have to bind the shader, because it's not sure if it's active. The objects could be sorted and grouped. Easier to swap APIs. With a few macro lines, it can be easy to swap between a DirectX renderer and an OpenGL renderer (not a reason for my project, but still a good point) Easier to manage rendering code Of course, if anyone has strong recommendations for the first method, I will listen to them. But I was wondering how make this work. First idea The renderer has a list of pointers to the renderable components of each entity, which register themselves on RenderCompoent creation. However, I'm worrying that this may end up as a lot of extra pointer weight. But I can sort the list of pointers every so often. Second idea The entire list of entities is passed to the renderer each render call. The renderer then sorts the list (each call, or maybe once?) and gets what it wants. That's a lot of passing and/or sorting, however. Other ideas ??? PROFIT Anyone got ideas? Thank you.

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• How do sites avoid SEO issues / legalities with subdomain unique ids?

  - by JM4

  I was looking through a few websites recently and noticed a trend I'm not sure I understand. Sites are creating unique referral URLs for customers in the form of: http://customname.site.com (If somebody were to use http://www.site.com/customname it would function the same way). I can see the sites are using 302 redirects at some point using Google Chrome then doing some sort of htaccess redirect, taking the subdomain name (customname) and applying it as a referral parameter then keeping in session during the entire process. However, there must be thousands of these custom URLs that people are typing in. How are each one of these "subdomains" not treated as separate URLs which in turn are redirected to the same page (in short, generating tons of links all pointing to the same page which Google would normally frown upon)? Additionally, the links also appear on the site themselves as clickable links so I'm not sure how these are not tracked. Similarly, the "unique" url is not indexed or cached in any Google search results. How is this capability handled? It does NOT highlight the referral aspect, but a true example of this is visiting http://sfgiants.com which does a 302 redirect to the much longer proper San Francisco Giants MLB homepage. I am wondering how SFgiants.com is not indexed (assuming that direct shortened link appears on several MLB pages)? 1 - I know these are 302 redirects, I can see this on the sites network flow. 2 - These links do in fact appear on the page itself because in some areas (for example, the bottom of the page may say: send this page to a friend! http://name.site.com/ which in turn would again redirect to something like http://www.site.com?id=name so the id value could be stored in session

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• Need advice for approach for a web-based app that loads excel worksheet but exposes only the charts

  - by John

  I'm looking for suggestions on the Visual Studio approach to take for a web application that is in the conceptual stage. My environment has a lot of tools: Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard 64bit Visual Studio 2010 Professional Edition Sharepoint 2010 Server Enterprise Edition SQL Server 2008 R2 Office 2010 Professional I know I will need this app to retrieve data from a database (or a web service - not sure exactly at this point). The data needs to be placed in an Excel workbook dynamically. The app will need to have a nice user interface (standard web controls - perhaps with some Javascript effects). The Excel ribbon and worksheet grid will need to be hidden. Some web control(s) will cause the Excel chart(s) to be rendered. I am thinking this sounds like Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) so as to leverage .Net and hide Excel. Can you offer suggestions regarding: One ASP.Net Web App Project One Class Library Project for Excel or perhaps which one of the several different Excel 2010 project types (addin, template, document) Would Excel Services for Sharepoint be useful (or required) ? I am feeling a little overwhelmed with so many choices at this early stage of conceptualizing the app. Can you suggest some ideas for this sort of thing? Also, I am a bit more experienced with C# but I've read VB.Net is better for work with the Excel object model. What are general advises with regard to tool choice and overall approach tradeoffs?

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• Almost time to hit the road again

  - by Chris Williams

  I’ve had a few months of not much traveling, but now that the weather is improving… conference season is starting up again. That means it’s time for me to start hitting the road. In June, I have Tech Ed 2010 in New Orleans, LA. I lived in New Orleans for several years, both as military and civilian and I have a few friends still down there. I haven’t been there since before Hurricane Katrina, so I have mixed feelings about returning… but I am still looking forward to it. Also in June, I have Codestock in Knoxville, TN. Codestock is one of my favorite events, primarily because of the excellent people that speak there and also attend sessions. It’s a great mix of people and technologies. Sometime in July or August, I’m headed to Austin, TX for a couple days. I don’t know the exact date yet, but if you have an event down there in that timeframe, let me know and maybe we can sort something out. In September, I’m heading to Seattle for my first PAX (Penny Arcade Expo.)  I’m going strictly as an attendee and it looks like a LOT of fun. Really excited to check it out. Also in September, I’m headed to Omaha for the Heartland Developers Conference. This is a FANTASTIC event, and certainly one of my local favorites. (I guess local is relative, it’s about a 6 hour drive.) In addition to speaking on WP7, I’ll be doing a series of hands on labs on XNA they day before the conference starts, so that should be a lot of fun as well.   In addition to all this stuff, I have my own XNA User Group to take care of. In August, Andy “The Z-Man” Dunn is coming to speak and check out the various food on a stick offerings at the Minnesota State Fair!

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• What is the proper response to lousy error message?

  - by William Pursell

  I've just come across (for the 47 millionth time) some code that looks like this: except IOError, e: print "Problems reading file: %s." % filename sys.exit( 1 ) My first reaction is very visceral: the person who coded this is a complete idiot. How hard is it to print error messages to stderr and to include the system error message in the string? I haven't used python in years, and it took me all of 4 minutes to track down the documentation to figure out how to get the error message from the exception object e and the syntax for printing to stderr. My "complete idiot" reaction was slightly lessened since at least a non-zero value is passed to sys.exit, but I still find this code offensive. My prime thought is that the developer who wrote this is a complete novice for whom I have zero respect. Am I over-reacting? Surely there are excuses for all sorts of bad coding practices, but is there anything that can possibly excuse this sort of $#|t? I guess there are two question here: one is a duplicate of What are developer's problems with helpful error messages?, and the other is "am I over-reacting, or is it valid to conclude that the author of the above code is a novice?"

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• What determines which Javascript functions are blocking vs non-blocking?

  - by Sean

  I have been doing web-based Javascript (vanilla JS, jQuery, Backbone, etc.) for a few years now, and recently I've been doing some work with Node.js. It took me a while to get the hang of "non-blocking" programming, but I've now gotten used to using callbacks for IO operations and whatnot. I understand that Javascript is single-threaded by nature. I understand the concept of the Node "event queue". What I DON'T understand is what determines whether an individual javascript operation is "blocking" vs. "non-blocking". How do I know which operations I can depend on to produce an output synchronously for me to use in later code, and which ones I'll need to pass callbacks to so I can process the output after the initial operation has completed? Is there a list of Javascript functions somewhere that are asynchronous/non-blocking, and a list of ones that are synchronous/blocking? What is preventing my Javascript app from being one giant race condition? I know that operations that take a long time, like IO operations in Node and AJAX operations on the web, require them to be asynchronous and therefore use callbacks - but who is determining what qualifies as "a long time"? Is there some sort of trigger within these operations that removes them from the normal "event queue"? If not, what makes them different from simple operations like assigning values to variables or looping through arrays, which it seems we can depend on to finish in a synchronous manner? Perhaps I'm not even thinking of this correctly - hoping someone can set me straight. Thanks!

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