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• Content light website and Google - Tell google it's a listings site (as opposed shop, reviews or restaurants)

  - by Doug Firr

  I have a listings style website. Due to the nature of this (listings) the site is content light. Each page is typically less that 50 words but there are many pages. The site in question has had a ton of media coverage and so has some great inbound links from places like Wired, Fast Company, Canada Broadcasting Corporation and many many other bloggers, media websites and recycle related niche authors (It's a recycling site). But Google really ignores it. Traffic from search is very very low - less than 5% of all traffic. I know that using markup you can tell Google whether your site is a restaurant, article, review, shop, local business and a few other categories (https://www.google.com/webmasters/markup-helper/u/0/). Is there a way to tell Google that my site is a listings site? I suspect, but do not know for sure, that part of the problem is that Google simply does not know what my site is? It's a crowdmap where people post curbalerts. The information is useful to people but it is presented in a short, concise way - a pin on a map, a picture and a short description. Adding anything further is not necessary for the site's intended purpose. 1st question - how best to tell the search engines what y site is - listings and not some spammy website? Any recommendations in improving our site's Search presence? You can take a look here if interested: http://tinyurl.com/lxg4hn7

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• tips, guidelines, points to remember for rendering professional code?

  - by ronnieaka

  I'm talking about giving clients professional looking code. The whole nine yards, everything you hardcore professional highly experienced programmers here probably do when coding freelance or for the company you work in. I'm fresh out of college and I'm going into freelance. I just want to be sure that my first few projects leave a good after-taste of professionalism imprinted on the clients' minds. When I Googled what i'm asking here, I was given pages that showed various websites and tools that let you make flashy websites and templates etc. The $N package and such stuff. I can't recall the word experts use for it. Standard, framework [i know that's not it]. English isn't my first language so I'm sorry I don't really don't know the exact phrase for it. That abstract way of writing code so that you don't come across as a sloppy programmer. That above mentioned way for programming websites and desktop software [in python/C/C++/Java]. EDIT: i can work on the accruing vast knowledge and know-how and logic building etc. what i'm asking for is the programming standard/guidelines you guys follow so that the client on seeing code feels that its a professional solution. Like comment blocks, a particular indentation style something like that. Is there any book on it or specific list of points for enterprise type coding by them? Especially here as in my case, for building websites [php for now..], and desktop software [c/c++/java/python]

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• Is Ruby on Rails supposed to have a steep learning curve or is it just me?

  - by Anita

  I'm a self-taught programmer. I've been learning RoR since October with varying intensity (sometimes all day, sometimes nothing for several weeks). Before that I knew only Java, but knew it pretty well. I've heard so much hype about RoR and how it's supposed to make you happy, productive, etc. So far it's only made me frustrated. I learned it out of the Agile book, and I suspect part of the difficulty might have to do with my not knowing JavaScript and CSS, and having only a shaky grasp of databases and HTML. But apparently it took me much longer to complete the project in the Agile book than other people, and I still don't remember much of it. There are some things about Rails that I just can't seem to get, e.g. when to use symbols and when NOT to, or how dynamic methods are called. Recently I was given a small Rails assignment where I'm asked to make a small change to the interface. It's taken me around 25 hours and although I've made some progress in understanding the code, I still have no idea how to proceed. I can't even ask Stack Overflow because there is so much code I'll have to provide to give context. So my question is in the title: is RoR supposed to take a long time to learn or am I just slow? Can it be that I've been learning from the wrong book? My learning style is such that I either understand nothing or understand everything, if that makes sense. Thanks!

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• Continuous Retraining Tutorials

  - by foampile

  I am looking for an online resource in which you can sortof design your future professional profile and it would provide you a set of tutorials that you would complete to get a basic level of familiarity with related technologies. One of my professional problems is my learning style: I can learn either by direct hands-on experience OR by following a rigid training program that goes in a linear progression. I have a hard time learning things in a multidimensional environment where the biggest challenge is to determine what needs to be learned and how to pick from a ton of books and the least problem is to go through the actual material. So I am looking for a reputable source that will knock those two confusing questions out for me so I can kick back and continuously be upgrading my skills without having to worry about what and how myself. I have found some decent online tutorials for various technologies but never found a single place that has all or most developer education tutorials that all follow the same or similar interface. I am kindof a lazy learner and would rather follow confirmed learning steps than be figuring my own education path just to realize I did it all wrong down the road. Is there a tutorial mega-boutique like that online?

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• How to manage Agile developers working with traditional (serial) business persons?

  - by Riggy

  Good afternoon, My work environment has some problems. Our IT team is trying to be more agile, but we're not really getting buy-in from the business. They attend our daily stand-ups and sprint reviews, and they help with sprint planning, but then they turn around and do 4 months of requirements gathering for a project before moving forward with a (mostly) serial development style. The sprint goals are things like "get XX% closer to release". For the IT team, they've turned the Sprints into a sort of death march. We end a Sprint one day and start a new Sprint the very next day. There's no reflection or changes done between sprints, only during. Having never done any of the agile methodologies before, I haven't had a very pleasant introduction to them. So my questions are: 1) Should there be some time (perhaps a week or so) between sprints to do the reflection/introspection/changes/etc.? Or are back-to-back-to-back sprints the norm? 2) Is there any chance for survival for an agile team with no agile business counter-parts? If not, are there some transitional methodologies or even tips for moving the business towards an iterative if not necessarily agile mindset? 3) Should your entire team be on every sprint? We have almost 20 programmers on a single sprint but working on completely different projects (typically teams of 3-5, sometimes larger). Is it normal to have a single sprint or should we be trying to manage multiple independent sprints? Should we be trying to keep the multiple sprints in concurrent lockstep or should their timetables be allowed to overlap and be flexible? Any thoughts or advice is appreciated. This is my first time coming over from SO for a question, so please let me know if there are better ways to phrase these kinds of questions (faq was rather helpful, but still not sure I'm following it perfectly). Thanks!

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• Differentiating between user script input formats

  - by KChaloux

  I have a .NET project at work that provides a couple of (Iron)Python scripts to the customers, to allow them to customize the output of the program. The application generates code for certain machines, and supports a couple of different formats. Until recently, we only provided a script for one format. We're expanding upon that to include support for the others. If the user is using a script, they select their input script before generating the output code. A script designed for Format1 output is going to cause errors if they're trying to generate Format2 output. I need to deal with this. One option would just be to let the customers use common sense, and if they load the wrong script it will just fail, or worse, produce inaccurate data. I'm inclined to provide a little more protection than that. At the moment I'm considering putting a shebang-style comment line at the top of the script, ala: # OUTPUT - Format1 If the user tries to run a Format2 process with a Format1 script, it will warn them. Alternatively I could create different file extensions for the input scripts that vary by type. The file-type comment approach helps prevent the script from actually loading improperly, at the cost of failing to warn the user until they've already selected it, via a dialog box. Using different file extensions would allow me to cut down on visual clutter when providing a File Dialog, but doesn't actually stop them from loading the wrong script. So I'm really not sure if the right approach is to just leave it alone, or provide some safeguards.

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• What technologies are needed to be a freelance web developer / designer targeting small businesses?

  - by Jason Wirth

  First off, I'm not looking for this answer: "learn PHP/MySQL, JQuery, HTML/CSS...." My background, I wear many hats, and do many things. Currently I manage investment accounts with a business partner who is also a friend. He happens to be attending business / law school perusing a joint JD and MBA. As a result, we're putting our into "coast", maintaining our current clients, but not acquiring more. Recently I've picked up some freelance graphic design / web development / online marketing side work (Photoshop, HTML/CSS, WordPress) through some personal networks. The work is enjoyable; now I'm thinking about expanding it into a larger business with these primary goals: augment my finances (I'm shooting for about $1,000-2,000 per mo.), learn new technologies, involve myself with meaningful work. As an entrepreneur I don't mind the aspects of running a business that hassle other freelancers... -- the marketing -- the billing -- etc. I'm considering targeting the small to middle market businesses and organizations where I can contribute in marketing, design, and development building projects from the ground up. Thus I'll have freedom to decide the specific technology (I won't have to work with an existing code base). What kinds of projects should I focus on? What technologies are a good fit for this style of work? For example: It might be fun to develop with Ruby on Rails. However, maybe a lot of projects would be rolling out e-commerce solutions. Thus, I should focus on PHP due to more shopping cart options, skipping ROR entirely.

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• What is the average page size for single page application (SPA)? [on hold]

  - by Emmanuel Istace

  I'm developing a single page application with a lot of css & javascript. For now the page is 1.3Mo composed by 5 section. Here are the rounded stats : Document : 10kb Style : 60kb Images : 450 kb (already compressed, include a big gallery thumbnails) Javascript : 700kb - 600kb of "framework" (jquery, jquery-ui, boostrap, modernizer, waypoint, ...) and 100kb of custom js. Fonts : 125kb And the site is not finished yet. (Will include gmap api, and some others...) My questions are : Do you have any statistics about the average weight of an SPA? As this is the whole website, do you think it's acceptable? Is lazy load (for images) a solution? What will be impact for SEO ? Is the "200kb rule" of google still relevant? Do you know great tools to detect which javascript code is not used during the the exection of a page and then the availability to optimize these 700kb of framework js stuffs? Can a caching strategy be an answer?

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• What patterns book for iOS development contains this specific information? [closed]

  - by Brett Ryan

  I've read several books on iOS development and Objective-C, however what a lot of them teach is how to work with interfaces and all contain the model inside the view controller, i.e. a UITableViewController based view will simply have an NSArray as it's model. I'm interested in what the best practices are for designing the structure of an application. Specifically I'm interested in best practices for the following: How to separate a model from the view controller. I think I know how to do this by simply replacing the NSArray style example with a specific model object, however what I do not know how to do is alert the view when the model changes. For example in .NET I would solve this by conforming to INotifyPropertyChanged and databinding, and similarly with Java I would use PropertyChangeListener. How to create a service model for my domain objects. For example I want to learn the best way to create a service for a hypothetical Widget object to manage an internal DB and also services for communicating with remote endpoints. I need to learn the best ways to do this in a way that interface components can subscribe to events such as widgetUpdated. These services should be singleton classes and some how dependency injected into model/controller objects. Books I've read so far are: Programming in Objective-C (4th Edition) Beginning iOS 5 Development: Exploring the iOS SDK The iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook: Expanded Electronic Edition: Essentials and Advanced Recipes for iOS Programmers Learn Objective-C on the Mac: For OS X and iOS I've also purchased the following updated books but not yet read them. The Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook (4th edition Programming in Objective-C (5th Edition) I come from a Java and C# background with 15 years experience, I understand that many of the ways I would do things in these languages may not fit to the ObjC way of developing applications. Would someone be able to provide me with the book on this topic containing this specific subject matter?

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• Working with lots of cubes. Improving performance?

  - by Randomman159

  Edit: To sum the question up, I have a voxel based world (Minecraft style (Thanks Communist Duck)) which is suffering from poor performance. I am not positive on the source but would like any possible advice on how to get rid of it. I am working on a project where a world consists of a large quantity of cubes (I would give you a number, but it is user defined worlds). My test one is around (48 x 32 x 48) blocks. Basically these blocks don't do anything in themselves. They just sit there. They start being used when it comes to player interaction. I need to check what cubes the users mouse interacts with (mouse over, clicking, etc.), and for collision detecting as the player moves. Now I had a massive amount of lag at first, looping through every block. I have managed to decrease that lag, by looping through all the blocks, and finding which blocks are within a particular range of the character, and then only looping through those blocks for the collision detection, etc. However, I am still going at a depressing 2fps. Does anyone have any other ideas on how I could decrease this lag? Btw, I am using XNA (C#) and yes, it is 3d.

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• When using MVVM, should you create new viewmodels, or swap out the models?

  - by ConditionRacer

  Say I have a viewmodel like this: public class EmployeeViewModel { private EmployeeModel _model; public Color BackgroundColor { get; set; } public Name { get { return _model.Name; } set { _model.Name = value; NotifyPropertyChanged(Name); } } } So this viewmodel binds to a view that displays an employee. The thing to think about is, does this viewmodel represent an employee, or a "displayable" employee. The viewmodel contains some things that are view specific, for instance the background color. There can be many employees, but only one employee view. With this in mind, when changing the displayed employee, does it make sense to create a new EmployeeViewModel and rebind to the view, or simply swap out the EmployeeModel. Is the distinction even important, or is it a matter of style? I've always leaned toward creating new viewmodels, but I am working on a project where the viewmodels are created once and the models are swapped out. I'm not sure how I feel about this, though it seems to work fine.

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• How to enable the user to add background images to anchor links thought Wordpress admin panel? [closed]

  - by janoChen

  I have css selectors like this on in my style.css: .jimgMenu ul li.landscapes a { background: url(../images/landscapes.jpg) repeat scroll 0%; } What's the easiest way to enable the user to add background images to anchor links like the ones below? front-page.php: <div class="jimgMenu"> <ul> <li class="landscapes"><a href="#nogo">Landscapes</a></li> <li class="people"><a href="#nogo">People</a></li> <li class="nature"><a href="#nogo">Nature</a></li> <li class="abstract"><a href="#nogo">Abstract</a></li> <li class="urban"><a href="#nogo">Urban</a></li> <li class="people2"><a href="#nogo">People</a></li> </ul> </div> To illustrate: .jimgMenu ul li.landscapes a { background: url(<add background image>) repeat scroll 0%; } What that code would look like?

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• JQueryMobile - Problems with dialog boxes [closed]

  - by Richard van Hees

  I'm programming in JQueryMobile, but I can't seem to get some things as I want. First it's good to tell I am mostly programming in a multi-page template. I have a login function in the web based app. The idea is that the user sees he's not logged in and the user can click on the button to log in. A dialog box pops up, in which the user can enter his credentials. This dialog box is in front of the previous page, in my case just index.php. The page for profile is at profile.php#profile. In this case the url for the dialog box is index.php#profile&ui-state=dialog. Don't ask me why, that's how JQueryMobile works, I guess. Anyway, after the user clicks on 'Login' in the pop-up, I want a new dialog to pop-up in which it says you are logged in and I want the content of the page behind it (index.php#profile) to refresh. Of course I want this all to move very smooth and no refreshing of the whole page, to prevent loading time and thus a blank screen for a second. In short: User not logged in Clicks on login Dialog pops up with form Clicks login New dialog pops up with 'success' (or whatever) in the same style as the previous dialog Clicks ok Page behind the dialogues has been refreshed without user noticing Also another thing that doesn't really work out for me: I can't seem to get a dialog to pop up, triggered by an action in another dialog. It just appears as a normal page.

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• Returning a flexible datatype from a C++ function

  - by GavinH

  I'm developing for a legacy C++ application which uses ODBC for it's data access. Coming from a C# background, I really miss the ADO style of data access. I'm writing a wrapper (because we can't actually use ADO) to make our data access less painful. This means no char arrays, no manual text blob streaming, and no declaritive column binding. I'm struggling with how to store / return data values. In C# at least, you can declare an object and cast it to whatever (as long as the type is convertable). My current C++ solution is to use boost::any to store the data value in a custom DataColumnValue object. This class has conversion and assignment operators to the various types used in our app (more than 10). There's a bit of complexity here because if you store an int in the boost::any and try to boost::any_cast<long> you get a boost::bad_any_cast. Client objects shouldn't have to know how the value is stored internally. Does anyone have any experience trying to store / return values whose types are only known at runtime? Is there a better / cleaner way?

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• Working Qt controls in a 3d environment

  - by Jay

  I need some advice from a Qt expert. The background: I have a 3D engine (ogre3d) working in concert with Qt. The 3D Content is displayed in a widget (using a custom OS window in the client area). I'm able to overlay arbitrary Qt widgets onto the 3d world using the widget render() method and a shared bitmap. This makes a great "heads up display". I can use the standard Qt style sheets and animation using this technique. My goal I'd like to go a step further and allow the user to move these rendered widgets using the mouse. I'd like some advice on the best way to implement this. Possible solutions: The widgets in the HUD are not part of the inheritance chain. I render them manually. They don't get events though. I could add them to the inheritance chain so they get events in the usual way. Then I would need to change them to render to my shared bitmap instead of to the operating system. I looked at this once but couldn't find enough information to implement it. Capture mouse events in the 3D display widget and EMIT them to child controls. I basically create my own event handling chain. Any suggestions on how to implement this? I'm also considering switching to Qt5. I'm not sure how that might affect this decision.

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• How to encourage domain experts familiar only with C into a C++ opensource project [closed]

  - by paperjam

  Possible Duplicate: How to persuade C fanatics to work on my C++ open source project? I am launching an open-source project into a space where a lot of development is done Linux-kernel-style, i.e. C-language with a low-level mindset. My project is broad and complex and uses aspects of the C++ language and libraries, including the Boost library to best effect for simple, slightly syntactically sweetened, elegant and well structured high level code. We are using C++ templates too to avoid duplication of code and for static polymorphism in code specialisation for performance. Many of the experts in this field are well used to pure C-language projects. How can I persuade them to contribute to my idiomatic C++ based project? I have no objection to C-language subcomponents or the use of a C-like subset for parts of the project so that might be part of the answer. This is a rewritten and retagged rehash of my previous question that was closed. Apologies to those who read and answered for it not being constructive. I hope this new question is viewed as constructive. Please note that this is not a language advocacy question and please keep answers in that spirit.

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• Allowing client to select data to return via REST interface

  - by CMP

  I have a rest service that is essentially a proxy to a variety of other services. So if I call GET /users/{id} It will get their user profile, as well as order history, and contact info, etc... all from various services, and aggregates them into one nice object. My problem is that each call to a different service has the potential to add time to the original request, so we would rather not get ALL the data ALL of the time if a particular client does not care about all of the pieces. A solution I have arrived at is to do something like this: GET /users/{id}?includeOrders=true&includeX=true&includeY=true... That works, and it allow me to do only what I need to, but it is cumbersome. We have added enough different data sources that there are too many parameters for that style to be useful. I could do something similar with a single integer and a bitmask or something, but that only makes it harder to read, and it does not feel very Restful. I could break it down into multiple calls so they would need to call /users/{id}/orders and /users/{id}/profile separately, but that sort of defeats the purpose of an aggregating proxy, who's purpose is to make clients jobs easier. Are there any good patterns that can help me return just enough data for each client, without making it too difficult for them to filter and select what they want?

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• How to persuade C fanatics to work on my C++ open source project?

  - by paperjam

  I am launching an open-source project into a space where a lot of the development is still done Linux-kernel-style, i.e. C-language with a low-level mindset. There are multiple benefits to C++ in our space but I fear those used to working in C will be scared off. How can I make the case for the benefits of C++? Specifically, the following C++ attributes are very valuable: concept of objects and reference-counting pointers - really don't want to have to malloc(sizeof(X)) or memcpy() structs templates for specialising whole bodies of code with specific performance optimizations and for avoiding duplication of code. template metaprogramming related to the above syntactic sweetness available (e.g. operator overloading, to be used in very small doses) STL Boost libraries Many of the knee-jerk negative reactions to C++ are illfounded. Performance does not suffer: modern compilers can flatten dozens of call stack levels and avoid bloat through wide use of template specializations. Granted, when using metaprogramming and building multiple specializations of a large call tree, compile time is slower but there are ways to mitigate this. How can I sell C++?

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• In developing a soap client proxy, which return structure is easier to use and more sensible?

  - by cori

  I'm writing (in PHP) a client/proxy for a SOAP web service. The return types are consistently wrapped in response objects that contain the return values. In many cases this make a lot of sense - for instance when multiple values are being returned: GetDetailsResponse Object ( Results Object ( [TotalResults] => 10 [NextPage] => 2 ) [Details] => Array ( [0] => Detail Object ( [Id] => 1 ) ) ) But some of the methods return a single scalar value or a single object or array wrapped in a response object: GetThingummyIdResponse Object ( [ThingummyId] => 42 ) In some cases these objects might be pretty deep, so getting at properties within requires drilling down several layers: $response->Details->Detail[0]->Contents->Item[5]->Id And if I unwrap them before passing them back I can strip out a layer from consumers' code. I know I'm probably being a little bit of an Architecture Astronaut here, but the latter style really bug me, so I've been working through my code to have my proxy methods just return the scalar value to the client code where there's no absolute need for a wrapper object. My question is, am I actually making things more difficult for the consumers of my code? Would I be better off just leaving the return values wrapped in response objects so that everything is consistent, or is removing unneccessary layers of indirection/abstraction worthwhile?

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• Building My First JavaFX Application Using Netbeans 7.1

  - by javafx4you

  Angela Caicedo, Oracle Technology Evangelist for JavaFX, has released a series of videos demonstrating how to build a simple JavaFX application using Netbeans 7.1. This video series is a great introduction to using JavaFX and takes the viewer through easy to follow, step-by-step instructions, including example code and showing the results along the way. These videos are highly recommend to anyone who is new to JavaFX and is looking for a quick getting started guide.  The first video provides an introduction to the the application and shows viewers the end result of the exercises that will be demonstrated throughout the series. The second video (Part 1) demonstrates how to get started creating the application from an empty project to build your first JavaFX application in Netbeans 7.1. Instructions include defining the components, creating and inserting image packages, adding the resources you want to make available in your application, setting the clipping area for you image, and setting the style for your image to create a transparent window. The third video (Part 2) demonstrates how to handle events and binding in the sample application using JavaFX. Watch the first 3 episodes now and stay tuned for future installments in this series on the Java YouTube channel.

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• High-level strategy for distinguishing a regular string from invalid JSON (ie. JSON-like string detection)

  - by Jonline

  Disclaimer On Absence of Code: I have no code to post because I haven't started writing; was looking for more theoretical guidance as I doubt I'll have trouble coding it but am pretty befuddled on what approach(es) would yield best results. I'm not seeking any code, either, though; just direction. Dilemma I'm toying with adding a "magic method"-style feature to a UI I'm building for a client, and it would require intelligently detecting whether or not a string was meant to be JSON as against a simple string. I had considered these general ideas: Look for a sort of arbitrarily-determined acceptable ratio of the frequency of JSON-like syntax (ie. regex to find strings separated by colons; look for colons between curly-braces, etc.) to the number of quote-encapsulated strings + nulls, bools and ints/floats. But the smaller the data set, the more fickle this would get look for key identifiers like opening and closing curly braces... not sure if there even are more easy identifiers, and this doesn't appeal anyway because it's so prescriptive about the kinds of mistakes it could find try incrementally parsing chunks, as those between curly braces, and seeing what proportion of these fractional statements turn out to be valid JSON; this seems like it would suffer less than (1) from smaller datasets, but would probably be much more processing-intensive, and very susceptible to a missing or inverted brace Just curious if the computational folks or algorithm pros out there had any approaches in mind that my semantics-oriented brain might have missed. PS: It occurs to me that natural language processing, about which I am totally ignorant, might be a cool approach; but, if NLP is a good strategy here, it sort of doesn't matter because I have zero experience with it and don't have time to learn & then implement/ this feature isn't worth it to the client.

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• Windows Phone 7 v. Windows 8 Metro &ldquo;Same but Different&rdquo;

  - by ryanabr

  I have been doing development on both the Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 Metro style applications over the past month and have really been enjoying doing both. What is great is that Silverlight is used for both development platforms. What is frustrating is the "Same but Different" nature of both platforms. Many similar services and ways of doing things are available on both platforms, but the objects, namespaces, and ways of handling certain cases are different. I almost had a heart attack when I thought that XmlDocument had been removed from the new WinRT. I was relived (but a little annoyed)  when I found out that it had shifted from the "System.Xml" namespace to the "Windows.Data.Xml.Dom" namespace. In my opinion this is worse than deprecating and reintroducing it since there isn't the lead time to know that the change is coming, maker changes and adjust. I also think the breaks the compatibility that is advertised between the WinRT and .NET framework from a programming perspective, as the code base will have to be physically different if compiled for one platform versus the other. Which brings up another issue, the need for separate DLLs with for the different platforms that contain the same C# code behind them which seems like the beginning of a code maintenance headache. Historically, I have kept source files "co-located" with the projects that they are compiled into. After doing some research, I think I will end up keeping "common" files that need to be compiled in to DLLs for the different platforms in a seperate location in TFS, not directly included in any one Visual Studio project, but added as links in the project that would get compiled into the windows 7 phone, or Windows 8. This will work fine, except for the case where dependencies don't line up for each platform as described above, but will work fine for base classes that do the raw work at the most basic programming level.

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• Best way to generate pieces in match-3 games, and then tracking them?

  - by JonLim

  I've been working on a match-3 style game in Actionscript using Flixel, and so far, I've been able to build the core mechanics of the game, including board generation, piece generation, piece swapping and movement, and checking algorithms. However, I am now running into issues with clearing out pieces and letting the above pieces fall down and generating new pieces. The reason I'm running into these issues is that when all of the pieces are generated, the pertinent values (position, sprite ID, and sprite object) are pushed into an array that helps me track everything, all the time. When pieces are moved, I swap the values of the corresponding arrays and life goes on. And that array is the core of my problem: if a row in the middle of the board clears out, ideally, all of the pieces above the cleared pieces should fall down to take their place and new pieces are generated at the top and also fall into place. Except if I try to do that now, all the pieces can fall down, but then I'd have to bump all of their values into the right arrays (oh god my head) and then generate new pieces and fit THOSE into the correct place in the array. Am I overthinking this? Or is there a far better way to track these pieces? Thanks guys!

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• Random generation of interesting puzzle levels?

  - by monsterfarm

  I'm making a Sokoban-like game i.e. there's a grid that has some crates on it you can push and you have to get the crates on crosses to win the level (although I'm going to add some extra elements to it). Are there any general algorithms or reading material I can look at for how I could go about generating interesting (as in, not trivial to solve) levels for this style of game? I'm aware that random level generators exist for Sokoban but I'm having trouble finding the algorithm descriptions. I'm interested in making a game where the machine can generate lots of levels for me, sorted by difficulty. I'm even willing to constrain the rules of the game to make the level generation easier (e.g. I'll probably limit the grid size to about 7x7). I suspect there are some general ways to do level generation here as I've seen e.g. Traffic Jam-like games (where you have to move blocks around the free some block) with 1000s of levels where each one has a unique solution. One idea I had was to generate a random map in its final state (i.e. where all crates are on top of their crosses) and then the computer would pull (instead of push) these crates around to create a level. The nice property here is that we know the level is solvable. However, I'd need some heuristics to ensure the level was interesting.

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• Now that Apple's intending to deprecate Java on OS X, what language should I focus on?

  - by Smalltown2000

  After getting shot down on SO, I'll try this here: I'm sure you'll all know of Apple's recent announcement to deprecate Java on OS X (such as discussed here). I've recently come back to programming in the last year or so since I originally learnt on ye olde BASIC many years ago. I have a Mac at home and a PC at work and whilst I have got Windows and Ubuntu installed on my Mac as VMs, I chose to focus my "relearning" on VB first (as it was closest to BASIC) and then rapidly moved to Java as it was cross platform (with minimal effort) and so it was easiest to work on code from both OSes. So my question, if the winds of change on Mac are blowing away from Java and in this post-Sun era, what would be the best language to focus my new efforts on? Please note, this isn't a general "which language is better?" thread and or an opportunity for the associated flame-war. There's plenty of those and it's not the point. I realise that in the long term one shouldn't be allegiant to an individual language so, taking this as an excuse, the question is specifically which is going to be the most quick to be productive on given the background whilst bearing in mind minimum portability rewrites (aspiration rather then requirement) and with a long term value of usage. To that I see the main options as: C# - Closest in "style" to Java but M$ dependent (unless you consider Mono of course) C++ - Hugely complex but if even slightly conquered, then a win? Is it worth the climb up the learning curve? VB.Net - Already have background so easiest to go back to but who uses VB for .Net these days? Surely if using a CLI language I should use C#... Python - Cross-platform but what about UI for the end-user? EDIT: As a usage priority, I envision desktop application programming. Though the ability to branch in the future is always desirable. I guess graphics are the next direction once basics are in place.

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