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• New to iPhone Development - iOS5 Storyboard

  - by Peter

  I'm new here and pretty new to iOS development. My question is basically, should I learn the old school development methods or just learn how to do things using the latest tools (i.e. Storyboard)? I've had a go with the Storyboard feature of XCode 4.2 and it's very powerful. My only concern is that it requires iOS 5. I don't mind learning the old way of doing things but I've been having trouble finding tutorials/examples for XCode 4.2 that don't use the storyboard. An example would be the with my trouble finding a good tutorial on how to embed a Navigation Controller into a TabBarController. A lot of the material out there seems to be for older version of XCode. Using the storyboard I'm able to set this up with seconds but still haven't managed to get it working without it. So in short :) would you guys suggest I continue my project using the Storyboard or make the extra effort to do things a little more manually?

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• Does *every* project benefit from written specifications?

  - by nikie

  I know this is holy war territory, so please read the question to the end before answering. There are many cases where written specifications make a lot of sense. For example, if you're a contractor and you want to get paid, you need written specs. If you're working in a team with 20 persons, you need written specs. If you're writing a programming language compiler or interpreter (and it's not perl), you'll usually write a formal specification. I don't doubt that there are many more cases where written specifications are a really good idea. I just think that there are cases where there's so little benefit in written specs, that it doesn't outweigh the costs of writing and maintaining them. EDIT: The close votes say that "it is difficult to say what is asked here", so let me clarify: The usefulness of written, detailed specifications is often claimed like a dogma. (If you want examples, look at the comments.) But I don't see the use of them for the kind of development I'm doing. So what is asked here is: How would written specifications help me? Background information: I work for a small company that's developing vertical market software. If our product is easier to use and has better performance than the competition, it sells. If it's harder to use, even if it behaves 100% as the specification says, it doesn't sell. So there are no "external forces" for having written specs. The advantage would have to be somewhere in the development process. Now, I can see how frozen specifications would make a developer's life easier. But we'll never have frozen specs. If we see in the middle of development that feature X is not intuitive to use the way it's specified, then we can only choose between changing the specification or developing a product that won't sell. You'll probably ask by now: How do you know when you're done? Well, we're continually improving our product. The competition does the same. So (hopefully) we're never done. We keep improving the software, and when we reach a point when the benefits of the improvements we've added since the last release outweigh the costs of an update, we create a new release that is then tested, localized, documented and deployed. This also means that there's rarely any schedule pressure. Nobody has to do overtime to make a deadline. If the feature isn't done by the time we want to release the next version, it'll simply go into the next version. The next question might be: How do your developers know what they're supposed to implement? The answer is: They have a lot of domain knowledge. They know the customers business well enough, so a high-level description of the feature (or even just the problem that the customer needs solved) is enough to implement it. If it's not clear, the developer creates a few fake screens to get feedback from marketing/management or customers, but this is nowhere near the level of detail of actual specifications. This might be inefficient for larger teams, but for a small team with low turnover it works quite well. It has the additional benefit that the developer in question often comes up with a better solution than the person writing the specs might have. This question is already getting very long, but let me address one last point: Testing. Like I said in the beginning, if our software behaves 100% like the spec says, it still can be crap. In fact, if it's so unintuitive that you need a spec to know how to test it, it probably is crap. It makes sense to have fixed, written tests for some core functionality and for regression bugs, but again, this is nowhere near a full written spec of how the software should behave when. The main test is: hand the software to a user who doesn't know it yet and tell him to use the new feature X. If she can figure out how to use it and it works, it works.

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• Is there a good reference manual for ruby/rails?

  - by Kevin

  I've found switching from Java to Ruby/Rails to be very difficult. I feel like the rails books and websites that I've seen are program by example, and I have yet to see anything like a complete reference. In the java/spring world there is plenty of examples but also very thorough reference manuals. So even though I can get toy application xyz up and running in an afternoon with rails I'm apprehensive about doing anything of significance. I'm willing to admit that maybe this is because I've done java/spring for a few years and have near zero experience with ruby/rails. Just wondering if anyone else has run into this or if I'm missing something.

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• How to become an expert in Python, PHP and Javascript? [closed]

  - by Andrew Alexander

  So I've been programming for about 9ish months now, and I've taught myself some Python, some PHP and some Javascript. I want to become better at these languages - I can hack something out, but a lot of things like OOP, using lists in the most effective ways, etc, is lost on me. What are the best ways to become an "expert" programmer? Does it depend on the nuances of the language, or is it more general? Is there any math I should be studying alongside it? Obviously a lot depends on what you want to do with it - so far I've mostly done small scale internal applications as well as web programming. How do I find out about good program design?

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• How to estimate effort required to convert a large codebase to another language/platform

  - by Justin Branch

  We have an MFC C++ program with around 200,000 lines of code in it. It's pretty much finished. We'd like to hire someone to convert it to work for Macs, but we are not sure how to properly estimate a reasonable timeline for this project. What techniques can we use to estimate what it would take to convert this project to work on a Mac? Also, is there anything in particular we should be watching out for specific to this sort of conversion?

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• PyQt design issues

  - by Falmarri

  I've been working on a my first real project using PyQt lately. I've done just a little bit of work in Qt for C++ but nothing more than just messing around. I've found that the Qt python bindings are essentially just a straight port of C++ classes into python, which makes sense. The issue is that this creates a lot of messy, unpythonic code. For example if you look at QAbstractItemModel, there's a lot of hoops you have to go through that forces you to hide the actual python. I was just wondering if there's any intention of writing a python implementation of Qt that isn't necessarily just a wrapper? Either by Nokia or anyone else? I really like Qt but I would love to be able to write more pythonic code. I hope this is OK to ask here. I'm not trying to start a GUI war or anything.

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• What encryption algorithm/package should I use in a betting game?

  - by user299648

  I have a betting type site where I publish a number (between 0-100) that is encrypted. Then after a period of time, I would review what the number is and prove it with a key to decrypt the encrypted number to prove that I'm not cheating. I also want it to be easily verifiable by an average user. What encryption algorithm/technique/package should I use? I'm no expert on cryptography. There seems to be so many options out there and I'm not sure what to use. python friendly is a plus.

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• Testing controller logic that uses ISession directly

  - by Rippo

  I have just read this blog post from Jimmy Bogard and was drawn to this comment. Where this falls down is when a component doesn’t support a given layering/architecture. But even with NHibernate, I just use the ISession directly in the controller action these days. Why make things complicated? I then commented on the post and ask this question:- My question here is what options would you have testing the controller logic IF you do not mock out the NHibernate ISession. I am curious what options we have if we utilise the ISession directly on the controller?

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• Finding maximum number of congruent numbers

  - by Stefan Czarnecki

  Let's say we have a multiset (set with possible duplicates) of integers. We would like to find the size of the largest subset of the multiset such that all numbers in the subset are congruent to each other modulo some m 1. For example: 1 4 7 7 8 10 for m = 2 the subsets are: (1, 7, 7) and (4, 8, 10), both having size 3. for m = 3 the subsets are: (1, 4, 7, 7, 10) and (8), the larger set of size 5. for m = 4 the subsets are: (1), (4, 8), (7, 7), (10), the largest set of size 2. At this moment it is evident that the best answer is 5 for m = 3. Given m we can find the size of the largest subset in linear time. Because the answer is always equal or larger than half of the size of the set, it is enough to check for values of m upto median of the set. Also I noticed it is necessary to check for only prime values of m. However if values in the set are large the algorithm is still rather slow. Does anyone have any ideas how to improve it?

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• University teaches DOS-style C++, how to deal with it

  - by gaidal

  Half a year ago I had a look at available programming educations. I chose this one because unlike most of the choices: The majority of the courses seemed to be about something concrete and useful; the languages used are C++ and Java which are platform-independent; later courses include developing for mobile devices and a course on Android development, which seemed modern and relevant. Now after two introductory courses we're just starting with C++, and my programming professor seems a bit weird. He's tested us on things like "why should you use constants" and "why are globals bad" in a kind of mechanical way, without much context, before teaching actual programming. His handouts use system("pause"), system("cls"), and getch() from some conio.h that seems ancient according to what I've read. I just did a task that was about printing the "ASCII letters from 32 to 255" (huh?), with an example picture showing a table with Windows' Extended ASCII - of course I got other results for 128-255 on my Arch Linux that uses Unicode, and this isn't mentioned at all. I don't know, it just doesn't seem right... As if he is teaching programming because he has to, perhaps? Should I bring such things up? Hmm. I was looking forward to learning from someone who really knows stuff, and in an academic, rigorous way, like SICP or something. Aren't professors in programming supposed to be like that? I studied math for a while and every teacher and assistant there were really precise about what they said, but this is my second programming teacher that is sort of disappointing. Oh well. Now, question: Is this what to expect from universities or Not OK, and how do I deal with it? I have never touched the language C++ (or C) until now, and am not the right person to jump up and say "This is So Wrong!", so if I google something and find 10 people who say "xxx is blasphemy", how do I skillfully communicate this? I do think it would be better for those classmates who are total beginners not to learn bad habits (such as these vibes of total ignorance of other platforms!) during the upcoming courses, but don't want to disrespect the teacher. I don't know if it's reasonable or just cocky to bring up things like "what about other platforms?" or "but what about this article or stackoverflow answer that I read that said..." for every assignment? Or, if he keeps ignoring non-Windows-programming, should I give up and focus on my own projects or somehow argue that this really isn't OK nowadays? Are there any programming teachers out there, what do you think? By the way these are web-based courses, all interaction between teachers and students takes place in a forum. EDIT: A few answers seem to be making some incorrect assumptions, so maybe I should add a few things. I have been doing programming for fun on and off for 10 years, am pretty comfortable in 3 languages and read programming blogs et c regularly. Also, I feel kind of done being a student, having a degree in another field. I just need another, relevant diploma to work as a programmer, so I'm going back for that. Studying computer science for 5 years is not for me anymore, even though I enjoy learning and solving problems in my free time. Second, let me highlight that I don't expect it to be like the industry at all, quite the contrary. I expect it to be academic, dry and unnecessarily correct. No, it's not just math. Every professor I have had in math, or Japanese (major) or Chinese (minor) have been very very academic, discussing subtle points for hours with passion. But the courses I'm taking now and a previous one in programming don't seem serious. They neither resemble industry NOR academia. That is the problem. And it's not because I can't learn programming anyway. Third, I don't necessarily want to learn C++ or Android development, and I know I could teach myself those and anything else if I wanted to. But I am going back to school anyway, and those platform-independent languages and mobile stuff made me think that maybe they're serious about teaching something relevant here. Seems like I got this wrong, but we'll see.

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• Personal/career objectives tracker

  - by scottyab

  Looking for a simple, clean and easy to use personal/career objectives tracker for my team of ~10 developers something like what remember the milk is for tasks. At the moment I track these in a google doc, but ideally like a system where I can browse the teams objectives, add a team objective and it automatically appear on members personal objectives. Also where team members can add/manage their own objectives, browse colleges public/team objectives. Ideally it would also have option for people to add personal out side of work objectives for personal dev projects. Anyone used a tool to do this? our a combination of existing tools like gdocs, rtm?

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• Crappy school, what to do? [closed]

  - by zhenka

  I started programming fairly late. I am 24 years old and about to graduate from a local public university with a really poorly designed curriculum and teachers. Most of the work felt like busy work, and no matter how much I try, it all feels like a waste. I know what a good curriculum looks like. I know what books I should read, but alas it's not so in my university. There is no way at this point that I can catch up to those graduating from places like MIT. My question and this is a serious one: what do I do? Do I just postpone learning the theory I would have learned until later and focus on software engineering skills? How important is the theory in terms of landing a job in New York? Any particular things I should focus on to land a software engineer job? I am very motivated and I just wish someone would give me the time and a chance.

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• Javascript: Avoid this and new - further reading? [closed]

  - by Thomas Deutsch

  I do not want this to end in a sort of religious discussion, i want to collect some sources for further reading on this topic. As shown here: Node.js Style and Structure Point 1: Avoid this and new you can find a good example when it could be better to use closures instead of a prototype, and to make every argument explicit. Ok, i agree - could be nice, but i need to know more. Can anyone recommend a good link? Would this make my code 100% object-pattern-free ? (no factory-, repository-, module- pattern?)

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• How to Convert HTML to PDF Using PHP?

  - by Meng Longlong

  PDF or Portable Document Format is a popular file type that is often used for online documents. It's great for distributing downloadable written content, and is frequently used by governments and businesses alike. Because it's a format that's familiar to all, many applications allow the user to convert other document types to the PDF format. PHP is one programming language that has a built-in ability to convert to PDF. PHP scripts can be used to transform file types such as HTML into PDF files.

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• Long term planning and agile?

  - by Ignite

  My team has recently went through the process of laying out a nearly one year plan for our direction of work. We have separated the plan into three phases and each phase will include a couple of launches. I wonder, from an agile point of you, is what we do wrong? I think it's not a bad idea, because we haven't spent too much time on designing anything but the first few steps and it's possible for us to change direction. At the same time it's nice that we don't act with only the near term in sight.

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• Neural network input preprocessing

  - by TND

  It's clear that the effectiveness of a neural network depends strongly on the format you give it to work with. You want to preprocess it into the most convenient form you can algorithmically get to, so that the neural network doesn't have to account for that itself. I'm working on a little project that (surprise!) is going to be using neural networks. My future goal is to eventually use NEAT, which I'm really excited about. Anyway, one of my ideas involves moving entities in continuous 2D space, from a top-down perspective (this would be a really cool game AI). Of course, unless these guys are blind, they're going to be able to see the world around them. There's a lot of different ways this information could be fed into the network. One interesting but expensive way is to simply render a top-down "view" of things, with the entities as dots on the picture, and feed that in. I was hoping for something much simpler to use (at least at first), such as a list of the x (maybe 7 or so) nearest entities and their position in relative polar coordinates, orientation, health, etc., but I'm trying to think of the best way to do it. My first instinct was to order them by distance, which would inherently also train the neural network to consider those more "important". However, I was thinking- what if there's two entities that are nearly the same distance away? They could easily alternate indexes in that list, confusing the network. My question is, is there a better way of representing this? Essentially, the issue is the network needs a good way of keeping track of who's who, while knowing (by being inputted) relevant information about the list of entities it can see. Thanks!

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• "Best fit" to avoid reuse of object instances in a collection

  - by Simon

  Imagine I have a collection of object instances which represent activities for a user to undertake. Dependent on user attributes, I have to randomly select instances to present activities to the user. For some users, I need to present more activities to them than there are available activities in which case, I want to use the following algorithm. If all available activities have already been presented to the user, then re-select a "used" activity, selecting the earliest presented activity ordered by frequency of use. In other words, try to reduce repetition and where repetition is unavoidable, use the instances which have been repeated less often and were presented furthest back in time. Before I go on to code that algorithm, I wondered if there is some existing pattern I can re-use? [EDIT] "Furthest back in time" is not relevant as I will pass the algorithm an ordered collection of used instances where the first entry is the first presented.

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• Unable to debug an encodded javascript?

  - by miles away

  I’m having some problems debugging an encoded javacscript. This script I’m referring to given in this link over here. The encoding here is simple and it works by shifting the unicodes values to whatever Codekey was use during encoding. The code that does the decoding is given here in plain English below:- <script language="javascript"> function dF(s){ var s1=unescape(s.substr(0,s.length-1)); var t=''; for(i=0;i<s1.length;i++)t+=String.fromCharCode(s1.charCodeAt(i)-s.substr(s.length-1,1)); document.write(unescape(t)); } </script> I’m interested in knowing or understanding the values (e.g s1,t). Like for example when the value of i=0 what values would the following attributes / method would hold s1.charCodeAt(i) and s.substr(s.length-1,1) The reason I’m doing this is to understand as to how a CodeKey function really works. I don’t see anything in the code above which tells it to decode on the basis of codekey value. The only thing I can point in the encoding text is the last character which is set to 1 , 2 ,3 or 4 depending upon the codekey selected during encoding process. One can verify using the link I have given above. However, to debug, I’m using firebug addon with the script running as localhost on my wamp server. I’m able to put a breakpoint on the js using firebug but I’m unable to retrieve any of the user defined parameters or functions I mentioned above. I want to know under this context what would be best way to debug this encoded js.

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• Algorithm for flattening overlapping ranges

  - by Joseph

  I am looking for a nice way of flattening (splitting) a list of potentially-overlapping numeric ranges. The problem is very similar to that of this question: Fastest way to split overlapping date ranges, and many others. However, the ranges are not only integers, and I am looking for a decent algorithm that can be easily implemented in Javascript or Python, etc. Example Data: Example Solution: Apologies if this is a duplicate, but I am yet to find a solution.

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• Using macro as an abstraction layer

  - by tehnyit

  I am having a discussion with a colleague about using macro as a thin (extremely) layer of abstraction vs using a function wrapper. The example that I used is Macro way. #define StartOSTimer(period) (microTimerStart(period)) Function wrapper method void StartOSTimer(period) { microTimerStart(period); } Personally, I liked the second method as it allows for future modification, the #include dependencies are also abstracted as well.

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• What are the benefits of Android way of "saving memory" - explicitly passing Context objects everywhere?

  - by Sarge Borsch

  Turned out, this question is not easy to formulate for me, but let's try. In Android, pretty much any UI object depends on a Context, and has defined lifetime. It also can destroy and recreate UI objects and even whole application process at any time, and so on. This makes coding asynchronous operations correctly not straightforward. (and sometimes very cumbersome) But I never have seen a real explanation, why it's done that way? There are other OSes, including mobile OSes (iOS, for example), that don't do such things. So, what are the wins of Android way (Activities & Contexts)? Does that allow Android applications to use much less RAM, or maybe there are other benefits?

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• What are the various development tools beneficial for Java/J2EE developers?

  - by Saurabh

  I am a J2EE developer and have used some tools like Eclipse, ANT, SVN, etc. while developing various projects using Java, Spring, Struts, etc. Can you please tell me what are the other various tools which will help me while building the projects. Are there any tools helping in designing databases, building architecture, etc. It would be great if you can advice some tools which can help me in various software development activities.

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• Is it OK to repeat code for unit tests?

  - by Pete

  I wrote some sorting algorithms for a class assignment and I also wrote a few tests to make sure the algorithms were implemented correctly. My tests are only like 10 lines long and there are 3 of them but only 1 line changes between the 3 so there is a lot of repeated code. Is it better to refactor this code into another method that is then called from each test? Wouldn't I then need to write another test to test the refactoring? Some of the variables can even be moved up to the class level. Should testing classes and methods follow the same rules as regular classes/methods? Here's an example: [TestMethod] public void MergeSortAssertArrayIsSorted() { int[] a = new int[1000]; Random rand = new Random(DateTime.Now.Millisecond); for(int i = 0; i < a.Length; i++) { a[i] = rand.Next(Int16.MaxValue); } int[] b = new int[1000]; a.CopyTo(b, 0); List<int> temp = b.ToList(); temp.Sort(); b = temp.ToArray(); MergeSort merge = new MergeSort(); merge.mergeSort(a, 0, a.Length - 1); CollectionAssert.AreEqual(a, b); } [TestMethod] public void InsertionSortAssertArrayIsSorted() { int[] a = new int[1000]; Random rand = new Random(DateTime.Now.Millisecond); for (int i = 0; i < a.Length; i++) { a[i] = rand.Next(Int16.MaxValue); } int[] b = new int[1000]; a.CopyTo(b, 0); List<int> temp = b.ToList(); temp.Sort(); b = temp.ToArray(); InsertionSort merge = new InsertionSort(); merge.insertionSort(a); CollectionAssert.AreEqual(a, b); }

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• What are common patterns for handling possible pluralization in message properties?

  - by C. Ross

  Obviously users like to see text properly pluralized, and pluralization schemes vary in the various written languages one may encounter. When internationalizing an app, what pattern(s) are useful for handling messages with possible pluralization? What about messages with multiple possible pluralization? For example: "N review(s):" One pattern would be reviews.title.singular="{0} review:" reviews.title.singular="{0} reviews:" And this may not support all languages. Or a more complicated case: "Found M question(s) with N comment(s)." This would be difficult to support in English?

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• How to make creating viewmodels at runtime less painfull

  - by Mr Happy

  I apologize for the long question, it reads a bit as a rant, but I promise it's not! I've summarized my question(s) below In the MVC world, things are straightforward. The Model has state, the View shows the Model, and the Controller does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a controller has no state. To do stuff the Controller has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a controller you care about supplying those dependencies, nothing else. When you execute an action (method on Controller), you use those dependencies to retrieve or update the Model or calling some other domain service. If there's any context, say like some user wants to see the details of a particular item, you pass the Id of that item as parameter to the Action. Nowhere in the Controller is there any reference to any state. So far so good. Enter MVVM. I love WPF, I love data binding. I love frameworks that make data binding to ViewModels even easier (using Caliburn Micro a.t.m.). I feel things are less straightforward in this world though. Let's do the exercise again: the Model has state, the View shows the ViewModel, and the ViewModel does stuff to/with the Model (basically), a ViewModel does have state! (to clarify; maybe it delegates all the properties to one or more Models, but that means it must have a reference to the model one way or another, which is state in itself) To do stuff the ViewModel has some dependencies on web services, repository, the lot. When you instantiate a ViewModel you care about supplying those dependencies, but also the state. And this, ladies and gentlemen, annoys me to no end. Whenever you need to instantiate a ProductDetailsViewModel from the ProductSearchViewModel (from which you called the ProductSearchWebService which in turn returned IEnumerable<ProductDTO>, everybody still with me?), you can do one of these things: call new ProductDetailsViewModel(productDTO, _shoppingCartWebService /* dependcy */);, this is bad, imagine 3 more dependencies, this means the ProductSearchViewModel needs to take on those dependencies as well. Also changing the constructor is painfull. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelFactory.Create().Initialize(productDTO);, the factory is just a Func, they are easily generated by most IoC frameworks. I think this is bad because Init methods are a leaky abstraction. You also can't use the readonly keyword for fields that are set in the Init method. I'm sure there are a few more reasons. call _myInjectedProductDetailsViewModelAbstractFactory.Create(productDTO); So... this is the pattern (abstract factory) that is usually recommended for this type of problem. I though it was genious since it satisfies my craving for static typing, until I actually started using it. The amount of boilerplate code is I think too much (you know, apart from the ridiculous variable names I get use). For each ViewModel that needs runtime parameters you'll get two extra files (factory interface and implementation), and you need to type the non-runtime dependencies like 4 extra times. And each time the dependencies change, you get to change it in the factory as well. It feels like I don't even use an DI container anymore. (I think Castle Windsor has some kind of solution for this [with it's own drawbacks, correct me if I'm wrong]). do something with anonymous types or dictionary. I like my static typing. So, yeah. Mixing state and behavior in this way creates a problem which don't exist at all in MVC. And I feel like there currently isn't a really adequate solution for this problem. Now I'd like to observe some things: People actually use MVVM. So they either don't care about all of the above, or they have some brilliant other solution. I haven't found an indepth example of MVVM with WPF. For example, the NDDD-sample project immensely helped me understand some DDD concepts. I'd really like it if someone could point me in the direction of something similar for MVVM/WPF. Maybe I'm doing MVVM all wrong and I should turn my design upside down. Maybe I shouldn't have this problem at all. Well I know other people have asked the same question so I think I'm not the only one. To summarize Am I correct to conclude that having the ViewModel being an integration point for both state and behavior is the reason for some difficulties with the MVVM pattern as a whole? Is using the abstract factory pattern the only/best way to instantiate a ViewModel in a statically typed way? Is there something like an in depth reference implementation available? Is having a lot of ViewModels with both state/behavior a design smell?

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