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• Relation between developers and clients

  - by guiman

  Hi everyone, i've been facing a situation at work and i would like to share it with you and tell me: Did you had to do it to? Should a developer be in direct contact wit the client? Or there should be an "adapter" guy that translates client needs in pseudo formal requirements understandable to us? I'm currently working in a small company that its taking care of implementing lots of systems, most of them for goverment institutions, in witch it generally means taking software developted 20 years ago and refurbish them so fit up-to-date needs. The clients generally are very used to them and tend to discourage change (they are in their 50s 60s give or take, so not technologie-friendly in general). As you can imagine, dev-team in most cases starts taking care of relation with clients, generating the documentation needed in this cases (CU usually), assisting to weekly meets to see improvements with clients. As for experience, this is a gold mine for me, because gives a nice perspective on all the aspects of software development, but also some problems rise because, if developers come from mars then client are from venus. So there is a fine gap on the vocabulary/experience/capability-to-interpret-needs that generates an noice in the communication, and some times affecting the final product.

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• Need help with ColdFusion and ASP.NET site [closed]

  - by Michael Stone

  To begin, I wasn't too sure how to title this.. I've got a few questions. First off, I've got a very big site that's in ColdFusion and we've been migrating to ASP.NET C# 4.0 the last 8 months. I've got a team of 7 programmers and no one can seem to figure out these answers, not even our senior C# programmer. We're using Team Foundation Server and we can't figure out how to only push up one small change at time. Right now we're stuck to publishing the entire site and it's causing serious issues. We've currently got the site as a Project and not a Website. We're wondering if that's one issue. I actually think it might be a problem. We're also dealing with an issue where we can't access our regular folders with relative paths. So we're first developing our admin side in .NET and We've got our regular site and then we've got another site within that for our .NET admin tools. By site, I'm referring to them actually being Sites in IIS. This also creates a problem for us when we're creating tools that upload images and want to store them and access them from our parent Site. I'd very much appreciate any advice on how to go about this in the most standardized way. So what I'm hoping for is advise on: -Publishing and managing a site/project in Team Foundation Server. Being able to push up one fix at a time if needed would be GREAT! -Any help figuring out the issuing referencing folders from my .NET child site to my parent ColdFusion site using regular relative paths. "/a/images/b/" would be nice nice instead of only being able to do "/b/images/" We're using ColdFusion 8, C# Asp.NET 4.0/Entity Framework/POCO Templates, and a Windows 2008 R2 Server. Thank you in advance for any help.

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• Dynamic Jump spot

  - by Pasquale Sada

  I have an initial velocity V(Vx,Vy,VZ) and a spot where he stands still at S(Sx,Sy,Sz). What I'm trying to achieve is a jump on a spot E(Ex,Ey,Ez) where you have clicked on(only lower or higher spot, because I've in place a simple steering behavior for even terrains). There are no obstacle around. I've implemented a formula that can make him jump in a precise way on a spot but you need to declare an angle: the problem arise when the selected spot is straight above your head. It' pretty lame that the char hang there and can reach a thing that is 1cm above is head. I'll share the code I'm using: Vector3 dir = target - transform.position; // get target direction float h = dir.y; // get height difference dir.y = 0; // retain only the horizontal direction float dist = dir.magnitude ; // get horizontal distance float a = angle * Mathf.Deg2Rad; // convert angle to radians dir.y = dist * Mathf.Tan(a); // set dir to the elevation angle dist += h / Mathf.Tan(a); // correct for small height differences // calculate the velocity magnitude float vel = Mathf.Sqrt(dist * Physics.gravity.magnitude / Mathf.Sin(2 *a)); return vel * dir.normalized;

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• 3D physics engine for accurate collision handling on desktop/laptop computers (non-console)

  - by Georges Oates Larsen

  What are your suggestions for a physics engine that satisfies the following criteria? Capable of calculating collisions between multiple concave mesh-based colliders Handles many collisions going on at once (for instance one mesh being wedged between two others, which themselves may be wedged between two meshes) Does not allow for collider passthrough, even at high speeds. For instance, if I am applying force to a programmatically hinged object that makes it spin, I do not want it to pass through another rigidbody that it collides with while spinning. I have this problem using PhysX As implied before, reacts well to hinged objects, preferably has its own implementation of a hinge, but I am willing to program my own. The important part is that it has some sort of interface that guarantees accurate collision tracking even when dealing with these things Platform independent -- runs on mac as well as PC, also not tied down to specific graphics cards I think that's the best way to explain what I am looking for. Basically, I need SUPER reliable collisions. Something that can't be accomplished with a simple ray casting approach that sends a ray from the last position of the object to the current position (as this object may be potentially large and colliding with small objects via rotation) Bonus points for also including an OPEN SOURCE engine.

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• Tracking "To Do" Items

  - by Bill Graziano

  One of the challenges I struggle with is keeping a good "to do" list of things I need to do on the various SQL Servers I support. I have servers that I don't visit on a regular basis so my situation may be different than many of you. Though I'm sure you all have servers that you only touch every few months. (And it's usually the accounting server!) It's difficult for me to remember what changes I made and what changes I need to make. I've tried Outlook, OneNote and various other to do list managers and haven't been happy with any of them. Many are close but just don't give me what I need. As a result I've started writing my own. It's web-based so you can use it from anywhere -- including on a server. It also knows just enough about SQL Server to help structure your to do items and your notes. It isn't agent based and doesn't do any monitoring. Think OneNote or Evernote but with some "SQL Servery" stuff built in. If you'd like to try this or take a survey I'm putting together, add your email address to my mailing list.  I should be ready in a week or so.  I'm only going to use this list for notifications about this service. I'd like to find a small group of people that feel the same pain I do and maybe we can build something interesting.

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• Why is my query soooooo slow?

  - by geekrutherford

  A stored procedure used in our production environment recently became so slow it cause the calling web service to begin timing out. When running the stored procedure in Query Analyzer it took nearly 3 minutes to complete.   The stored procedure itself does little more than create a small bit of dynamic SQL which calls a view with a where clause at the end.   At first the thought was that the query used within the view needed to be optimized. The query is quite long and therefore easy to jump to this conclusion.   Fortunately, after bringing the issue to the attention of a coworker they asked "is there a where clause, and if so, is there an index on the column(s) in it?" I had no idea and quickly said as much. A quick check on the table/column utilized in the where clause indicated indeed there was no index.   Before adding the index, and after admitting I am no SQL wiz, I checked the internet for info on the difference between clustered and non-clustered indexes. I found the following site quite helpful OdeToCode. After adding the non-clustered index on the column, the query that used to take nearly 3 minutes now takes 10 seconds! Ah, if only I'd thought to do this ahead of time!

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• Costs/profit of/when starting an indie company

  - by Jack

  In short, I want to start a game company. I do not have much coding experience (just basic understanding and ability to write basic programs), any graphics design experience, any audio mixing experience, or whatever else technical. However, I do have a lot of ideas, great analytical skills and a very logical approach to life. I do not have any friends who are even remotely technical (or creative in regards to games for that matter). So now that we've cleared that up, my question is this: how much, minimally, would it cost me to start such a company? I know that a game could be developed in under half a year, which means it would have to operate for half a year prior, and that's assuming that the people working on the first project do their jobs good, don't leave game breaking bugs, a bunch of minor bugs, etc.. So how much would it cost me, and what would be the likely profit in half a year? I'm looking at minimal costs here, as to do it, I would have to sell my current apartment and buy a new, smaller one, pay taxes, and likely move to US/CA/UK to be closer to technologically advanced people (and be able to speak the language of course). EDIT: I'm looking at a small project for starters, not a huge AAA title.

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• Embedded Nashorn in JEditorPane

  - by Geertjan

  Here's a prototype for some kind of backoffice content management system. Several interesting goodies are included, such as an embedded JavaScript editor, as can be seen in the screenshot: Key items of interest in the above are as follows: Embedded JavaScript editor (i.e., the latest and greatest Nashorn technology, look it up, if you're not aware of what that is.) The way that's done is to include the relevant JavaScript modules in your NetBeans Platform application. Make very sure to include "Lexer to NetBeans Bridge", which does a bunch of critical stuff under the hood. The JEditorPane is defined as follows, along the lines that I blogged about recently thanks to Steven Yi: javaScriptPane.setContentType("text/javascript"); EditorKit kit = CloneableEditorSupport.getEditorKit("text/javascript"); javaScriptPane.setEditorKit(kit); javaScriptPane.getDocument().putProperty("mimeType", "text/javascript"); Note that "javaScriptPane" above is simply a JEditorPane. Timon Veenstra's excellent solution for integrating Nodes with MultiViewElements, which is described here by Timon, and nowhere else in the world. The tab you see above is within a pluggable container, so anyone else could create a new module and register their own MultiViewElement such that it will be incorporated into the editor. A small trick to ensure that only one window opens per news item: @NbBundle.Messages("OpenNews=Open") private class OpenNewsAction extends AbstractAction { public OpenNewsAction() { super(Bundle.OpenNews()); } @Override public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { News news = getLookup().lookup(News.class); Mode editorMode = WindowManager.getDefault().findMode("editor"); for (TopComponent tc : WindowManager.getDefault().getOpenedTopComponents(editorMode)) { if (tc.getDisplayName().equals(news.getTitle())) { tc.requestActive(); return; } } TopComponent tc = MultiViews.createMultiView("application/x-newsnode", NewsNode.this); tc.open(); tc.requestActive(); } } The rest of what you see above is all standard NetBeans Platform stuff. The sources of everything you see above is here: http://java.net/projects/nb-api-samples/sources/api-samples/show/versions/7.3/misc/CMSBackOffice

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• The advantages & disadvantages to be had from using a Web Framework?

  - by JHarley1

  Hello, This question is focused on extracting the advantages and disadvantages of using Web based Frameworks: such as Cake PHP, Zend, jQuery, ASP.NET). This question is completely language agnostic. Let me start with the notion of "Standing on the shoulders of Giants". Advantages: Empowers Developers - by taking features that would have previously have taken 100's of lines of code and compressing them into one simple function call empowers developers to integrate more complex features into their Web Sites. Allow for Quicker development of applications - this is very relevant for people that need websites created in a very small window (has anyone any examples of this?) Lower Costs - allows programmers to pass cost savings onto the customer, a whole new range of customers generated that wanted a website but previously could not afford the higher development costs. Disadvantages: Lost Understanding - by relying on the features of a framework a developer is in danger of loosing understanding on how things work (underneath the hood). The configuration cliff - once you go further than the configuration of your framework your productivity drops right off, it can be difficult to implement features outside of a frameworks configuration. Developer tramlines - you (the developer) has to do things the way that the developer want you to do things. Security issues - giving people these tools to develop professional looking websites fast is a potential risk, people can quickly create professional looking websites for fraudulent companies. I wonder what people make of my points, and whether any body disagrees with them? Also if people have additional points I would be grateful. Many Thanks, J

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• Unit testing to prove balanced tree

  - by Darrel Hoffman

  I've just built a self-balancing tree (red-black) in Java (language should be irrelevant for this question though), and I'm trying to come up with a good means of testing that it's properly balanced. I've tested all the basic tree operations, but I can't think of a way to test that it is indeed well and truly balanced. I've tried inserting a large dictionary of words, both pre-sorted and un-sorted. With a balanced tree, those should take roughly the same amount of time, but an unbalanced tree would take significantly longer on the already-sorted list. But I don't know how to go about testing for that in any reasonable, reproducible way. (I've tried doing millisecond tests on these, but there's no noticeable difference - probably because my source data is too small.) Is there a better way to be sure that the tree is really balanced? Say, by looking at the tree after it's created and seeing how deep it goes? (That is, without modifying the tree itself by adding a depth field to each node, which is just wasteful if you don't need it for anything other than testing.)

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• Employee Engagement: Drive Business Value

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  As we’ve been discussing this week, employee engagement is extremely important and you’ve probably realized that effectively engaging your employees is essential to driving business value. Your employees are the ones responsible for executing on the business’ objectives. Your employees (in the sales & service departments) are the ones interacting with your customers the most, so delivering on customer expectations and attaining high levels of customer engagement are simply not possible without successfully empowering these this stakeholder group. High employee and partner engagement can have many benefits including: Higher levels of employee productivity Longer employee retention Stronger, more enduring and more successful relationships Serving as ambassadors for an organization’s brand More likely to deliver excellent customer service Referring others for hire Recommending the organization’s products and services Sharing feedback with their colleagues In a way, engagement is a measure of employee investment in an organization’s mission and brand. And then you have the enablement piece of this as well.  It’s hard to imagine a high level of engagement existing among employees who don’t feel that they’ve been enabled to do their jobs very efficiently or effectively. You’re just not going to find high engagement among people if the everyday processes and technologies  they work with make it a challenge for them to access, share and manage the information  they need do their jobs or if they’re unable to effectively collaborate around the projects they’re working on. How does your organization measure on the employee engagement spectrum? We’ve got a number of different resources to help you get started! Portal Resource Center Video: Got a minute? WebCenter in Action Webcast Series Portal Engagement Webcast 

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• Unity in 12.10 comes up behind other windows

  - by ams

  I've just upgraded from 12.04 to 12.10. For the most part, everything works fine, but I have a few small problems with Unity, or maybe Compiz. When I hit the Super key, or click on the dash launcher, the dash sometimes comes up behind the other windows on the screen. As you can imagine, this makes it somewhat tricky to use. Once it has started coming up behind, no amount of trying again will convince it to come back to the front. Possibly related, the Alt-Tab switcher doesn't show either. It maybe that there isn't one, or maybe that's behind also? Alt-Tab does switch the windows, but there's no visual indicator. When I hit Super-W, the windows do all do the zoom thing, but it's slow and juddery where it used to be smooth in 12.04. I'm using the standard "radeon" driver, same as before, with a triple-head monitor setup (and that works fine). I've not tried the proprietary drivers as I've previously found the multi-monitor support much weaker than the default driver, but maybe that's the way to go now? Video play fine. Even WebGL seems ok. Do other see this problem? Is it a bug? Or have I just got some left-over config from 12.04 in the way?

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• Is Wordpress more appropriate than Magento/Opencart for site like this?

  - by Alex

  The premise of the site is that a user pays a small fee to advertise an item that they want to sell. Therefore the user is responsible for adding the "products", not the administrator. The product upload will create a product page for that item. This is a rather common framework that I'm sure you're familiar with. My initial thought was that it would be best suited using Magento - mainly because it needs to accept payments - and the products will grow to form a catalog of categorized products. However - there is no concept of a shopping cart. A buyer does not buy the item online, or go to a checkout. They simply look at the product, and contact the seller if they like it. The buyer and seller then take it from there. For this reason, I then begin to suspect that Magento is perhaps too overkill, or just simply not the right CMS if there is on checkout procedure (other than the uploader making a payment) So then I begin to think Wordpress....Hmmm Feature requirements: User's can add content via a form process User's can be directed to a payment gateway For each product listing - a series of photographs shall be displayed, in thumbnail form Zoom capabilities/rotate on the images would be a welcome feature In short - e-commerce CMS, or something more simple?

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• Grid Based Lighting in XNA/Monogame

  - by sm81095

  I know that questions like this have been asked many times, but I have not found one exactly like this yes. I have implemented a top-down grid based world in Monogame, and am starting on the lighting system soon. How I want to do lighting is to have a grid that is 4 times wider and higher, basically splitting each world tile into a 4x4 system of "subtiles". I would like to use a flow like system to spread light across the tiles by reducing the light by a small amount each time. This is kind of the effect I was going for: http://i.imgur.com/rv8LCxZ.png The black grid lines are the light grid, and the red lines are the actual tile grid, and the light drop-off is very exaggerated. I plan to render the world by drawing the unlit grid to a separate RenderTarget2D, then rendering the lighting grid to a separate target and overlaying the two. Basically, my questions are: What would be the algorithm for a flow style lighting system like this? Would there be a more efficient way of rendering this? How would I handle the darkening of the light with colors, reducing the RGB values in each grid, or reducing the alpha in each grid, assuming that I render the light map over the grid using blending? Even assuming the former are possible, what BlendState would I use for that?

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• What does SVN do better than git?

  - by doug

  No question that the majority of debates over programmer tools distill to either personal choice (by the user) or design emphasis, i.e., optimizing design according to particular uses cases (by the tool builder). Text Editors are probably the most prominent example--a coder who works on a Windows at work and codes in Haskell on the Mac at home, values cross-platform and compiler integration and so chooses Emacs over Textmate, etc. It's less common that a newly introduced technology is genuinely, demonstrably superior to the extant options. I wonder if this is in fact the case with version-control systems, in particular, centralized VCS (CVS, SVN) versus distributed VCS (git, hg)? I used SVN for about five years, and SVN is currently used where I work. A little less than three years ago, I switched to git (and gitHub) for all of my personal projects. I can think of a number of advantages of git over subversion (and which for the most part abstract to advantages of distributed over centralized VCS), but I cannot think of one contra example--some task (that's relevant and arises in a programmers usual workflow) that subversion does better than git. The only conclusion I have drawn from this is that I don't have any data--not that git is better, etc. My guess is that such counter-examples exist, hence this question.

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• How do you apply to a company way out of your league?

  - by emcb

  First, my background: I'm in the market for a new job I have ~2 years experience under my belt Nothing on my resume would JUMP out at you Thus far in my career I've been able to become productive quickly and have been continually praised by managers and coworkers for my abilities to learn and produce. I don't mean to be bragging here, but I want to get across that (at least in my mind) I could be categorized as "very promising young developer" I've been job hunting for a little while now and like most job seekers I've found a handful of companies that are basically "dream" jobs (think Fog Creek or 37Signals). If I were to apply to a company like that in the normal recruitment channels, my resume would probably not make it past the first set of filters. Now, I accept that I'm a longshot for a job at the hottest companies out there, but in my job search I've had a little success in applying for positions I'm not qualified for simply by doing something a little different: sending an email outlining how I don't meet the qualifications but stating why I would do well in the job anyways. In other cases, I've outright asked for a small project/problem that would be representative of the work to prove I can do the job, since I didn't have the specific skills on my resume yet. What I'm wondering is: If I'm not qualified on paper for a particular job, what creative/unique/impressive methods have you thought of or seen work to at least get an interview? For the sake of argument, assume I really am a "very promising young developer". I would love to hear from people who are responsible for hiring - I'd like to hear examples of techniques that got someone noticed when they otherwise wouldn't have. Clarification: I know that I need to continue building my resume to continue advancing. But I'm in the job search NOW, so I'm looking for other approaches

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• Sneak Preview - New CodePlex UI

  We have been busy the last several months working to improve the overall experience for the CodePlex community. We have been working through some of the top requested items, such as our big announcement last week enabling Git. Something that is not explicitly on the feature request list are requests to update the web site look and user experience.  As Brian Harry mentioned, the Future of CodePlex is Bright, so it is time to start brightening up the place. Goals As with any sizeable change you need to decide the scope of changes you want to tackle. We decided that we would optimize on incremental improvements verses taking months to get a completely new experience released. Our goals with this user experience work is to refresh the look and feel of the site, introduce new visual elements and set up the site for future structural changes. So this is not the end, just the beginning. Early Views I want to set a few expectations first, these screen shots are not final, and we are still working through the content and final element placement. Feedback is always welcome, just take that in mind as you review the images. New CodePlex Home The navigation changed a good bit on the home page and we have moved the search to a more consistent location across the site.   User Profile Users Home Page The goal was to make it easier to find and take action on common tasks such as creating projects. Project Home Issue Tracker   This should give you a taste of where we are going with the new user experience.     As always we love the feedback, either comment below, find us on Twitter @codeplex or @mgroves84, or create or vote up suggestions.

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• Best practices in versioning

  - by Gerenuk

  I develop some scripts for data analysis in a small team. For the moment we use SVN, but not in a very structured way. We haven't even looked how to use branches even though we need this functionality. What do you suggest as the best practice to setup the following system: two code bases (core and plugins) versions can be incompatible to previous scripts sometimes individual features are being developed and not yet finished, while other fixes have to be done urgently to the code In the end we don't deliver the code as a package, but rather place the Python scripts in some directory (with version names?). Some other python script which serves as a configuration choses the desired version, sets the path to these libraries and then starts to import the modules. I saw stable releases to be named "trunk" so I did the same. However, no version numbers yet. Core and plugins are different repositories, however we have to match versions for compatibility. Can you suggest some best practices or reference to ease development and reduce chaos? :) Some suggested GIT. I haven't heard about it, but I'm free to change.

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• What is the best way to exploit multicores when making multithread games?

  - by Keeper

  Many people suggest to write a program, and then start optimizing it. But I think that when it's coming to multithreading with multicore, a little think ahead is required. I've read about using threads, and experienced it myself during some courses at the university (still a student). The big question is simple, but a bit abstract: What thread related steps in game design do I need to take, before implementation? Now trying to be more specific. Let's say, as an example, that I'm making a small board game (like Monopoly) that I want to be multithreaded. My goal Is that this multithreaded game will exploit the best of the multicore system, lets say 4-6 cores (like in i7 processors). My answer to this question at the moment is, one thread for each of these four basic components: GUI User Input / Output AI (computer rival) Other game related calculations (like shortest path from A to B, or level up status change) I'm not an expert (yet!), and I'm sure there are better answers out there. Any suggestion, answer, different approach will be helpful. Some thoughts: Maybe splitting the main database is a good way.. (or total disaster.. )

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• How to Install WebLogic 12c ZIP on Linux

  - by Bruno.Borges

  I knew that WebLogic had this small ZIP distribution, of only 184M, but what I didn't know was that it is so easy to install it on Linux machines, specially for development purposes, that I thought I had to blog about it. You may want to check this blog, where I found the missing part on this how to, but I'm blogging this again because I wanted to put it in a simpler way, straight to the point. And if you are looking for a how to for Mac, check Arun Gupta's post.  So, here's the step-by-step: 1 - Download the ZIP distribution (don't worry if your system is x86_64)Don't forget to accept the OTN Free Developer License Agreement! 2 - Choose where to install your WebLogic server and your domain, and set as your MW_HOME environment variableI will use /opt/middleware/weblogic for this how to export MW_HOME=/opt/middleware/weblogicMake sure this path exists in your system. 'mydomains' will be used to keep your WebLogic domain. mkdir -p $MW_HOME/mydomain 3 - If you don't have your JAVA_HOME environment variable still configured, do it. Point it to where your JDK is installed. export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/default-java 4 - Unzip the downloaded file into MW_HOME unzip wls1211_dev.zip -d $MW_HOME 5 - Go to that directory and run configure.sh cd $MW_HOME ./configure.sh 6 - Call the setEnvs.sh script . $MW_HOME/wlserver/server/bin/setWLSEnv.sh7 - Create your development domain. It will ask you for username and password. I like to use weblogic / welcome1cd $MW_HOME/mydomain $JAVA_HOME/bin/java $JAVA_OPTIONS -Xmx1024m \ -Dweblogic.management.allowPasswordEcho=true weblogic.Server8 - Start WebLogic and access its web console(sh startWebLogic.sh &); sleep 10; firefox http://localhost:7001/consoleUsually, it takes only 10 seconds to start a domain, and 5 more to deploy the Administration Console (on my laptop). :-)Enjoy!

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• Advice on designing web application with a 40+ year lifetime

  - by user2708395

  Scenario Currently, I am apart of a health care project whose main requirement is to capture data with unknown attributes using user generated forms by health care providers. The second requirement is that data integrity is key and that the application will be used for 40+ years. We are currently migrating the client's data from the past 40 years from various sources (Paper, Excel, Access, etc...) to the database. Future requirements are: Workflow management of forms Schedule management of forms Security/Role based management Reporting engine Mobile/Tablet support Situation Only 6 months in, the current (contracted) architect/senior programmer has taken the "fast" approach and has designed a poor system. The database is not normalized, the code is coupled, the tiers have no dedicated purpose and data is starting to go missing since he has designed some beans to perform "deletes" on the database. The code base is extremely bloated and there are jobs just to synchronize data since the database is not normalized. His approach has been to rely on backup jobs to restore missing data and doesn't seem to believe in re-factoring. Having presented my findings to the PM, the architect will be removed when his contract ends. I have been given the task to re-architect this application. My team consists of me and one junior programmer. We have no other resources. We have been granted a 6-month requirement freeze in which we can focus on re-building this system. I suggested using a CMS system like Drupal, but for policy reasons at the client's organization, the system must be built from scratch. This is the first time that I will be designing a system with a 40+ lifespan. I have only worked on projects with 3-5 year lifespans, so this situation is very new, yet exciting. Questions What design considerations will make the system more "future proof"? What experiences have you had in designing such systems - both failures and successes? What questions should be asked to the client/PM to make the system more "future proof"?

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• Indie devs working with publishers

  - by MrDatabase

  I'm an independent game developer considering working with a publisher. This question is very informative however I have more questions. Please give feedback on the following issues... I think this can be helpful to many indie devs in the same situation. Source code: is it common for developers to give the publisher the source code? Code quality: does this matter when working with a publisher any more so than when just working on your own (or in a small team)? Just wondering if developers working for the publisher might scoff at the code quality and perhaps influence the relationship between developer and publisher. Unique game concepts: are publishers generally biased towards new/novel game concepts? Intellectual property: if I send a playable demo to a publisher what's to stop them from just reproducing the new/novel game mechanic? I think the answer is basically nothing... but I'm wondering if this is a realistic concern. Revenue sharing: how does it work? what's a common ratio? 70/30? 30/70? Flaky publishers: how common is it for a publisher to "string along" developers for a while then just drop them? Can this be reconciled with a contract of some kind? And any other issues you've encountered or heard of.

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• Is learning C# as a first language a mistake?

  - by JuniorDeveloper1208

  I know there are similar questions on here, which I've read, but I recently read this post by Joel Spolsky: How can I teach a bright person, with no programming experience, how to program? And it got me thinking about my way of learning and whether it might actually be harmful in the long run. I've dabbled with various languages but C# is my first serious one, I've read "Head First C#" and created a few projects. But after reading the post above I've found it a bit disheartening that I may be going about it all wrong, obviously I respect Joel's opinion which is what has thrown me a bit. I've started reading "Code" as recommended in the reading list and I'm finding it pretty hard going, although enjoyable. I feel like it's taken the shine off of my "noobish hacking about" in Visual Studio. So now I'm unsure as to what path I should take? Should I take a step back and follow Joel's advice and start reading? I guess my main aim is just to become a good programmer, like everyone else, but I don't want to be going into bad practice by learning a .NET language when someone who's opinion I respect thinks that it is harmful. Thoughts?

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• Beginners guide to developing optimization software

  - by Florenc

  I am novice in "serious" programming i.e. applications that deal with real-life applications and software projects that go beyond school assignments. My interests include optimization, operations research, algorithms and lately i discovered how much I do like software design/development/engineering. I have already developed some simple desktop applications for some "famous" problems like TSP using heuristc approaches, a VRP solver (in progress) and so on. While developing this kind of software I actually used basic concepts taught at school such as object-orientation analysis and design. But, I found these courses rather elementary and quite boring (for my expectations). So I decided to go a little further and start developing "real" software (and this is where I realized how important and interesting software engineering/design is.) Now, here's my issue: I can not find a "study guide" for developing software of this kind. Currently, there are numerous resources out there (books, websites, tutorials) in designing and developing complex IS, web applications, smartphone apps but I can't find a book for example entitled "optimization software development". Definetly, someone could claim that "design patterns apply to software in general" but that's not my point. My point is that I could simply use my imagination for "simple" implementations, but what happens, when my imagination can not go further? In other words I'm looking for a guide/path to bridge the gap between: Mathematics-Algorithm Design-Software Engineering-Optimization-Software development

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• Reformatting and version control

  - by l0b0

  Code formatting matters. Even indentation matters. And consistency is more important than minor improvements. But projects usually don't have a clear, complete, verifiable and enforced style guide from day 1, and major improvements may arrive any day. Maybe you find that SELECT id, name, address FROM persons JOIN addresses ON persons.id = addresses.person_id; could be better written as / is better written than SELECT persons.id, persons.name, addresses.address FROM persons JOIN addresses ON persons.id = addresses.person_id; while working on adding more columns to the query. Maybe this is the most complex of all four queries in your code, or a trivial query among thousands. No matter how difficult the transition, you decide it's worth it. But how do you track code changes across major formatting changes? You could just give up and say "this is the point where we start again", or you could reformat all queries in the entire repository history. If you're using a distributed version control system like Git you can revert to the first commit ever, and reformat your way from there to the current state. But it's a lot of work, and everyone else would have to pause work (or be prepared for the mother of all merges) while it's going on. Is there a better way to change history which gives the best of all results: Same style in all commits Minimal merge work ? To clarify, this is not about best practices when starting the project, but rather what should be done when a large refactoring has been deemed a Good Thing™ but you still want a traceable history? Never rewriting history is great if it's the only way to ensure that your versions always work the same, but what about the developer benefits of a clean rewrite? Especially if you have ways (tests, syntax definitions or an identical binary after compilation) to ensure that the rewritten version works exactly the same way as the original?

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