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• Frustrated where I am, but not sure where to go with my career [closed]

  - by Tom Pickles

  I work (3 years now) as a lead developer for a team developing internal tools and websites for a customer account within large outsourcing company. I'm a self taught programmer and my previous incarnation was a 3rd line support guy, so I have a solid infrastructure knowledge. We use VB.Net/MSSQL/SSIS/SSRS ASP.NET (nTier) in house and I have about 8 years coding experience. Without going into too much detail, my boss is very ambitious and uses our team as his footing to get up the ladder. I've been in the team from the start and the only new dev's we have brought in have been people with a bit of VBA/VBScript experience, much to my chagrin, to bolster his empire. It's been a lot of hard work to bring them up to a standard, but there's still a lot for them to learn. This makes my life stressful as I always get the high profile/complex project work to do as other's simply cannot do it, or it'd take them twice/three times longer to do it. My boss is always seeking stuff for us to build for people who haven't asked for it, which usually get's thrown to me as I have the most experience and can pick new API's (etc) up quicker. He doesn't give us proper requirements, we don't get time to design properly before we code, he wants us to throw something (quick and dirty as he calls it) together so we can get it out ASAP. I take pride in my work so I like to do it properly, make my code clean, maintainable etc, and I train the other guys in the team to do the same. But, we always fall on our faces. The customer we drop the apps on say it doesn't do what they need (due to few requirements), or my boss doesn't like it/changes the spec, so we have to rework it, it get's drawn out, and it makes us and me look and feel like fools. We then get accused by boss of not being reactive enough to change. I've had enough. In order to get my skills and knowledge gap's filled, I've been reading Code Complete 2nd Ed (McConnell) and the Head First Design Patterns books. I'm forcing myself to move into C# from VB at home to broaden my horizons. I'm not sure where to go from here. I don't want to code all my life as I'd like to move into a higher level design/architects role at some point in time (I'm 35). Where do I/can I go from here?

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• Web workflow solution - how should I approach the design?

  - by Tom Pickles

  We've been tasked with creating a web based workflow tool to track change management. It has a single workflow with multiple synchronous tasks for the most part, but branch out at a point to tasks running in parallel which meet up later on. There will be all sorts of people using the application, and all of them will need to see their outstanding tasks for each change, but only theirs, not others. There will also be a high level group of people who oversee all changes, so need to see everything. They will need to see tasks which have not been done in the specified time, who's responsible etc. The data will be persisted to a SQL database. It'll all be put together using .Net. I've been trying to learn and implement OOP into my designs of late, but I'm wondering if this is moot in this instance as it may be better to have the business logic for this in stored procedures in the DB. I could use POCO's, a front end layer and a data access layer for the web application and just use it as a mechanism for CRUD actions on the DB, then use SP's fired in the DB to apply the business rules. On the other hand, I could use an object oriented design within the web app, but as the data in the app is state-less, is this a bad idea? I could try and model out the whole application into a class structure, implementing interfaces, base classes and all that good stuff. So I would create a change class, which contained a list of task classes/types, which defined each task, and implement an ITask interface etc. Put end-user types into the tasks to identify who should be doing what task. Then apply all the business logic in the respective class methods etc. What approach do you guys think I should be using for this solution?

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• As a tooling/automation developer, can I be making better use of OOP?

  - by Tom Pickles

  My time as a developer (~8 yrs) has been spent creating tooling/automation of one sort or another. The tools I develop usually interface with one or more API's. These API's could be win32, WMI, VMWare, a help-desk application, LDAP, you get the picture. The apps I develop could be just to pull back data and store/report. It could be to provision groups of VM's to create live like mock environments, update a trouble ticket etc. I've been developing in .Net and I'm currently reading into design patterns and trying to think about how I can improve my skills to make better use of and increase my understanding of OOP. For example, I've never used an interface of my own making in anger (which is probably not a good thing), because I honestly cannot identify where using one would benefit later on when modifying my code. My classes are usually very specific and I don't create similar classes with similar properties/methods which could use a common interface (like perhaps a car dealership or shop application might). I generally use an n-tier approach to my apps, having a presentation layer, a business logic/manager layer which interfaces with layer(s) that make calls to the API's I'm working with. My business entities are always just method-less container objects, which I populate with data and pass back and forth between my API interfacing layer using static methods to proxy/validate between the front and the back end. My code by nature of my work, has few common components, at least from what I can see. So I'm struggling to see how I can better make use of OOP design and perhaps reusable patterns. Am I right to be concerned that I could be being smarter about how I work, or is what I'm doing now right for my line of work? Or, am I missing something fundamental in OOP? EDIT: Here is some basic code to show how my mgr and api facing layers work. I use static classes as they do not persist any data, only facilitate moving it between layers. public static class MgrClass { public static bool PowerOnVM(string VMName) { // Perform logic to validate or apply biz logic // call APIClass to do the work return APIClass.PowerOnVM(VMName); } } public static class APIClass { public static bool PowerOnVM(string VMName) { // Calls to 3rd party API to power on a virtual machine // returns true or false if was successful for example } }

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• Is it possible to do DNS-based ACLs on a Cisco ASA?

  - by pickles

  Short of using static IP addresses, is it possible to have a Cisco ASA use a DNS name rather than an IP address? For instance, if I want to limit a host in the DMZ to access only one particular web service, but that web service might be globally load balanced or using DynDNS or cloud, how can the ACL be expressed so that a fixed IP address isn't used and the admin doesn't have to keep opening and closing down IP addresses?

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• Duplication of Windows 7 Backup

  - by Steven Pickles

  I use the built in backup utility for Windows 7 because it's automated and flexible enough to allow me to schedule a daily shadow copy backup of particular files and folders directly to a separate internal RAID 0 array (2 x 1TB). It's also lightweight and stays out of the way. For off-site backup purposes, each week I copy the contents of the internal backup from the RAID 0 array to an external 1 TB drive. I then store move this drive to a different building. The copy from the internal backup to the external backup typically works like this: mount and erase contents of external drive highlight "file" on internal drive, hit CTRL+C CTRL+V on root directory of external drive Is there a better way to synchronize? Microsoft's SyncToy application does a pitiful job, and often leaves the folders not truly synchronized... which completely defeats the ability to use the backup's restore feature.

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• Message pump in C# Windows service

  - by Pickles

  Hello, I have a Windows Service written in C# that handles all of our external hardware I/O for a kiosk application. One of our new devices is a USB device that comes with an API in a native DLL. I have a proper P/Invoke wrapper class created. However, this API must be initialized with an HWnd to a windows application because it uses the message pump to raise asynchronous events. Besides putting in a request to the hardware manufacturer to provide us with an API that does not depend on a Windows message pump, is there any way to manually instantiate a message pump in a new thread in my Windows Service that I can pass into this API? Do I actually have to create a full Application class, or is there a lower level .NET class that encapsulates a message pump? Thanks

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• Message pump in .NET Windows service

  - by Pickles

  I have a Windows Service written in C# that handles all of our external hardware I/O for a kiosk application. One of our new devices is a USB device that comes with an API in a native DLL. I have a proper P/Invoke wrapper class created. However, this API must be initialized with an HWnd to a windows application because it uses the message pump to raise asynchronous events. Besides putting in a request to the hardware manufacturer to provide us with an API that does not depend on a Windows message pump, is there any way to manually instantiate a message pump in a new thread in my Windows Service that I can pass into this API? Do I actually have to create a full Application class, or is there a lower level .NET class that encapsulates a message pump?

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• How do I manage dependencies for automated builds on my build server?

  - by Tom Pickles

  I'm trying to implement continuous integration into our day to day workings. In our team, we're moving from just building our code in Visual Studio on our workstations and deploying, to using MSBuild.exe and automating on our build server (which is Jenkins) without the use of Visual Studio. We have external dependencies to references such as Automap in our projects. Because the automap (for example) dll isn't on the build server, the msbuild execution fails, for obvious reasons. There are other dll's which I need to be part of the build, I'm just using automap as an example. So what's the best way to get any dependencies onto the build server as part of the automated build? I've seen references to using a 'lib' folder, but I don't really understand where I should be putting it (in my project, filesystem, SVN ...?), and how the build server will get to it. I've also read that NuGet can do something with dependencies, but my build server isn't connected to the internet, and I don't understand how I can get my build to pull a NuGet package I may have created, and how it works together. Edit: I'm using subversion and we cannot use TeamCity as we would have to buy it and there's zero chance of funding.

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• Is it possible to do DNS-based ACLs on a Cisco ASA?

  - by pickles

  Short of using static IP addresses, is it possible to have a Cisco ASA use a DNS name rather than an IP address? For instance, if I want to limit a host in the DMZ to access only one particular web service, but that web service might be globally load balanced or using DynDNS or cloud, how can the ACL be expressed so that a fixed IP address isn't used and the admin doesn't have to keep opening and closing down IP addresses?

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• Getting animated gif data in c or c++

  - by Pickles

  I'm trying to get the frames (properly decoded) and the frames delay times from an animated gif. I've opened up the code to gifsicle and have also tried lungif but I'm not accustomed to c code and I'm having a difficult time following the logic. I've also tried other examples and I've gotten one to work but it didn't do the proper LZW decoding. Can anyone give me a quick example of how to do this? I'm building this app in xcode and trying to get an NSArray of the image frames. Thanks.

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• How do I get more control of UIImageView animation?

  - by Pickles

  I'm trying to display a series of images in a animation where the duration between the images changes frame to frame. I can successfully animate images where the duration is the same. I've looked into subclassing UIImageView but it doesn't seem to allow you access anything that could be helpful. I've also looked into subclassing UIView directly but it seems like I'd have to write a lot of the stuff that UIImageView already does for me. Is there a way to do this with UIImageView? Or if I am going to have to build my own UIView animation can someone point me the right direction to get started? Thanks.

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• How can I get my business objects layer to use the management layer in their methods?

  - by Tom Pickles

  I have a solution in VS2010 with several projects, each making up a layer within my application. I have business entities which are currently objects with no methods, and I have a management layer which references the business entities layer in it's project. I now think I have designed my application poorly and would like to move methods from helper classes (which are in another layer) into methods I'll create within the business entities themselves. For example I have a VirtualMachine object, which uses a helper class to call a Reboot() method on it which passes the request to the management layer. The static manager class talks to an API that reboots the VM. I want to move the Reboot() method into the VirtualMachine object, but I will need to reference the management layer: public void Reboot() { VMManager.Reboot(this.Name); } So if I add a reference to my management project in my entities project, I get the circular dependency error, which is how it should be. How can I sort this situation out? Do I need to an yet another layer between the entity layer and the management layer? Or, should I just forget it and leave it as it is. The application works ok now, but I am concerned my design isn't particularly OOP centric and I would like to correct this.

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• Increasing figure size in Matplotlib

  - by Anirudh

  I am trying to plot a graph from a distance matrix. The code words fine and gives me a image in 800 * 600 pixels. The image being too small, All the nodes are packed together. I want increase the size of the image. so I added the following line to my code - figure(num=None, figsize=(10, 10), dpi=80, facecolor='w', edgecolor='k') After this all I get is a blank 1000 * 1000 image file. My overall code - import networkx as nx import pickle import matplotlib.pyplot as plt print "Reading from pickle." p_file = open('pickles/names') Names = pickle.load(p_file) p_file.close() p_file = open('pickles/distance') Dist = pickle.load(p_file) p_file.close() G = nx.Graph() print "Inserting Nodes." for n in Names: G.add_node(n) print "Inserting Edges." for i in range(601): for j in range(601): G.add_edge(Names[i],Names[j],weight=Dist[i][j]) print "Drawing Graph." nx.draw(G) print "Saving Figure." #plt.figure(num=None, figsize=(10, 10)) plt.savefig('new.png') print "Success!"

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• Integrating Jython Cpython

  - by eric.frederich

  I am about to begin a project where I will likely use PyQt or Pyside. I will need to interface with a buggy 3rd party piece of server software that provides C++ and Java APIs. The Java APIs are a lot easier to use because you get Exceptions where with the C++ libraries you get segfaults. Also, the Python bindings to the Java APIs are automatic with Jython whereas the Python bindings for the C++ APIs don't exist. So, how would a CPython PyQt client application be able to communicate with these Java APIs? How would you go about it? Would you have another separate Java process on the client that serializes / pickles objects and communicates with the PyQt process over a socket? I don't want to re-invent the wheel... is there some sort of standard interface for these types of things? Some technology I should look into? RPC, Corba, etc? Thanks, ~Eric

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• Query on object id in VQL

  - by Banang

  I'm currently working with the versant object database (using jvi), and have a case where I need to query the database based on an object id. What I'm trying to achieve is something along the lines of Employee employee = new Employee("Mr. Pickles"); session.commit(); FundVQLQuery q = new FundVQLQuery(session, "select * from Employee employee where employee = $1"); q.bind(employee); q.execute(); However, I'm finding out the hard way (I get an EVJ_NOT_A_VALID_KEY_TYPE error thrown at me) that this is infact not the way to do it. Anyone got any experience in working with VQL? Your help is much apreciated! A small clarification: The problem is I'm running some performance tests on the database using the pole position framework, and one of the tests in that framework requires me to fetch an object from the database using either an object reference or a low level object id. Thus, I'm not allowed to reference specific fields in the employee object, but must perform the query on the object in its entirety. So, it's not allowed for me to go "select * from Employee e where e.id = 4", I need it to use the entire object. Accepted answer: Since there is some sort of lunacy magic built into SO that prevents me to mark an accepted answer after a bounty has run out, readers should know that the answer posted by Chris Holmes solves this issue. Readers are encouraged to up-vote his post to further signalize the correctness of his answer to any future readers of this thread.

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