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• Code review recommendations and Code Smells

  - by Michael Freidgeim

  Some time ago Twitter told that I am similar to Boris Lipschitz . Indeed he is also .Net programmer from Russia living in Australia. I‘ve read his list of Code Review points and found them quite comprehensive. A few points  were not clear for me, and it forced me for a further reading.In particular the statement “Exception should not be used to return a status or an error code.” wasn’t fully clear for me, because sometimes we store an exception as an object with all error details and I believe it’s a valid approach. However I agree that throwing exceptions should be avoided, if you expect to return error as a part of a normal flow. Related link: http://codeutopia.net/blog/2010/03/11/should-a-failed-function-return-a-value-or-throw-an-exception/ Another point slightly puzzled me“If Thread.Sleep() is used, can it be replaced with something else, ei Timer, AutoResetEvent, etc” . I believe, that there are very rare cases, when anyone using Thread.Sleep in any production code. Usually it is used in mocks and prototypes.I had to look further to clarify “Dependency injection is used instead of Service Location pattern”.Even most of articles has some preferences to Dependency injection, there are also advantages to use Service Location. E.g see http://geekswithblogs.net/KyleBurns/archive/2012/04/27/dependency-injection-vs.-service-locator.aspx. http://www.cookcomputing.com/blog/archives/000587.html  refers to Concluding Thoughts of Martin Fowler The choice between Service Locator and Dependency Injection is less important than the principle of separating service configuration from the use of services within an applicationThe post had a link to excellent article Code Smells of Jeff Atwood, but the statement, that “code should not pass a review if it violates any of the  code smells” sound too strict for my environment. In particular, I disagree with “Dead Code” recommendation “Ruthlessly delete code that isn't being used. That's why we have source control systems!”. If there is a chance that not used code will be required in a future, it is convenient to keep it as commented or #if/#endif blocks with appropriate explanation, why it could be required in the future. TFS is a good source control system, but context search in source code of current solution is much easier than finding something in the previous versions of the code.I also found a link to a good book “Clean Code.A.Handbook.of.Agile.Software”

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• Friday Fun: Snowball

  - by Asian Angel

  It is Christmas Eve and hopefully you are enjoying the start of an early weekend away from work. This week we have a snowball throwing game for you to try out, so bundle up and get ready to let those snowballs fly! Snowball The object of the game is to use your snowball ammo to harass the drunk businessman and send him flying along distance-wise as far as you can. Simply use your mouse to aim and click the left button to throw snowballs. You can monitor your stats on the silver bar towards the top of the window. The sound can also be disabled if the music is bothering you, but keep in mind that all sound will be disabled if you use the option. Time to get those snowballs flying through the air!! Keep hitting the businessman with your snowballs as you chase after him. Make certain that your aim is good or you will quickly run out of snowballs! You can really get him moving along at a good rate and he can even go high enough in the air to disappear off the screen for a few moments. There is a also chance that your aim will be so wicked with the snowballs that you will literally knock the drunk businessman’s head off! Weird but possible… The game ends when one of these two events occur: 1.) you run out of snowballs or 2.) the businessman literally bounces back at and then drops behind you as seen in the screenshot here. The moment either happens your score will pop up and then you have the opportunity to try again. Have fun! Note: The bounce back event can happen when encountering cars. Play Snowball Latest Features How-To Geek ETC How to Use the Avira Rescue CD to Clean Your Infected PC The Complete List of iPad Tips, Tricks, and Tutorials Is Your Desktop Printer More Expensive Than Printing Services? 20 OS X Keyboard Shortcuts You Might Not Know HTG Explains: Which Linux File System Should You Choose? HTG Explains: Why Does Photo Paper Improve Print Quality? An Alternate Star Wars Christmas Special [Video] Sunset in a Tropical Paradise Wallpaper Natural Wood Grain Icons for Your Desktop and App Launcher Docks My Blackberry Is Not Working! The Apple Too?! [Funny Video] Hidden Tracks Your Stolen Mac; Free Until End of January Why the Other Checkout Line Always Moves Faster

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• Any reliable polygon normal calculation code?

  - by Jenko

  I'm currently calculating the normal vector of a polygon using this code, but for some faces here and there it calculates a wrong normal. I don't really know what's going on or where it fails but its not reliable. Do you have any polygon normal calculation that's tested and found to be reliable? // calculate normal of a polygon using all points var n:int = points.length; var x:Number = 0; var y:Number = 0; var z:Number = 0 // ensure all points above 0 var minx:Number = 0, miny:Number = 0, minz:Number = 0; for (var p:int = 0, pl:int = points.length; p < pl; p++) { var po:_Point3D = points[p] = points[p].clone(); if (po.x < minx) { minx = po.x; } if (po.y < miny) { miny = po.y; } if (po.z < minz) { minz = po.z; } } for (p = 0; p < pl; p++) { po = points[p]; po.x -= minx; po.y -= miny; po.z -= minz; } var cur:int = 1, prev:int = 0, next:int = 2; for (var i:int = 1; i <= n; i++) { // using Newell method x += points[cur].y * (points[next].z - points[prev].z); y += points[cur].z * (points[next].x - points[prev].x); z += points[cur].x * (points[next].y - points[prev].y); cur = (cur+1) % n; next = (next+1) % n; prev = (prev+1) % n; } // length of the normal var length:Number = Math.sqrt(x * x + y * y + z * z); // turn large values into a unit vector if (length != 0){ x = x / length; y = y / length; z = z / length; }else { throw new Error("Cannot calculate normal since triangle has an area of 0"); }

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• Is there a language or design pattern that allows the *removal* of object behavior or properties in a class hierarchy?

  - by Sebastien Diot

  A well-know shortcoming of traditional class hierarchies is that they are bad when it comes to model the real world. As an example, trying to represent animals species with classes. There are actually several problems when doing that, but one that I never saw a solution to is when a sub-class "looses" a behavior or properties that was defined in a super-class, like a penguin not being able to fly (there are probably better examples, but that's the first one that comes to my mind, having seen "Madagascar 2" recently). On the one hand, you don't want to define for every property and behavior some flag that specifies if it is at all present, and check it every time before accessing that behavior or property. You would just like to say that birds can fly, simply and clearly, in the Bird class. But then it would be nice if one could define "exceptions" afterward, without having to use some horrible hacks everywhere. This often happens when a system has been productive for a while. You suddenly find an "exception" that doesn't fit in the original design at all, and you don't want to change a large portion of your code to accommodate it. So, is there some language or design patterns that can cleanly handle this problem, without requiring major changes to the "super-class", and all the code that uses it? Even if a solution only handle a specific case, several solutions might together form a complete strategy. [EDIT] Forgot about the Liskov Substitution Principle. That is why you can't do it. Assuming you define "traits/interfaces" for all major "feature groups", you can freely implement traits in different branches of the hierarchy, like the Flying trait could be implemented by Birds, and some special kind of squirrels and fish. So my question could amount to "How could I un-implement a trait?" If your super-class is a Java Serializable, you have to be one too, even if there is no way for you to serialize your state, for example if you contained a "Socket". So one way to do it is to always define all your traits in pair from the start: Flying and NotFlying (which would throw UnsupportedOperationExceiption, if not checked against). The Not-trait would not define any new interface, and could be simply checked for. Sounds like a "cheap" solution, in particular if used from the start.

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• GUI device for throwing a ball

  - by Fredrik Johansson

  The hero has a ball, which shall be thrown with accuracy in a court on iPhone/iPad. The player is seen from above, in a 2D view. In game play, the player reach is between 1/15 and 1/6 of the height of the iPhone screen. The player will run, and try to outmaneuver his opponent, and then throw the ball at a specific location, which is guarded by the opponent (which is also shown on the screen). The player is controlled by a joystick, and that works ok, but how shall I control the stick? Maybe someone can propose a third control method? I've tried the following two approaches: Joystick: Hero has a reach of 1 meter, and this reach is marked with a semi-opaque circle around the player. The ball can be moved by a joystick. When the joystick is moved south, the ball is moved south within the reach circle. There is a direct coupling with the joystick and the position of the ball. I.e. when the joystick is moved max south, the ball is max south within the player reach. At each touch update the speed is calculated, and the Box2d ball position and ball speed are updated. NB, the ball will never be moved outside the reach as long as the player push the joystick. The ball is thrown by swiping the joystick to make the ball move, and then releasing the joystick. At release, the ball will get a smoothed speed of the joystick. Joystick Problem: The throwing accuracy gets bad, because the joystick can not be that big, and a small movement results in quite a large movement of the ball. If the user does not release before the end of the joystick maximum end point, the ball will stop, and when the user releases the joystick the speed of the ball will be zero. Bad... Touch pad A force is applied to the ball by a sweep on a touchpad. The ball is released when the sweep is ended, or when the ball is moved outside the player reach. As there is no one to one mapping between the swipe and the ball position, the precision can be improved. A large swipe can result in a small ball movement. Touch Pad Problem A touchpad is less intuitive. Users do not seem to know what to do with the touch pad. Some tap the touchpad, and then the ball just falls to the ground. As there is no one-to-one mapping, the ball can be moved outside the reach, and then it will just fall to the ground. It's a bit hard to control the ball, especially if the player also moves.

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• Segmentation fault 11 in MacOS X- C++ [migrated]

  - by Marcos Cesar Vargas Magana

  all. I have a "segmentation fault 11" error when I run the following code. The code actually compiles but I get the error at run time. //** Terror.h ** #include <iostream> #include <string> #include <map> using std::map; using std::pair; using std::string; template<typename Tsize> class Terror { public: //Inserts a message in the map. static Tsize insertMessage(const string& message) { mErrorMessages.insert( pair<Tsize, string>(mErrorMessages.size()+1, message) ); return mErrorMessages.size(); } private: static map<Tsize, string> mErrorMessages; } template<typename Tsize> map<Tsize,string> Terror<Tsize>::mErrorMessages; //** error.h ** #include <iostream> #include "Terror.h" typedef unsigned short errorType; typedef Terror<errorType> error; errorType memoryAllocationError=error::insertMessage("ERROR: out of memory."); //** main.cpp ** #include <iostream> #include "error.h" using namespace std; int main() { try { throw error(memoryAllocationError); } catch(error& err) { } } I have kind of debugging the code and the error happens when the message is being inserted in the static map member. An observation is that if I put the line: errorType memoryAllocationError=error::insertMessage("ERROR: out of memory."); inside the "main()" function instead of at global scope, then everything works fine. But I would like to extend the error messages at global scope, not at local scope. The map is defined static so that all instances of "error" share the same error codes and messages. Do you know how can I get this or something similar. Thank you very much.

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• How do software projects go over budget and under-deliver?

  - by Carlos

  I've come across this story quite a few times here in the UK: NHS Computer System Summary: We're spunking £12 Billion on some health software with barely anything working. I was sitting the office discussing this with my colleagues, and we had a little think about. From what I can see, all the NHS needs is a database + middle tier of drugs/hospitals/patients/prescriptions objects, and various GUIs for doctors and nurses to look at. You'd also need to think about security and scalability. And you'd need to sit around a hospital/pharmacy/GPs office for a bit to figure out what they need. But, all told, I'd say I could knock together something with that kind of structure in a couple of days, and maybe throw in a month or two to make it work in scale. * If I had a few million quid, I could probably hire some really excellent designers to make a maintainable codebase, and also buy appropriate hardware to run the system on. I hate to trivialize something that seems to have caused to much trouble, but to me it looks like just a big distributed CRUD + UI system. So how on earth did this project bloat to £12B without producing much useful software? As I don't think the software sounds so complicated, I can only imagine that something about how it was organised caused this mess. Is it outsourcing that's the problem? Is it not getting the software designers to understand the medical business that caused it? What are your experiences with projects gone over budget, under delivered? What are best practices for large projects? Have you ever worked on such a project? EDIT *This bit seemed to get a lot of attention. What I mean is I could probably do this for say, 30 users, spending a few tens of thousands of pounds. I'm not including stuff I don't know about the medical industry and government, but I think most people who've been around programming are familiar with that kind of database/front end kind of design. My point is the NHS project looks like a BIG version of this, with bells and whistles, notably security. But surely a budget millions of times larger than mine could provide this?

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• Library to fake intermittent failures according to tester-defined policy?

  - by crosstalk

  I'm looking for a library that I can use to help mock a program component that works only intermittently - usually, it works fine, but sometimes it fails. For example, suppose I need to read data from a file, and my program has to avoid crashing or hanging when a read fails due to a disk head crash. I'd like to model that by having a mock data reader function that returns mock data 90% of the time, but hangs or returns garbage otherwise. Or, if I'm stress-testing my full program, I could turn on debugging code in my real data reader module to make it return real data 90% of the time and hang otherwise. Now, obviously, in this particular example I could just code up my mock manually to test against a random() routine. However, I was looking for a system that allows implementing any failure policy I want, including: Fail randomly 10% of the time Succeed 10 times, fail 4 times, repeat Fail semi-randomly, such that one failure tends to be followed by a burst of more failures Any policy the tester wants to define Furthermore, I'd like to be able to change the failure policy at runtime, using either code internal to the program under test, or external knobs or switches (though the latter can be implemented with the former). In pig-Java, I'd envision a FailureFaker interface like so: interface FailureFaker { /** Return true if and only if the mocked operation succeeded. Implementors should override this method with versions consistent with their failure policy. */ public boolean attempt(); } And each failure policy would be a class implementing FailureFaker; for example there would be a PatternFailureFaker that would succeed N times, then fail M times, then repeat, and a AlwaysFailFailureFaker that I'd use temporarily when I need to simulate, say, someone removing the external hard drive my data was on. The policy could then be used (and changed) in my mock object code like so: class MyMockComponent { FailureFaker faker; public void doSomething() { if (faker.attempt()) { // ... } else { throw new RuntimeException(); } } void setFailurePolicy (FailureFaker policy) { this.faker = policy; } } Now, this seems like something that would be part of a mocking library, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's been done before. (In fact, I got the idea from Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code, where he discusses this exact idea on pages 228-231, saying that such facilities were common in Microsoft code of that early-90's era.) However, I'm only familiar with EasyMock and jMockit for Java, and neither AFAIK have this function, or something similar with different syntax. Hence, the question: Do such libraries as I've described above exist? If they do, where have you found them useful? If you haven't found them useful, why not?

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• State / Screen management in Entity Component Systems

  - by David Lively

  My entity/component system is happily humming along and, despite some performance concerns I initially had, everything is working fine. However, I've realized that I missed a crucial point when starting this thing: how do you handle different screens? At the moment, I have a GameManager class which owns a component manager and entity manager. When I create an entity, the entity manager assigns it an ID and makes sure it's tracked. When I modify the components that are assigned to an entity. an UpdateEntity method is called, which alerts each of the systems that they may need to add or remove the entity from their respective entity lists. A problem with this is that the collection of entities operated on by each system is determined solely by the individual Systems, typically based on a "required component" filter. (An entity has to have a Renderable component to be rendered, for instance.) In this situation, I can't just keep collections of entities per screen and only Update/Draw those collections. They'd have to either be added and removed depending on their applicability to the current screen, which would cause their associated components to be removed, or enable/disable entities in a group per screen to hide what's not supposed to be visible. These approaches seem like really, really crappy kludges. What's a good way to handle this? A pretty straightforward way that comes to mind is to create a separate GameManager (which in my implementation owns all of the systems, entities, etc.) per screen, which means that everything outside of the device context would be duplicated. That's bothersome because some things are always visible, or I might want to continue to display the game under a translucent menu window. Another option would be to add a "layer" key to the GameManager class, which could be checked against a displayable layer stack held by the game manager. *System.Draw() would be called for each active layer, in the required order as determined by the stack. When the systems request an iterator for their respective entity collections, it would be pre-filtered to a (cached) set of those entities that participate in the active layer. Those collections could be updated from the same UpdateEntity event that's already used to maintain each system's entity collections. Still, kinda feels like a hack. If I've coded myself into a corner, feel free to throw tomatoes as long as they're labeled with a helpful suggestion. Hooray for learning curves.

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• Memory Glutton

  - by AreYouSerious

  I have to admit that I can't get enough storage. I have hard drives just sitting around in case I need to move somthing, or I'm going to a friends and either they want something I have or I want something they might have. What I'm going to talk about today is cost effective memory for devices. I don't know how this particualr device will work in a camera, as That's not what I use in my camera, in fact I don't have a camera that doesn't either use SD, or the old compact flash card, that's not so compact anymore. There's this thing that uses two micro sd cards to double the capacity of your memory, and it costs about 4 bucks, without the Micro SD card. I have had one for about a year and was going to throw it away because I couldn't get it to work with my computer, or with my Sony Reader. However I found out by one last ditch effort that this thing works beautifully with my Sony PSP. there is no software to speak of associated with this thing, you simply put in two SD cards of the same size... (if you put in two different sizes it will still work, you'll only double the smallest cards size though) and format through the psp. Viola you know have a 29 GB memory card for your PSP. why is this important ? well for starters you can carry more music and more videos. Second if you have gone the way of the hacker.... you can store more games on your card... There are just a few things you have to note.... I speak from experience... you have to use the usb connection to the PSP to do any file moving, as I said previously said card doesn't play well with my computers or card readers... I not saying it won't work at all, just hasn't work with anything I own. Second. If for some reason you try to Hack/crack your PSP don't attempt to delete a game from the psp, use the usb file browser to remove games. if you delete from the PSP you are likely to have to move all your files off, reformat and start again... just a couple things I have noticed... if I had done something like that.   anyway, Here's a link.... http://www.photofast-adapter.com/  and if you want to buy one, get it off ebay, I've seen them as low as $1.99

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• Play or Lift: which one is more explicit?

  - by Andrea

  I am going to investigate web development with Scala, and the choice is between learning Lift or Play: probably I will not have enough time to try both, at least at first. Now, many comparisons between the two are available on the internet, but I would like to know how do they compare with respect to being explicit and involving less magic. Let me explain what I mean by example. I have used, to various degrees, CakePHP, symfony2, Django and Grails. I feel a very clear distinction between Django and symfony2, which are very explicit about what you are doing, and Grails and CakePHP, which try to do their best to guess what you are trying to achieve and often feel "magical". Let me give some examples comparing Django and Grails. In Django, views are functions that take a request as input and return a response. You can instantiate explicitly an instance of HttpResponse and populate its body with a string, or you can use shortcut functions to leverage the template system. In any case the return value from your view always has the same type. In contrast, the render method from Grails is highly polymorphic. You can throw a context at it and it will try to render a template which is found by convention using that context. Or you can pass it a pair of a template path and a context and that will work too. Or a string. Or XML. Grails tries hard to make sense of whatever you return from your controller. In the Django ORM, each model class has a static attribute representing the manager for that class. That manager exposes a fluent interface to build querysets. In Grails, you can have a similar functionality by composing detached criteria. Still, the most common way to query objects seems to be the use of runtime-generated methods like FindUserByEmailNotNull or FindPostByDateGreaterThan. I will not go further, but my point is that in Django-like frameworks you have control over the whole flow of the request/response process, while in Grails-like ones I feel I only have to feel the blanks and the framework will manage the rest of the flow for me. This is not to criticize Grails or CakePHP; which type you prefer is mainly a matter of preference. In fact, I happen to like some aspects of Grails, but I feel more comfortable with a framework which does less for me. Back to the point of the question: which one among Play and Lift is more explicit about what you do and which one tries to simplify more what you have to do with a layer of "magic"?

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• What does the Spring framework do? Should I use it? Why or why not?

  - by sangfroid

  So, I'm starting a brand-new project in Java, and am considering using Spring. Why am I considering Spring? Because lots of people tell me I should use Spring! Seriously, any time I've tried to get people to explain what exactly Spring is or what it does, they can never give me a straight answer. I've checked the intros on the SpringSource site, and they're either really complicated or really tutorial-focused, and none of them give me a good idea of why I should be using it, or how it will make my life easier. Sometimes people throw around the term "dependency injection", which just confuses me even more, because I think I have a different understanding of what that term means. Anyway, here's a little about my background and my app : Been developing in Java for a while, doing back-end web development. Yes, I do a ton of unit testing. To facilitate this, I typically make (at least) two versions of a method : one that uses instance variables, and one that only uses variables that are passed in to the method. The one that uses instance variables calls the other one, supplying the instance variables. When it comes time to unit test, I use Mockito to mock up the objects and then make calls to the method that doesn't use instance variables. This is what I've always understood "dependency injection" to be. My app is pretty simple, from a CS perspective. Small project, 1-2 developers to start with. Mostly CRUD-type operations with a a bunch of search thrown in. Basically a bunch of RESTful web services, plus a web front-end and then eventually some mobile clients. I'm thinking of doing the front-end in straight HTML/CSS/JS/JQuery, so no real plans to use JSP. Using Hibernate as an ORM, and Jersey to implement the webservices. I've already started coding, and am really eager to get a demo out there that I can shop around and see if anyone wants to invest. So obviously time is of the essence. I understand Spring has quite the learning curve, plus it looks like it necessitates a whole bunch of XML configuration, which I typically try to avoid like the plague. But if it can make my life easier and (especially) if make it can make development and testing faster, I'm willing to bite the bullet and learn Spring. So please. Educate me. Should I use Spring? Why or why not?

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• PowerShell – Show a Notification Balloon

  - by BuckWoody

  In my presentations for PowerShell I sometimes want to start a process (like a backup) that will take some time. I normally pop up a notification “balloon” at the start, and then do the bulk of the work, and then pop up a balloon at the end to let me know it’s done. You can actually try out this little sample (on a test system, of course) without any other code to see what it does. Then just put the other PowerShell commands in the #Do Some Work part. Oh – throw an icon (.ico file) in a c:\temp directory or point that somewhere else. (No, this probably isn’t original. Can’t remember where I saw the original code, but I’ve modified it a bit anyway, so if you’re the original author and this looks slightly familiar, post a comment.) [void] [System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("System.Windows.Forms") $objBalloon = New-Object System.Windows.Forms.NotifyIcon $objBalloon.Icon = "C:\temp\Folder.ico" # You can use the value Info, Warning, Error $objBalloon.BalloonTipIcon = "Info" # Put what you want to say here for the Start of the process $objBalloon.BalloonTipTitle = "Begin Title" $objBalloon.BalloonTipText = "Begin Message" $objBalloon.Visible = $True $objBalloon.ShowBalloonTip(10000) # Do some work # Put what you want to say here for the completion of the process $objBalloon.BalloonTipTitle = "End Title" $objBalloon.BalloonTipText = "End Message" $objBalloon.Visible = $True $objBalloon.ShowBalloonTip(10000) Script Disclaimer, for people who need to be told this sort of thing: Never trust any script, including those that you find here, until you understand exactly what it does and how it will act on your systems. Always check the script on a test system or Virtual Machine, not a production system. Yes, there are always multiple ways to do things, and this script may not work in every situation, for everything. It’s just a script, people. All scripts on this site are performed by a professional stunt driver on a closed course. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Offer good for a limited time only. Keep out of reach of small children. Do not operate heavy machinery while using this script. If you experience blurry vision, indigestion or diarrhea during the operation of this script, see a physician immediately. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar’s Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a ‘perfect storm’ of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one’s work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven’t far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it’s a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it’s more important not to let such fears lead to writer’s block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn’t always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what’s involved in getting an application that is ‘done’ ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we’d love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to ‘throw your hat into the ring’, drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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• How to suggest using an ORM instead of stored procedures?

  - by Wayne M

  I work at a company that only uses stored procedures for all data access, which makes it very annoying to keep our local databases in sync as every commit we have to run new procs. I have used some basic ORMs in the past and I find the experience much better and cleaner. I'd like to suggest to the development manager and rest of the team that we look into using an ORM Of some kind for future development (the rest of the team are only familiar with stored procedures and have never used anything else). The current architecture is .NET 3.5 written like .NET 1.1, with "god classes" that use a strange implementation of ActiveRecord and return untyped DataSets which are looped over in code-behind files - the classes work something like this: class Foo { public bool LoadFoo() { bool blnResult = false; if (this.FooID == 0) { throw new Exception("FooID must be set before calling this method."); } DataSet ds = // ... call to Sproc if (ds.Tables[0].Rows.Count > 0) { foo.FooName = ds.Tables[0].Rows[0]["FooName"].ToString(); // other properties set blnResult = true; } return blnResult; } } // Consumer Foo foo = new Foo(); foo.FooID = 1234; foo.LoadFoo(); // do stuff with foo... There is pretty much no application of any design patterns. There are no tests whatsoever (nobody else knows how to write unit tests, and testing is done through manually loading up the website and poking around). Looking through our database we have: 199 tables, 13 views, a whopping 926 stored procedures and 93 functions. About 30 or so tables are used for batch jobs or external things, the remainder are used in our core application. Is it even worth pursuing a different approach in this scenario? I'm talking about moving forward only since we aren't allowed to refactor the existing code since "it works" so we cannot change the existing classes to use an ORM, but I don't know how often we add brand new modules instead of adding to/fixing current modules so I'm not sure if an ORM is the right approach (too much invested in stored procedures and DataSets). If it is the right choice, how should I present the case for using one? Off the top of my head the only benefits I can think of is having cleaner code (although it might not be, since the current architecture isn't built with ORMs in mind so we would basically be jury-rigging ORMs on to future modules but the old ones would still be using the DataSets) and less hassle to have to remember what procedure scripts have been run and which need to be run, etc. but that's it, and I don't know how compelling an argument that would be. Maintainability is another concern but one that nobody except me seems to be concerned about.

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• What if I can't make my unit test fail in "Red, Green, Refactor" of TDD?

  - by Joshua Harris

  So let's say that I have a test: @Test public void MoveY_MoveZero_DoesNotMove() { Point p = new Point(50.0, 50.0); p.MoveY(0.0); Assert.assertAreEqual(50.0, p.Y); } This test then causes me to create the class Point: public class Point { double X; double Y; public void MoveY(double yDisplace) { throw new NotYetImplementedException(); } } Ok. It fails. Good. Then I remove the exception and I get green. Great, but of course I need to test if it changes value. So I write a test that calls p.MoveY(10.0) and checks if p.Y is equal to 60.0. It fails, so then I change the function to look like so: public void MoveY(double yDisplace) { Y += yDisplace; } Great, now I have green again and I can move on. I've tested not moving and moving in the positive direction, so naturally I should test a negative value. The only problem with this test is that if I wrote the test correctly, then it doesn't fail at first. That means that I didn't fit the principle of "Red, Green, Refactor." Of course, This is a first-world problem of TDD, but getting a fail at first is helpful in that it shows that your test can fail. Otherwise this seemingly innocent test that is just passing for incorrect reasons could fail later because it was written wrong. That might not be a problem if it happened 5 minutes later, but what if it happens to the poor-sap that inheirited your code two years later. What he knows is that MoveY does not work with negative values because that is what the test is telling him. But, it really could work and just be a bug in the test. I don't think that would happen in this particular case because the code sample is so simple, but if it were a large complicated system that might not be the case. It seems crazy to say that I want to fail my tests, but that is an important step in TDD, for good reasons.

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• What are some reasonable stylistic limits on type inference?

  - by Jon Purdy

  C++0x adds pretty darn comprehensive type inference support. I'm sorely tempted to use it everywhere possible to avoid undue repetition, but I'm wondering if removing explicit type information all over the place is such a good idea. Consider this rather contrived example: Foo.h: #include <set> class Foo { private: static std::set<Foo*> instances; public: Foo(); ~Foo(); // What does it return? Who cares! Just forward it! static decltype(instances.begin()) begin() { return instances.begin(); } static decltype(instances.end()) end() { return instances.end(); } }; Foo.cpp: #include <Foo.h> #include <Bar.h> // The type need only be specified in one location! // But I do have to open the header to find out what it actually is. decltype(Foo::instances) Foo::instances; Foo() { // What is the type of x? auto x = Bar::get_something(); // What does do_something() return? auto y = x.do_something(*this); // Well, it's convertible to bool somehow... if (!y) throw "a constant, old school"; instances.insert(this); } ~Foo() { instances.erase(this); } Would you say this is reasonable, or is it completely ridiculous? After all, especially if you're used to developing in a dynamic language, you don't really need to care all that much about the types of things, and can trust that the compiler will catch any egregious abuses of the type system. But for those of you that rely on editor support for method signatures, you're out of luck, so using this style in a library interface is probably really bad practice. I find that writing things with all possible types implicit actually makes my code a lot easier for me to follow, because it removes nearly all of the usual clutter of C++. Your mileage may, of course, vary, and that's what I'm interested in hearing about. What are the specific advantages and disadvantages to radical use of type inference?

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• Hadoop, NOSQL, and the Relational Model

  - by Phil Factor

  (Guest Editorial for the IT Pro/SysAdmin Newsletter)Whereas Relational Databases fit the world of commerce like a glove, it is useless to pretend that they are a perfect fit for all human endeavours. Although, with SQL Server, we’ve made great strides with indexing text, in processing spatial data and processing markup, there is still a problem in dealing efficiently with large volumes of ephemeral semi-structured data. Key-value stores such as Cassandra, Project Voldemort, and Riak are of great value for ephemeral data, and seem of equal value as a data-feed that provides aggregations to an RDBMS. However, the Document databases such as MongoDB and CouchDB are ideal for semi-structured data for which no fixed schema exists; analytics and logging are obvious examples. NoSQL products, such as MongoDB, tackle the semi-structured data problem with panache. MongoDB is designed with a simple document-oriented data model that scales horizontally across multiple servers. It doesn’t impose a schema, and relies on the application to enforce the data structure. This is another take on the old ‘EAV’ problem (where you don’t know in advance all the attributes of a particular entity) It uses a clever replica set design that allows automatic failover, and uses journaling for data durability. It allows indexing and ad-hoc querying. However, for SQL Server users, the obvious choice for handling semi-structured data is Apache Hadoop. There will soon be an ODBC Driver for Apache Hive .and an Add-in for Excel. Additionally, there are now two Hadoop-based connectors for SQL Server; the Apache Hadoop connector for SQL Server 2008 R2, and the SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse (PDW) connector. We can connect to Hadoop process the semi-structured data and then store it in SQL Server. For one steeped in the culture of Relational SQL Databases, I might be expected to throw up my hands in the air in a gesture of contempt for a technology that was, judging by the overblown journalism on the subject, about to make my own profession as archaic as the Saggar makers bottom knocker (a potter’s assistant who helped the saggar maker to make the bottom of the saggar by placing clay in a metal hoop and bashing it). However, on the contrary, I find that I'm delighted with the advances made by the NoSQL databases in the past few years. Having the flow of ideas from the NoSQL providers will knock any trace of complacency out of the providers of Relational Databases and inspire them into back-fitting some features, such as horizontal scaling, with sharding and automatic failover into SQL-based RDBMSs. It will do the breed a power of good to benefit from all this lateral thinking.

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• Loading levels from .txt or .XML for XNA

  - by Dave Voyles

  I'm attemptin to add multiple levels to my pong game. I'd like to simply exchange a few elements with each level, nothing crazy. Just the background texture, the color of the AI paddle (the one on the right side), and the music. It seems that the best way to go about this is by utilizing the StreamReader to read and write the files from XML. If there is a better, or more efficient alternative way then I'm all for it. In looking over the XNA Starter Platformer Kit provided by MS it seems that they've done it in this manner as well. I'm perplexed by a few things, however, namely parts within the Level class which aren't commented. /// <summary> /// Iterates over every tile in the structure file and loads its /// appearance and behavior. This method also validates that the /// file is well-formed with a player start point, exit, etc. /// </summary> /// <param name="fileStream"> /// A stream containing the tile data. /// </param> private void LoadTiles(Stream fileStream) { // Load the level and ensure all of the lines are the same length. int width; List<string> lines = new List<string>(); using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(fileStream)) { string line = reader.ReadLine(); width = line.Length; while (line != null) { lines.Add(line); if (line.Length != width) throw new Exception(String.Format("The length of line {0} is different from all preceeding lines.", lines.Count)); line = reader.ReadLine(); } } What does width = line.Length mean exactly? I mean I know how it reads the line, but what difference does it make if one line is longer than any of the others? Finally, their levels are simply text files that look like this: .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .................... .........GGG........ .........###........ .................... ....GGG.......GGG... ....###.......###... .................... .1................X. #################### It can't be that easy..... Can it?

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• How do you handle objects that need custom behavior, and need to exist as an entity in the database?

  - by Scott Whitlock

  For a simple example, assume your application sends out notifications to users when various events happen. So in the database I might have the following tables: TABLE Event EventId uniqueidentifier EventName varchar TABLE User UserId uniqueidentifier Name varchar TABLE EventSubscription EventUserId EventId UserId The events themselves are generated by the program. So there are hard-coded points in the application where an event instance is generated, and it needs to notify all the subscribed users. So, the application itself doesn't edit the Event table, except during initial installation, and during an update where a new Event might be created. At some point, when an event is generated, the application needs to lookup the Event and get a list of Users. What's the best way to link the event in the source code to the event in the database? Option 1: Store the EventName in the program as a fixed constant, and look it up by name. Option 2: Store the EventId in the program as a static Guid, and look it up by ID. Extra Credit In other similar circumstances I may want to include custom behavior with the event type. That is, I'll want subclasses of my Event entity class with different behaviors, and when I lookup an event, I want it to return an instance of my subclass. For instance: class Event { public Guid Id { get; } public Guid EventName { get; } public ReadOnlyCollection<EventSubscription> EventSubscriptions { get; } public void NotifySubscribers() { foreach(var eventSubscription in EventSubscriptions) { eventSubscription.Notify(); } this.OnSubscribersNotified(); } public virtual void OnSubscribersNotified() {} } class WakingEvent : Event { private readonly IWaker waker; public WakingEvent(IWaker waker) { if(waker == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("waker"); this.waker = waker; } public override void OnSubscribersNotified() { this.waker.Wake(); base.OnSubscribersNotified(); } } So, that means I need to map WakingEvent to whatever key I'm using to look it up in the database. Let's say that's the EventId. Where do I store this relationship? Does it go in the event repository class? Should the WakingEvent know declare its own ID in a static member or method? ...and then, is this all backwards? If all events have a subclass, then instead of retrieving events by ID, should I be asking my repository for the WakingEvent like this: public T GetEvent<T>() where T : Event { ... // what goes here? ... } I can't be the first one to tackle this. What's the best practice?

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• Inline template efficiency

  - by Darryl Gove

  I like inline templates, and use them quite extensively. Whenever I write code with them I'm always careful to check the disassembly to see that the resulting output is efficient. Here's a potential cause of inefficiency. Suppose we want to use the mis-named Leading Zero Detect (LZD) instruction on T4 (this instruction does a count of the number of leading zero bits in an integer register - so it should really be called leading zero count). So we put together an inline template called lzd.il looking like: .inline lzd lzd %o0,%o0 .end And we throw together some code that uses it: int lzd(int); int a; int c=0; int main() { for(a=0; a<1000; a++) { c=lzd(c); } return 0; } We compile the code with some amount of optimisation, and look at the resulting code: $ cc -O -xtarget=T4 -S lzd.c lzd.il $ more lzd.s .L77000018: /* 0x001c 11 */ lzd %o0,%o0 /* 0x0020 9 */ ld [%i1],%i3 /* 0x0024 11 */ st %o0,[%i2] /* 0x0028 9 */ add %i3,1,%i0 /* 0x002c */ cmp %i0,999 /* 0x0030 */ ble,pt %icc,.L77000018 /* 0x0034 */ st %i0,[%i1] What is surprising is that we're seeing a number of loads and stores in the code. Everything could be held in registers, so why is this happening? The problem is that the code is only inlined at the code generation stage - when the actual instructions are generated. Earlier compiler phases see a function call. The called functions can do all kinds of nastiness to global variables (like 'a' in this code) so we need to load them from memory after the function call, and store them to memory before the function call. Fortunately we can use a #pragma directive to tell the compiler that the routine lzd() has no side effects - meaning that it does not read or write to memory. The directive to do that is #pragma no_side_effect(<routine name), and it needs to be placed after the declaration of the function. The new code looks like: int lzd(int); #pragma no_side_effect(lzd) int a; int c=0; int main() { for(a=0; a<1000; a++) { c=lzd(c); } return 0; } Now the loop looks much neater: /* 0x0014 10 */ add %i1,1,%i1 ! 11 ! { ! 12 ! c=lzd(c); /* 0x0018 12 */ lzd %o0,%o0 /* 0x001c 10 */ cmp %i1,999 /* 0x0020 */ ble,pt %icc,.L77000018 /* 0x0024 */ nop

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• Drawing 2D Grid in 3D View - Need help with method

  - by Deukalion

  I'm trying to draw a simple 2D grid for an editor, to able to navigate more clearly around the 3D space, but I can't render it: Grid2D class, creates a grid of a certain size at a location and should just draw lines. public class Grid2D : IShape { private VertexPositionColor[] _vertices; private Vector2 _size; private Vector3 _location; private int _faces; public Grid2D(Vector2 size, Vector3 location, Color color) { float x = 0, y = 0; if (size.X < 1f) { size.X = 1f; } if (size.Y < 1f) { size.Y = 1f; } _size = size; _location = location; List<VertexPositionColor> vertices = new List<VertexPositionColor>(); _faces = 0; for (y = -size.Y; y <= size.Y; y++) { vertices.Add(new VertexPositionColor(location + new Vector3(-size.X, y, 0), color)); vertices.Add(new VertexPositionColor(location + new Vector3(size.X, y, 0), color)); _faces++; } for (x = -size.X; x <= size.X; x++) { vertices.Add(new VertexPositionColor(location + new Vector3(x, -size.Y, 0), color)); vertices.Add(new VertexPositionColor(location + new Vector3(x, size.Y, 0), color)); _faces++; } _vertices = vertices.ToArray(); } public void Render(GraphicsDevice device) { device.DrawUserPrimitives<VertexPositionColor>(PrimitiveType.LineList, _vertices, 0, _faces); } } Like this: +----+----+----+----+ | | | | | +----+----+----+----+ | | | | | +----+----+----+----+ | | | | | +----+----+----+----+ | | | | | +----+----+----+----+ Anyone knows what I'm doing wrong? If I add a Shape without texture, it's set automatically to VertexColorEnabled and TextureEnabled = false. This is how I render it: foreach (RenderObject render in _renderObjects) { render.Effect.Projection = projection; render.Effect.View = view; render.Effect.World = world; foreach (EffectPass pass in render.Effect.CurrentTechnique.Passes) { pass.Apply(); try { // Could be a Grid2D render.Shape.Render(_device); } catch { throw; } } } Exception is thrown: The current vertex shader declaration does not include all the elements required by the current Vertex Shader. Normal0 is missing. Simply put, I can't figure out how to draw a few lines. I want to draw them one at a time and I guess that's the problem I haven't figured out, and even when I tried rendering vertices[i], vertices[i+1] and primitiveCount = 1, vertices = 2, and so on it didn't work either. Any suggestions?

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• VS2010 Launch Presentations

  Last week I was in Vegas to present at the DevConnections / VS2010 Launch event.  The show was well-attended and everybody I spoke to agreed it was educational and enjoyable.  My three talks were all on Wednesday, 14 April 2010, including one at 8am for which I was impressed to see a large turnout in attendance.   Pragmatic ASP.NET Tips, Tricks, and Tools My first session was on tips, tricks, and tools for ASP.NET developers.  This is a talk Ive given in past years, but which I refine every time.  I usually like to have a full session to devote to tools, and a separate talk just for Tips and Tricks, but for this show I was only given the one 75-minute slot, so I had to cut some materials to make things fit.  The talk went well, all the demos work, and the attendees seemed to enjoy it, and I like giving it, so hopefully I can continue to present on this topic in future DevConnections shows. Download the ASP.NET Tips, Tricks, and Tools slides and demos.   Whats New in ASP.NET MVC 2 My second talk of the day followed immediately after the Tips and Tricks talk, and was a brand new talk for me.  I have to throw out a thank-you to Phil for letting me see his MIX slide deck before he gave his talk, as that was a big help.  The official whats new document online is also worth checking out if youre interested in this subject.  Download the Whats New in ASP.NET MVC 2 slides and demos.   SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC 2 Application Just because youre using a ASP.NET MVC doesnt mean your code cant still end up being a big ball of mud.  This session describes a number of principles of software design that can help ensure applications remain loosely-coupled and malleable even as they age and increase in features and complexity.  This was my last talk of the day and did have one minor demo failure involving a database constraint.  Ive given this talk many times before, and in this case I had to fit it into a 60-minute timeslot, so Im not sure I had quite enough time to drive home all of the concepts to everyone in the audience.  That said, I did hear a number of positive comments on how the talk went, so thats encouraging. Download the SOLIDify Your ASP.NET MVC 2 Application slides and demos.   In my sessions, I promised to have these posted by the end of the weekend theyre going up at 10pm Sunday night (my time) 2 hours to spare!  Enjoy! Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• On the art of self-promotion

  - by Tony Davis

  I attended Brent Ozar's Building the Fastest SQL Servers session at Tech Ed last week, and found myself engulfed in a 'perfect storm' of excellent technical and presentational skills coupled with an astute awareness of the value of promoting one's work. I spend a lot of time at such events talking to developers and DBAs about the value of blogging and writing articles, and my impression is that some could benefit from a touch less modesty and a little more self-promotion. I sense a reticence in many would-be writers. Is what I have to say important enough? Haven't far more qualified and established commentators, MVPs and so on, already said it? While it's a good idea to pick reasonably fresh and interesting topics, it's more important not to let such fears lead to writer's block. In the eyes of any future employer, your published writing is an extension of your resume. They will not care that a certain MVP knows how to solve problem x, but they will be very interested to see that you have tackled that same problem, and solved it in your own way, and described the process in your own voice. In your current job, your writing is one of the ways you can express to your peers, and to the organization as a whole, the value of what you contribute. Many Developers and DBAs seem to rely on the idea that their work will speak for itself, and that their skill shines out from it. Unfortunately, this isn't always true. Many Development DBAs, for example, will be painfully aware of the massive effort involved in tuning and adding resilience to rapidly developed applications. However, others in the organization who are unaware of what's involved in getting an application that is 'done' ready for production may dismiss such efforts as fussiness or conservatism. At the dark end of the development cycle, chickens come home to roost, but their droppings tend to land on those trying to clear up the mess. My advice is this: next time you fix a bug or improve the resilience or performance of a database or application, make sure that you use team meetings, informal discussions and so on to ensure that people understand what the problem was and what you had to do to fix it. Use your blog to describe, generally, the process you adopted, the resources you used and the insights that came from your work. Encourage your colleagues to do the same. By spreading the art of self-promotion to everyone involved in an IT project, we get a better idea of the extent of the work and the value of the contribution of all the team members. As always, we'd love to hear what you think. This very week, Simple-talk launches its new blogging platform. If any of this has moved you to 'throw your hat into the ring', drop us a mail at [email protected]. Cheers, Tony.

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