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• Is committing/checking code everyday a good practice?

  - by ArtB

  I've been reading Martin Fowler's note on Continuous Integration and he lists as a must "Everyone Commits To the Mainline Every Day". I do not like to commit code unless the section I'm working on is complete and that in practice I commit my code every three days: one day to investigate/reproduce the task and make some preliminary changes, a second day to complete the changes, and a third day to write the tests and clean it up^ for submission. I would not feel comfortable submitting the code sooner. Now, I pull changes from the repository and integrate them locally usually twice a day, but I do not commit that often unless I can carve out a smaller piece of work. Question: is committing everyday such a good practice that I should change my workflow to accomodate it, or it is not that advisable? ^ The order is more arbitrary and depends on the task, my point was to illustrate the time span and activities, not the exact sequence.

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• Implementing a FSM with ActionScript 2 without using classes?

  - by Up2u

  I have seen several references of A.I. and FSM, but sadly I still can't understand the point of an FSM in AS2.0. Is it a must to create a class for each state? I have a game-project which also it has an A.I., the A.I. has 3 states: distanceCheck, ChaseTarget, and Hit the target. It's an FPS game and played via mouse. I have created the A.I. successfully, but I want to convert it to FSM method... My first state is CheckDistanceState() and in that function I look for the nearest target and trigger the function ChaseState(), there I insert the Hit() function to destroy the enemy, The 3 functions that I created are being called in AI_cursor.onEnterframe. Is there any chance to implement an FSM without the need to create a class? From what I've read before, you have to create a class. I prefer to write the code on frames in flash and I still don't understand how to have external classes.

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• Design pattern and best practices

  - by insane-36

  I am an iphone developer. I am quite confident on developing iphone application with some minimal feature. I would consider myself as a fair application developer but the code I write is not so much structured. I make vey little use of MVC because I dont seem to find places to impose MVC. Most of the time, I create application with viewcontrollers and very few models only. How could I improve the skill for making my code more reusable, standard, easy and maintainable. I have seen few books on design patterns and tried few chapters myself but I dont seem to skip my habit. I know few of them but I am not being able to apply those patterns into my app. What is the best way to learn the design patterns and coding habit. Any kind of suggestion is warmly welcomed.

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• Asynchronously returning a hierarchal data using .NET TPL... what should my return object "look" like?

  - by makerofthings7

  I want to use the .NET TPL to asynchronously do a DIR /S and search each subdirectory on a hard drive, and want to search for a word in each file... what should my API look like? In this scenario I know that each sub directory will have 0..10000 files or 0...10000 directories. I know the tree is unbalanced and want to return data (in relation to its position in the hierarchy) as soon as it's available. I am interested in getting data as quickly as possible, but also want to update that result if "better" data is found (better means closer to the root of c:) I may also be interested in finding all matches in relation to its position in the hierarchy. (akin to a report) Question: How should I return data to my caller? My first guess is that I think I need a shared object that will maintain the current "status" of the traversal (started | notstarted | complete ) , and might base it on the System.Collections.Concurrent. Another idea that I'm considering is the consumer/producer pattern (which ConcurrentCollections can handle) however I'm not sure what the objects "look" like. Optional Logical Constraint: The API doesn't have to address this, but in my "real world" design, if a directory has files, then only one file will ever contain the word I'm looking for.  If someone were to literally do a DIR /S as described above then they would need to account for more than one matching file per subdirectory. More information : I'm using Azure Tables to store a hierarchy of data using these TPL extension methods. A "node" is a table. Not only does each node in the hierarchy have a relation to any number of nodes, but it's possible for each node to have a reciprocal link back to any other node. This may have issues with recursion but I'm addressing that with a shared object in my recursion loop. Note that each "node" also has the ability to store local data unique to that node. It is this information that I'm searching for. In other words, I'm searching for a specific fixed RowKey in a hierarchy of nodes. When I search for the fixed RowKey in the hierarchy I'm interested in getting the results FAST (first node found) but prefer data that is "closer" to the starting point of the hierarchy. Since many nodes may have the particular RowKey I'm interested in, sometimes I may want to get a report of ALL the nodes that contain this RowKey.

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• Is reference to bug/issue in commit message considered good practice?

  - by Christian P

  I'm working on a project where we have the source control set up to automatically write notes in the bug tracker. We simply write the bug issue ID in the commit message and the commit message is added as a note to the bug tracker. I can see only a few downsides for this practice. If sometime in the future the source code gets separated from the bug tracking software (or the reported bugs/issues are somehow lost). Or when someone is looking in the history of commits but doesn't have access to our bug tracker. My question is if having a bug/issue reference in the commit message is considered good practice? Are there some other downsides?

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• Exploring your database schema with SQL

  In the second part of Phil's series of articles on finding stuff (such as objects, scripts, entities, metadata) in SQL Server, he offers some scripts that should be handy for the developer faced with tracking down problem areas and potential weaknesses in a database.

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• Is Linq having a mind-numbing effect on .NET programmers?

  - by Aaronaught

  A lot of us started seeing this phenomenon with jQuery about a year ago when people started asking how to do absolutely insane things like retrieve the query string with jQuery. The difference between the library (jQuery) and the language (JavaScript) is apparently lost on many programmers, and results in a lot of inappropriate, convoluted code being written where it is not necessary. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I swear I'm starting to see an uptick in the number of questions where people are asking to do similarly insane things with Linq, like find ranges in a sorted array. I can't get over how thoroughly inappropriate the Linq extensions are for solving that problem, but more importantly the fact that the author just assumed that the ideal solution would involve Linq without actually thinking about it (as far as I can tell). It seems that we are repeating history, breeding a new generation of .NET programmers who can't tell the difference between the language (C#/VB.NET) and the library (Linq). What is responsible for this phenomenon? Is it just hype? Magpie tendencies? Has Linq picked up a reputation as a form of magic, where instead of actually writing code you just have to utter the right incantation? I'm hardly satisfied with those explanations but I can't really think of anything else. More importantly, is it really a problem, and if so, what's the best way to help enlighten these people?

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• Does a mature agile team requires any management?

  - by ashy_32bit

  After a recent heated debate over Scrum, I realized my problem is that I think of management as a quite unnecessary and redundant activity in a fully agile team. I believe a mature Agile team does not require management or any non-technical decision making process whatsoever. To my (apparently erring) eyes it is more than obvious that the only one suitable and capable of managing a mature development team is their coach (who is the most technically competent colleague with proper communication skills). I can't imagine how a Scrum master can contribute to such a team. I am having great difficulty realizing and understanding the value of such things in Scrum and the manager as someone who is not a veteran developer but is well skilled in planning the production cycles when a coach exists in the team. What does that even mean? How on earth can someone with no edge-skills of development manage a highly technical team? Perhaps management here means something else? I see management as a total waste of time and a by-product of immaturity. In my understanding a mature team is fully self-managing. Apparently I'm mistaken since many great people say the contrary but I can't convince myself.

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• Someone tell me why people writing GNU code use { like that?

  - by Deus Deceit

  I saw the rules on how to type code for UNITY project or GNU software in general. Why do they write code in such an ugly form? Is there a particular reason why they don't put brackets the way (from what I know) most people do? Why like this: for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) { //do something } and not like this: for (i = 0; i < 5; i++) { //Do something } or this: for(i = 0; i < 5l i++) { //Do Something } ???

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• Appropriate level of granularity for component-based architecture

  - by Jon Purdy

  I'm working on a game with a component-based architecture. An Entity owns a set of Component instances, each of which has a set of Slot instances with which to store, send, and receive values. Factory functions such as Player produce entities with the required components and slot connections. I'm trying to determine the best level of granularity for components. For example, right now Position, Velocity, and Acceleration are all separate components, connected in series. Velocity and Acceleration could easily be rewritten into a uniform Delta component, or Position, Velocity, and Acceleration could be combined alongside such components as Friction and Gravity into a monolithic Physics component. Should a component have the smallest responsibility possible (at the cost of lots of interconnectivity) or should related components be combined into monolithic ones (at the cost of flexibility)? I'm leaning toward the former, but I could use a second opinion.

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• What's a nice explanation for pointers?

  - by Macneil

  In your own studies (on your own, or for a class) did you have an "ah ha" moment when you finally, really understood pointers? Do you have an explanation you use for beginner programmers that seems particularly effective? For example, when beginners first encounter pointers in C, they might just add &s and *s until it compiles (as I myself once did). Maybe it was a picture, or a really well motivated example, that made pointers "click" for you or your student. What was it, and what did you try before that didn't seem to work? Were any topics prerequisites (e.g. structs, or arrays)? In other words, what was necessary to understand the meaning of &s and *, when you could use them with confidence? Learning the syntax and terminology or the use cases isn't enough, at some point the idea needs to be internalized. Update: I really like the answers so far; please keep them coming. There are a lot of great perspectives here, but I think many are good explanations/slogans for ourselves after we've internalized the concept. I'm looking for the detailed contexts and circumstances when it dawned on you. For example: I only somewhat understood pointers syntactically in C. I heard two of my friends explaining pointers to another friend, who asked why a struct was passed with a pointer. The first friend talked about how it needed to be referenced and modified, but it was just a short comment from the other friend where it hit me: "It's also more efficient." Passing 4 bytes instead of 16 bytes was the final conceptual shift I needed.

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• Cloud Computing - just get started already!

  - by BuckWoody

  OK - you've been hearing about "cloud" (I really dislike that term, but whatever) for over two years. You've equated it with just throwing some VM's in some vendor's datacenter - which is certainly part of it, but not the whole story. There's a whole world of - wait for it - *coding* out there that you should be working on. If you're a developer, this is just a set of servers with operating systems and the runtime layer (like.NET, Java, PHP, etc.) that you can deploy code to and have it run. It can expand in a horizontal way, allowing massive - and I really, honestly mean massive, not just marketing talk kind of scale. We see this every day. If you're not a developer, well, now's the time to learn. Explore a little. Try it. We'll help you. There's a free conference you can attend in November, and you can sign up for it now. It's all on-line, and the tools you need to code are free. Put down Facebook and Twitter for a minute - go sign up. Learn. Do. :) See you there. http://www.windowsazureconf.net/

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• Would you use UML if it kept stakeholders from requesting changes frequently?

  - by Huperniketes

  As much as programmers hate to document their code/system and draw UML (especially, Sequencing, Activity and State machine diagrams) or other diagramming notation, would you agree to do it if it kept managers from requesting a "minor change" every couple of weeks? IOW, would you put together visual models to document the system if it helped you demonstrate to managers what the effect of changes are and why it takes so long to implement them? (Edited to help programmers understand what type of answer I'm looking for.) 2nd edit: Restating my question again, "Would you be willing to use some diagramming notation, against your better nature as a programmer, if it helped you manage change requests?" This question isn't asking if there might be something wrong with the process. It's a given that there's something wrong with the process. Would you be willing to do more work to improve it?

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• How to handle compensation issue

  - by Ali

  I consider myself an expert Software Developer. Recently, I noticed my current company posted a new job through a recruting firm requiring half experience than I have and even lesser set of skills. However, they are offering the same salary as my current salary. When I joined my current company a year ago, they declined to pay my asking salary. My evaluations are good and there are critical projects in the pipeline where my involvement is crucial for their success. I'm little confused on how to handle this situation. I don't want to come across threatning or any thing like that.

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• Grading an algorithm: Readability vs. Compactness

  - by amiregelz

  Consider the following question in a test \ interview: Implement the strcpy() function in C: void strcpy(char *destination, char *source); The strcpy function copies the C string pointed by source into the array pointed by destination, including the terminating null character. Assume that the size of the array pointed by destination is long enough to contain the same C string as source, and does not overlap in memory with source. Say you were the tester, how would you grade the following answers to this question? 1) void strcpy(char *destination, char *source) { while (*source != '\0') { *destination = *source; source++; destionation++; } *destionation = *source; } 2) void strcpy(char *destination, char *source) { while (*(destination++) = *(source++)) ; } The first implementation is straightforward - it is readable and programmer-friendly. The second implementation is shorter (one line of code) but less programmer-friendly; it's not so easy to understand the way this code is working, and if you're not familiar with the priorities in this code then it's a problem. I'm wondering if the first answer would show more complexity and more advanced thinking, in the tester's eyes, even though both algorithms behave the same, and although code readability is considered to be more important than code compactness. It seems to me that since making an algorithm this compact is more difficult to implement, it will show a higher level of thinking as an answer in a test. However, it is also possible that a tester would consider the first answer not good because it's not readable. I would also like to mention that this is not specific to this example, but general for code readability vs. compactness when implementing an algorithm, specifically in tests \ interviews.

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• Is it good to review programs with seniors and boss even if it is working fine?

  - by Himanshu

  In my company, before delivery of any project, my boss asks my seniors to review programs written by me or other team members or sometimes boss also sits with us for review. I think it is a good way of getting knowledge, but sometimes when programs are working fine, they don't work same after review and I need to look again into my program. They says that review helps to optimize program and query execution, but can we prefer optimization over actual functioning of program?

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• Is the copy/paste approach professionally viable when working with the Google Maps API?

  - by Ian Campbell

  I find that I understand much of the Javascript concepts used in the Google Maps API code, but then again there is quite a bit that is way over my head in syntax. For example, the geocoder syntax seems to be of Ajax form, though I don't understand what is happening under the hood (especially with lines like results[0].geometry.location). I am able to modify the body of if (status == google.maps.GeocoderStatus.OK) for different purposes though. So, being that I am able to take various code from the Developer's Guide and rework it to an extent for my own purposes, all the while not fully understanding what Google Maps is actually doing, does this make me a copy-paste programmer? Is this a bad practice, or is this professionally viable? I am, of course, interested in learning as much as I can, but what if time-constraints outweigh the learning process?

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• What attracts software developers such as yourselves to choose to program for the Android mobile platform?

  - by Hasnan Karim

  Dear programmers, as part of my final year university project, I am conducting research into what makes programmers prefer to program for Android as opposed to other mobile operating systems. The description does not need to be detailed however, I am trying to find patterns between programmers to determine what properties (other than money) a software company such as Android must have in order to attract programmers and therefore grow.

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• Should I modify an entity with many parameters or with the entity itself?

  - by Saeed Neamati

  We have a SOA-based system. The service methods are like: UpdateEntity(Entity entity) For small entities, it's all fine. However, when entities get bigger and bigger, to update one property we should follow this pattern in UI: Get parameters from UI (user) Create an instance of the Entity, using those parameters Get the entity from service Write code to fill the unchanged properties Give the result entity to the service Another option that I've experienced in previous experiences is to create semantic update methods for each update scenario. In other words instead of having one global all-encompasing update method, we had many ad-hoc parametric methods. For example, for the User entity, instead of having UpdateUser (User user) method, we had these methods: ChangeUserPassword(int userId, string newPassword) AddEmailToUserAccount(int userId, string email) ChangeProfilePicture(int userId, Image image) ... Now, I don't know which method is truly better, and for each approach, we encounter problems. I mean, I'm going to design the infrastructure for a new system, and I don't have enough reasons to pick any of these approaches. I couldn't find good resources on the Internet, because of the lack of keywords I could provide. What approach is better? What pitfalls each has? What benefits can we get from each one?

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• Is there a way to procedurally generate the history of a world?

  - by pdusen

  I am somewhat intrigued by the diagram found here representing 1800 years of cultural history in an imaginary world some guy created. This sort of thing would seem to have strong applications for game development, insofar as world design. It looks like he did this diagram by hand. What I'm interested in is seeing if there is a way to create this sort of diagram programatically. If you were tasked with generating diagrams in the style of the above from random values, how would you go about it? Are there any particular data structures or algorithms that you would consider?

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• developers-designers-testers interaction [closed]

  - by user29124

  Sorry for my bad English, and also you may not read this and waste your time, because it is just a lament of layman developer... Seems no one want to learn anything at my workplace. We have Mantis bug tracker, but our testers use google-docs for reports and only developers and team lead report bugs in Mantis. We have SVN for version control and use Smarty as template system, but our designers give us pure HTML (sometimes it's ugly for programmers, but mostly it's OK) in archives, and changes to design made by programmers go nowhere (I mean designers use their own obsolete HTML and CSS most of the time). We have a testing environment but designers don't have access with restricted accounts to it. So we can only ask them where to look for the problem and then investigate the problem by ourselves (and made changes to CSS by ourselves (that go nowhere most of the time...)). I will not mention legacy code without documentation, tests, or any requirements, just an absence of real interaction in triangle programmers-designers-testers. I'm not talking about using HAML, SASS, continuous integration, or something else, just about using basic tools by all participants of the development process. Maybe the absence of communication is not a problem in short-time projects, which will finish up in 2 months time but rather on the types of projects that lasts for years. Any comments please...

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• Question about separating game core engine from game graphics engine...

  - by Conrad Clark

  Suppose I have a SquareObject class, which implements IDrawable, an interface which contains the method void Draw(). I want to separate drawing logic itself from the game core engine. My main idea is to create a static class which is responsible to dispatch actions to the graphic engine. public static class DrawDispatcher<T> { private static Action<T> DrawAction = new Action<T>((ObjectToDraw)=>{}); public static void SetDrawAction(Action<T> action) { DrawAction = action; } public static void Dispatch(this T Obj) { DrawAction(Obj); } } public static class Extensions { public static void DispatchDraw<T>(this object Obj) { DrawDispatcher<T>.DispatchDraw((T)Obj); } } Then, on the core side: public class SquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<SquareObject>(); } #endregion } And on the graphics side: public static class SquareRender{ //stuff here public static void Initialize(){ DrawDispatcher<SquareObject>.SetDrawAction((Square)=>{//my square rendering logic}); } } Do this "pattern" follow best practices? And a plus, I could easily change the render scheme of each object by changing the DispatchDraw parameter, as in: public class SuperSquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<SquareObject>(); } #endregion } public class RedSquareObject: GameObject, IDrawable { #region Interface public void Draw() { this.DispatchDraw<RedSquareObject>(); } #endregion } RedSquareObject would have its own render method, but SuperSquareObject would render as a normal SquareObject I'm just asking because i do not want to reinvent the wheel, and there may be a design pattern similar (and better) to this that I may be not acknowledged of. Thanks in advance!

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• Refactoring and Open / Closed principle

  - by Giorgio

  I have recently being reading a web site about clean code development (I do not put a link here because it is not in English). One of the principles advertised by this site is the Open Closed Principle: each software component should be open for extension and closed for modification. E.g., when we have implemented and tested a class, we should only modify it to fix bugs or to add new functionality (e.g. new methods that do not influence the existing ones). The existing functionality and implementation should not be changed. I normally apply this principle by defining an interface I and a corresponding implementation class A. When class A has become stable (implemented and tested), I normally do not modify it too much (possibly, not at all), i.e. If new requirements arrive (e.g. performance, or a totally new implementation of the interface) that require big changes to the code, I write a new implementation B, and keep using A as long as B is not mature. When B is mature, all that is needed is to change how I is instantiated. If the new requirements suggest a change to the interface as well, I define a new interface I' and a new implementation A'. So I, A are frozen and remain the implementation for the production system as long as I' and A' are not stable enough to replace them. So, in view of these observation, I was a bit surprised that the web page then suggested the use of complex refactorings, "... because it is not possible to write code directly in its final form." Isn't there a contradiction / conflict between enforcing the Open / Closed Principle and suggesting the use of complex refactorings as a best practice? Or the idea here is that one can use complex refactorings during the development of a class A, but when that class has been tested successfully it should be frozen?

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• OpenGLES GLSL Shader attributes always bound to 0

  - by codemonkey

  So I have a very simple vertex shader as follows #version 120 attribute vec3 position; attribute vec3 inColor; uniform mat4 mvp; varying vec3 fragColor; void main(void){ fragColor = inColor; gl_Position = mvp * vec4(position, 1.0); } Which I load, as well as the fragment shader: #version 120 varying vec3 fragColor; void main(void) { gl_FragColor = vec4(fragColor,1.0); } Which I then load, compile, and link to my shader program. I check for link status using glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_LINK_STATUS, &shaderSuccess); which returns GL_TRUE so I think its ok. However, when I query the active attributes and uniforms using #ifdef DEBUG int totalAttributes = -1; glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_ACTIVE_ATTRIBUTES, &totalAttributes); for(int i=0; i<totalAttributes; ++i) { int name_len=-1, num=-1; GLenum type = GL_ZERO; char name[100]; glGetActiveAttrib(shaderProgram, GLuint(i), sizeof(name)-1, &name_len, &num, &type, name ); name[name_len] = 0; GLuint location = glGetAttribLocation(shaderProgram, name); fprintf(stderr, "Attribute %s is bound at %d\n", name, location); } int totalUniforms = -1; glGetProgramiv(shaderProgram, GL_ACTIVE_UNIFORMS, &totalUniforms); for(int i=0; i<totalUniforms; ++i) { int name_len=-1, num=-1; GLenum type = GL_ZERO; char name[100]; glGetActiveUniform(shaderProgram, GLuint(i), sizeof(name)-1, &name_len, &num, &type, name ); name[name_len] = 0; GLuint location = glGetUniformLocation(shaderProgram, name); fprintf(stderr, "Uniform %s is bound at %d\n", name, location); } #endif I get: Attribute inColor is bound at 0 Attribute position is bound at 1 Uniform mvp is bound at 0 Which leads to failure when trying to use the shader to render the objects. I have tried switching the order of declaration of position & inColor, but still, only position is bound with the other two giving 0 Can someone please explain why this is happening? Thanks

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• Default values - are they good or evil?

  - by Andrew

  The question about default values in general - default return function values, default parameter values, default logic for when something is missing, default logic for handling exceptions, default logic for handling the edge conditions etc. For a long time I considered default values to be a "pure evil" thing, something that "cloaks the catastrophe" and results in a very hard do find bugs. But recently I started to think about default values as some sort of a technical debt ... which is not a straight bad thing but something that could provide some "short term financing" get us to survive the project (how many of us could afford to buy a house without taking out the mortgage?). When I say a "short term" - I don't mean - "do something quickly first and do refactor it out later before it hits the production". No - I am talking about relying on a hardcoded default values in a production software. Granted - it could cause some issues, but what if it only going to cause a single trouble in a whole year. Again - I am talking about the "average" mainstream software here (not a software for a nuclear power station) - the average web site or a UI application for the accounting software, meaning that people lives are not at stake, nor millions of dollars. Again, from my experience, business users would rather live with the software which "works somehow", rather then wait for a perfect one. And the use of default values helps a lot if you develop a software in a RAD style. But again - the longest debug sessions I have spent were because of the bugs introduced by a default value which either stopped being "a default" along the way or because a small subsystem has recently been upgraded and as a result of this upgrade it does not handle the default correctly (e.g. empty list vs null, or null string vs empty string). So my question is - are the default values good or evil. And if they are a technical debt - how do measure up how much you can borrow so you can afford the repayments? Would really appreciate any input. Cheers. EDIT: If I am using the default values as a way to cut the corners during the development - and if the corners cutting results in a bugs and issues - what is the methodology to recover from these issues?

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