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  • Introducing .NET 4.0 with Visual Studio 2010 by Alex Mackey - Book review

    - by Malisa L. Ncube
    Alex (http://simpleisbest.co.uk/) does a very good job in covering the new features of .NET 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. His focus is on the developers that have experience in development using previous versions of Visual Studio, more specifically Visual Studio 2008.     The following are my views towards his book. 1. Scope / Coverage Even as the book is labeled as introduction, it is covers a broad spectrum of technologies, features and references that are focused into helping a developer quickly decide what to use in the new .NET framework. a. Content The content included covers as much as possible the new additions that are included in the new .NET version 4.0. He shows the Visual Studio 2010 new features and quickly shows how to extend it using Managed Extensibility Framework. Some of my favorites are parallel debugging enhancements. The author delves into JQuery, which Microsoft has decided to support. Some of the very interesting content is on the out-of-band releases including ASP.NET MVC, Windows Azure Silverlight 3 and WCF Data Services. b. What is not included? Windows Phone 7 Series. This was only talked about in the MIX10. The data may not have been available at the time of writing. Microsoft Pinpoint (Microsoft code name "Dallas") Windows Embedded development. c. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Visual Studio IDE and MEF Chapter 3: Language and Dynamic Changes Chapter 4: CLR and BCL Changes Chapter 5: Parallelization and Threading Enhancements Chapter 6: Windows Workflow Foundation 4 Chapter 7: Windows Communication Foundation Chapter 8: Entity Framework Chapter 9: WCF Data Services Chapter 10: ASPNET Chapter 11: Microsoft AJAX Library Chapter 12: jQuery Chapter 13: ASPNET MVC Chapter 14: Silverlight Introduction Chapter 15: WPF 4.0 and Silverlight 3.0 Chapter 16: Windows Azure 2. Depth Avoids getting into depth on the topics presented, to present the new concepts in assumption of the developer’s existing knowledge. Code samples are on book and exist mostly as snippets and very easy to follow. There are no downloadable examples. 3. Complexity The book is written in a very simple way and easy to follow. There are no irrelevant intimidating details. So it’s a book that you can grab and never put down until you’ve finished reading the entire book. 4. References The author includes reference links to blogs, Wikis and a lot of online resources including the MSDN documentation, which is a very convenient strategy to avoid flooding the reader with details which may not be of interest to them. Most sites do not use url routing and that is really not nice. There are notes from interviews between the author and people behind the new technologies, in which they explain what some specific areas that need clarifications and what their future views are in relation to the features they are working on. 5. Target The author targets experts that want to make a transition from .NET 3.5 to 4.0. Some obvious 3.5 features have been purposely excluded from the text 6. Overrall It is evident that the author has made extensive research into the breadth of what MS is working on, in relation to .NET and Visual Studio and has also been watching the online community. What I would like to see in the next edition are some details on OData protocol, Expression Blend 4 and Embedded development and Windows Phone development. I should say I’m one of the beneficiaries of this book. Excellent work Alex.   Technorati Tags: .NET,Book-Review,Visual Studio

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  • Morgan Stanley chooses Solaris 11 to run cloud file services

    - by Frederic Pariente
    At the EAKC2012 Conference last week in Edinburg, Robert Milkowski, Unix engineer at Morgan Stanley, presented on deploying OpenAFS on Solaris 11. It makes a great proofpoint on how ZFS and DTrace gives a definite advantage to Solaris over Linux to run AFS distributed file system services, the "cloud file system" as it calls it in his blog. Mike used ZFS to achieve a 2-3x compression ratio on data and greatly lower the TCA and TCO of the storage subsystem, and DTrace to root-cause scalability bottlenecks and improve performance. As future ideas, Mike is looking at leveraging more Solaris features like Zones, ZFS Dedup, SSD for ZFS, etc.

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  • Linux to Solaris @ Morgan Stanley

    - by mgerdts
    I came across this blog entry and the accompanying presentation by Robert Milkoski about his experience switching from Linux to Oracle Solaris 11 for a distributed OpenAFS file serving environment at Morgan Stanley. If you are an IT manager, the presentation will show you: Running Solaris with a support contract can cost less than running Linux (even without a support contract) because of technical advantages of Solaris. IT departments can benefit from hiring computer scientists into Systems Programmer or similar roles.  Their computer science background should be nurtured so that they can continue to deliver value (savings and opportunity) to the business as technology advances. If you are a sysadmin, developer, or somewhere in between, the presentation will show you: A presentation that explains your technical analysis can be very influential. Learning and using the non-default options of an OS can make all the difference as to whether one OS is better suited than another.  For example, see the graphs on slides 3 - 5.  The ZFS default is to not use compression. When trying to convince those that hold the purse strings that your technical direction should be taken, the financial impact can be the part that closes the deal.  See slides 6, 9, and 10.  Sometimes reducing rack space requirements can be the biggest impact because it may stave off or completely eliminate the need for facilities growth. DTrace can be used to shine light on performance problems that may be suspected but not diagnosed.  It is quite likely that these problems have existed in OpenAFS for a decade or more.  DTrace made diagnosis possible. DTrace can be used to create performance analysis tools without modifying the source of software that is under analysis.  See slides 29 - 32. Microstate accounting, visible in the prstat output on slide 37 can be used to quickly draw focus to problem areas that affect CPU saturation.  Note that prstat without -m gives a time-decayed moving average that is not nearly as useful. Instruction level probes (slides 33 - 34) are a super-easy way to identify which part of a function is hot.

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  • TableTop: Wil Weaton, Morgan Webb, and Friends Review Pandemic [Video]

    - by Jason Fitzpatrick
    In the newest edition of TableTop, the board gaming video blog, Wil Weaton and his friends take a look at Pandemic–a challenging cooperative board game that pits players against a viral outbreak. Check out the above video for an overview of the game (although be forewarned they’re playing it on the highest difficulty setting) and then, for more information about it, hit up the Pandemic entry at BoardGameGeek. [via GeekDad] 7 Ways To Free Up Hard Disk Space On Windows HTG Explains: How System Restore Works in Windows HTG Explains: How Antivirus Software Works

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  • Python: Networked IDLE/Redo IDLE front-end while using the same back-end?

    - by Rosarch
    Is there any existing web app that lets multiple users work with an interactive IDLE type session at once? Something like: IDLE 2.6.4 Morgan: >>> letters = list("abcdefg") Morgan: >>> # now, how would you iterate over letters? Jack: >>> for char in letters: print "char %s" % char char a char b char c char d char e char f char g Morgan: >>> # nice nice If not, I would like to create one. Is there some module I can use that simulates an interactive session? I'd want an interface like this: def class InteractiveSession(): ''' An interactive Python session ''' def putLine(line): ''' Evaluates line ''' pass def outputLines(): ''' A list of all lines that have been output by the session ''' pass def currentVars(): ''' A dictionary of currently defined variables and their values ''' pass (Although that last function would be more of an extra feature.) To formulate my problem another way: I'd like to create a new front end for IDLE. How can I do this? UPDATE: Or maybe I can simulate IDLE through eval()? UPDATE 2: What if I did something like this: I already have a simple GAE Python chat app set up, that allows users to sign in, make chat rooms, and chat with each other. Instead of just saving incoming messages to the datastore, I could do something like this: def putLine(line, user, chat_room): ''' Evaluates line for the session used by chat_room ''' # get the interactive session for this chat room curr_vars = InteractiveSession.objects.where("chatRoom = %s" % chat_room).get() result = eval(prepared_line, curr_vars.state, {}) curr_vars.state = curr_globals curr_vars.lines.append((user, line)) if result: curr_vars.lines.append(('SELF', result.__str__())) curr_vars.put() The InteractiveSession model: def class InteractiveSession(db.Model): # a dictionary mapping variables to values # it looks like GAE doesn't actually have a dictionary field, so what would be best to use here? state = db.DictionaryProperty() # a transcript of the session # # a list of tuples of the form (user, line_entered) # # looks something like: # # [('Morgan', '# hello'), # ('Jack', 'x = []'), # ('Morgan', 'x.append(1)'), # ('Jack', 'x'), # ('SELF', '[1]')] lines = db.ListProperty() Could this work, or am I way off/this approach is infeasible/I'm duplicating work when I should use something already built?

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  • Windows 7 Mobile Device center Xperia x1 problem

    - by Morgan.Spagetti
    Hello I recently installed Windows 7 on my computer and having trouble to sync it with my Xperia X1 mobile phone. I tried to install ActiveSync 4.5 but Microsoft told me to install Mobile Device Center instead. The problem is that the computer doesn't recognize the phone so no drivers is installed for it and that prevents the Mobile Device Center to find my phone. Does anyone know how to fix this? Thanks, Morgan.

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  • How to get short month names in Joda Time?

    - by Mr Morgan
    Hello Does anyone know if there's a method in Joda Time or Java itself which takes either an int or a String as an argument, e.g. 4 or "4" and gives the name of the month back in short format, i.e. JAN for January? I suppose long month names can be truncated and converted to upper case. Thanks Mr Morgan.

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  • How to convert String to Java.sql.date and Java.sql.time

    - by Mr Morgan
    Hello If I have a method like this: public static String convertDateTimeToString(DateTime dt) { return dt.getDate() + " " + dt.getTime(); } Which takes a Datetime object of my own which contains a Java.sql.date and a Java.sql.time, what is the best way of reversing the process so that I can substring a Java.sql.date and a Java.sql.time from a string? Or if DateTime dt is a JodaTime DateTime object? If this can be done without reference to Java.util.date. Thanks Mr Morgan.

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  • When to favor webforms over MVC

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I know Microsoft has said "MVC is not a replacement for webforms". Some developers say webforms is faster to develop than MVC, but I believe this all comes down to comfort level with the technology; so I don't want any answers in this direction. Given that MVC gives a developer more control over our application, why is webforms not considered obsolete? When should I favor webforms over MVC for new development?

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  • When to favor ASP.NET WebForms over MVC

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I know Microsoft has said "ASP.NET MVC is not a replacement for WebForms". Some developers say WebForms is faster to develop than MVC, but I believe this all comes down to comfort level with the technology; so I don't want any answers in this direction. Given that ASP.NET MVC gives a developer more control over our application, why is WebForms not considered obsolete? When should I favor WebForms over MVC for new development?

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  • Does waterfall require code complete before QA steps in?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    The process used at a certain company consists of: Create a layout according to some designs made in a web page design tool. (CSS, html) Requirements come in with "functional requirements". These consist of 100's of lines of business directions. E.G. Create a Table on page X. Column1 has numeric data. Column1 is the client code. Column2 is a string...etc. Write code to meet all functional requirements. When all code is checked in, send to QA (which is the BA that wrote the requirements) for inspection, bug finds and change requests. Punt back to developer with a list of X bugs and Y change requests. While bug finds or change requests 0 go to step 4. The agile development environments I have worked in allow, if not demand, early QA inspection and early user acceptance. So, pieces of the program can be refined and redefined before the entire application is in place. Not only that, but the process leaves little room for error or people changing their minds. Instead, those "change requests" come in at the last stage when they do the most damage. And being that a bug-fix's cost increases over time, this is a costly way to write code. I am no waterfall expert. As described, is this waterfall being mishandled in some way? How does waterfall address my concerns?

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  • How can I convince cowboy programmers to use source control?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    UPDATE I work on a small team of devs, 4 guys. They have all used source control. Most of them can't stand source control and instead choose not to use it. I strongly believe source control is a necessary part of professional development. Several issues make it very difficult to convince them to use source control: The team is not used to using TFS. I've had 2 training sessions, but was only allotted 1 hour which is insufficient. Team members directly modify code on the server. This keeps code out of sync. Requiring comparison just to be sure you are working with the latest code. And complex merge problems arise Time estimates offered by developers exclude time required to fix any of these problems. So, if I say nono it will take 10x longer...I have to constantly explain these issues and risk myself because now management may perceive me as "slow". The physical files on the server differ in unknown ways over ~100 files. Merging requires knowledge of the project at hand and, therefore, developer cooperation which I am not able to obtain. Other projects are falling out of sync. Developers continue to have a distrust of source control and therefore compound the issue by not using source control. Developers argue that using source control is wasteful because merging is error prone and difficult. This is a difficult point to argue, because when source control is being so badly mis-used and source control continually bypassed, it is error prone indeed. Therefore, the evidence "speaks for itself" in their view. Developers argue that directly modifying server code, bypassing TFS saves time. This is also difficult to argue. Because the merge required to synchronize the code to start with is time consuming. Multiply this by the 10+ projects we manage. Permanent files are often stored in the same directory as the web project. So publishing (full publish) erases these files that are not in source control. This also drives distrust for source control. Because "publishing breaks the project". Fixing this (moving stored files out of the solution subfolders) takes a great deal of time and debugging as these locations are not set in web.config and often exist across multiple code points. So, the culture persists itself. Bad practice begets more bad practice. Bad solutions drive new hacks to "fix" much deeper, much more time consuming problems. Servers, hard drive space are extremely difficult to come by. Yet, user expectations are rising. What can be done in this situation?

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  • Is there a resource that explains the benefits of layered programming?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    Some developers I know favor what I would call a procedural programming style. I recognize that procedural programming has its uses, albeit not in the business application world of .NET programming. So let's say we have a winform application with a buttonclick event. The buttonclick handles everything from the UI configuration to the database call and data manipulation. So you end up with a method that is 100's of lines of code long. Outside the fact that this code can't be considered test-able for various reasons, this style of programming is fragile to change. I can talk bout OO, Anti-patterns, etc. The problem is that any distinct topic I can dream up requires a great deal of explanation to understand the potential benefits. Outside of finding a new job (lots of businesses program this way), how can I teach these kinds of developers how to write better code? Obviously we can't sit around a round table and discuss pro's and con's all day due to time constraints and real work that has to be done. Although, training and intense training is the only thing I can think of to fix these problems. Not to say I write perfect code, I most certainly do not. I do believe there are certain best practices that should be followed as a rule E.G. OO in the context of .NET. The most common excuse I hear is "we can't write code fast enough if we do it like that".

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  • Can a programmer get too smart for their own good?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    The more I learn about programming, the more things I see that could be improved by a great deal. Often, a companies process management is total SWAG or they have Frames based websites written recently, .NET 1.1 based code, no separation of concerns, poor quality control...I could go on and on and on... Projects can succeed, but there tends to be so much waste I am amazed at how much time and money a company can throw away. I've seen it happen at several companies. So is it that ignorance truly is bliss? UPDATE Question "How is it that top developers (I don't mean like Jon Skeet level, I mean guys who are dedicated enough to hit a forum and try for self-improvement) even want to code anymore after they see the often insurmountable sociological and technical problems they are told to fix, but then scolded for doing so? "

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  • What are the best practices for phasing out obsolete code?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I have the need to phase out an obsolete method. I am aware of the [Obsolete] attribute. Does Microsoft have a recommended best practice guide for doing this? Here's my current plan: A. I do not want to create a new assembly because developers would have to add a new reference to their projects and I expect to get a lot of grief from my boss and co-workers if they must do this. We also do not maintain multiple assembly versions. We only use the latest version. Changing this practice would require changing our deployment process which is a big issue (have to teach people how to do things with TFS instead of FinalBuilder and get them to give up FinalBuilder) B. Mark the old method obsolete. C. Because the implementation is changing (not the method signature), I need to rename the method rather than create an overload. So, to make users aware of the proper method I plan to add a message to the [Obsolete] attribute. This part bothers me, because the only change I'm making is decoupling the method from the connection string. But, because I'm not adding a new assembly, I see no way around this. Result: [Obsolete("Please don't use this anymore because it does not implement IMyDbProvider. Use XXX instead.")]; /// <summary> /// /// </summary> /// <param name="settingName"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static Dictionary<string, Setting> ReadSettings(string settingName) { return ReadSettings(settingName, SomeGeneralClass.ConnectionString); } public Dictionary<string, Setting> ReadSettings2(string settingName) { return ReadSettings(settingName);// IMyDbProvider.ConnectionString private member added to class. Probably have to make this an instance method. }

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  • What is the best way to design a table with an arbitrary id?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I have the need to create a table with a unique id as the PK. The ID is a surrogate key. Originally, I had a natural key, but requirement changes have undermined this idea. Then, I considered adding an auto incrementing identity. But, this presents problems. A. I can't specify my own ID. B. The ID's are difficult to reset. Both of these together make it difficult to copy over this table with new data or move the table across domains, e.g. Dev to QA. I need to refer to these ID's from the front end, JavaScript...so they must not change. So, the only way I am aware of to meet all these challenges is to make a GUID ID. This way, I can overwrite the ID's when I need to or I can generate a new one without concern for order (E.G. an int based id would require I know the last inserted ID). Is a GUID the best way to accomplish my goals? Considering that a GUID is a string and joining on a string is an expensive task, is there a better way?

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  • What's the best project management software for internal dev. 5 man shop

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I work for a large corporation, but we do small intranet web application development. Our project management tracking sucks. Its custom software built by a jr. intern. For what its worth, our development style is akin to agile, but there's nothing set in stone...very customer oriented approach. I need project tracking that meets the criteria: Intranet, internal products. Mostly maintenance, some new development. 5 developers 12 products 1 hands-off manager. He really just wants to know estimated man hours, due date for dev, QA and release. Along with a short description of the project. Free or super cheap. Bonus Simple pretty UI. Think pretty charts. Hope I covered everything. Please ask for any clarification. If you read dreaming in code, the company uses some project tracking software that sounds pretty sweet. Note, we do have Team Foundation Server. I already tried pushing its use as PM tracking, but its too complicated. I can't get people to sit and train. So this software has to be easy.

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  • Should a programmer "think" for the client?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I have gotten to the point where I hate requirements gathering. Customer's are too vague for their own good. In an agile environment, where we can show the client a piece of work to completion it's not too bad as we can make small regular corrections/updates to functionality. In a "waterfall" type in environment (requirements first, nearly complete product next) things can get ugly. This kind of environment has led me to constantly question requirements. E.G. Customer wants "automatically convert input to the number 1" (referring to a Qty in an order). But what they don't think about is that "input" could be a simple type-o. An "x" in a textbox could be a "woops" not I want 1 of those "toothpaste" products. But, there's so much in the air with requirements that I could stand and correct for hours on end smashing out what they want. This just isn't healthy. Working for a corporation, I could try to adjust the culture to fit the agile model that would help us (no small job, above my pay grade). Or, sweep ugly details under the rug and hope for the best. Maybe my customer is trying to get too close to the code? How does one handle the problem of "thinking for the client" without pissing them off with too many questions?

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  • Why is prefixing column names considered bad practice?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    According to a popular SO post is it considered a bad practice to prefix table names. At my company every column is prefixed by a table name. This is difficult for me to read. I'm not sure the reason, but this naming is actually the company standard. I can't stand the naming convention, but I have no documentation to back up my reasoning. All I know is that reading AdventureWorks is much simpler. In this our company DB you will see a table, Person and it might have column name: Person_First_Name or maybe even Person_Person_First_Name (don't ask me why you see person 2x) Why is it considered a bad practice to pre-fix column names? Are underscores considered evil in SQL as well? Note: I own Pro SQL Server 2008 - Relation Database design and implementation. References to that book are welcome.

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  • Automated architecture validation

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I am aware of the fact that TFS 2010 ultimate edition can create and validate architecture diagrams. For example, I can create a new modeling project add Layer Diagram Add Layer called View Add BL Layer Add DL layer. Then I can validate this architecture as part of the build process when someone tries to check code into TFS. In other words, if the View references the DL then the compilation process will fail and the checkin will not be allowed. For those without an MSDN ultimate license, can FxCop or some 3rd party utility be used to validate architecture in an automated fashion? I prefer a TFS install-able plugin, but a local VS plugin will do.

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  • Pros and cons of hosted scripts

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I have seen some developers use hosted scripts to link their libraries. cdn.jquerytools.org is one example. I have also seen people complain that a hosted script link has been hijacked. How safe is using hosted scripts in reality? Are the scripts automatically updated? For example, if jQuery 5 goes to 6 do I automatically get version 6 or do I need to update my link? I also see that Google has a large set of these scripts setup for hosting. What are the pros and cons?

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  • What do you do when practical problems get in the way of practical goals?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    UPDATE Source control is good to use. Sometimes, real world issues make it impractical to use. For example: If the team is not used to using source control, training problems can arise If a team member directly modifies code on the server, various issues can arise. Merge problems, lack of history, etc Let's say there's a project that is way out of sync. The physical files on the server differ in unknown ways over ~100 files. Merging would take not only a great knowledge of the project, but is also well beyond the ability to complete in the given time. Other projects are falling out of sync. Developers continue to have a distrust of source control and therefore compound the issue by not using source control. Developers argue that using source control is wasteful because merging is error prone and difficult. This is a difficult point to argue, because when source control is being so badly mis-used and source control continually bypassed, it is error prone indeed. Therefore, the evidence "speaks for itself" in their view. Developers argue that directly modifying source control saves time. This is also difficult to argue. Because the merge required to synchronize the code to start with is time consuming, across ~10 projects. Permanent files are often stored in the same directory as the web project. So publishing (full publish) erases these files that are not in source control. This also drives distrust for source control. Because "publishing breaks the project". Fixing this (moving stored files out of the solution subfolders) takes a great deal of time and debugging as these locations are not set in web.config and often exist across multiple code points. So, the culture persists itself. Bad practice begets more bad practice. Bad solutions drive new hacks to "fix" much deeper, much more time consuming problems. Servers, hard drive space are extremly difficult to come by. Yet, user expectations are rising. What can be done in this situation?

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  • Why does a computer science degree matter to a professional programmer?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I have a degree in computer science. It has been great for opening doors, getting a job. As far as helping me in the professional field of C# .NET programming (the most popular platform and language in the area I work if not the entire united states on hands down the most popular OS in the world) its hardly useful. Why do you think it helps you as a programmer in your professional career (outside spouting off to prims algorithm to impress some interviewer)? In today's world adaptation, a quick mind, strong communication, OO and fundamental design skills enable a developer to write software that a customer will accept. These skills are only skimmed over in the cs program. In my mind, reading a 500 page C# book by Wrox offers far more useable a skillset than 4 years of the comp sci math blaster courses. Many disagree. So, why does a computer science degree matter?

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  • Is there an antipattern to describe this method of coding?

    - by P.Brian.Mackey
    I have a codebase where the programmer tended to wrap things up in areas that don't make sense. For example, given an Error log we have you can log via ErrorLog.Log(ex, "friendly message"); He added various other means to accomplish the exact same task. E.G. SomeClass.Log(ex, "friendly message"); Which simply turns around and calls the first method. This adds levels of complexity with no added benefit. Is there an anti-pattern to describe this?

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