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• DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Scotland 2010 - DDDSCOT

  - by Plip

  DDD in Scotland was held on the 8th May 2010 in Glasgow and I was there, not as is uaual at these kind of things as an organiser but actually as a speaker and delegate. The weekend started for me back on Thursday with the arrival of Dave Sussman to my place in Lancashire, after a curry and watching the Electon night TV coverage we retired to our respective beds (yes, I know, I hate to shatter the illusion we both sleep in the same bed wearing matching pijamas is something I've shattered now) ready for the drive up to Glasgow the following afternoon. Before heading up to Glasgow we had to pick up Young Mr Hardy from Wigan then we began the four hour drive back in time... Something that struck me on the journey up is just how beautiful Scotland is. The menacing landscapes bordered with fluffy sheep and whirly-ma-gigs are awe inspiring - well worth driving up if you ever get the chance. Anywho we arrived in Glasgow, got settled intot he hotel and went in search of Speakers for pre conference drinks and food. We discovered a gaggle (I believe that's the collective term) of speakers in the Bar and when we reached critical mass headed off to the Speakers Dinner location. During dinner, SOMEONE set my hair on FIRE. That's all I'm going to say on the matter. Whilst I was enjoying my evening there was something nagging at me, I realised that I should really write my session as I was due to give it the following morning. So after a few more drinks I headed back to the hotel and got some well earned sleep (and washed the fire damage out of my hair). Next day, headed off to the conference which was a lovely stroll through Glasgow City Centre. Non of us got mugged, murdered (or set on fire) arriving safely at the venue, which was a bonus.   I was asked to read out the opening Slides for Barry Carr's session which I did dilligently and with such professionalism that I shocked even myself. At which point I reliased in just over an hour I had to give my presentation, so headed back to the speaker room to finish writing it. Wham, bam and it was all over. Session seemed to go well. I was speaking on Exception Driven Development, which isn't so much a technical solution but rather a mindset around how one should treat exceptions and their code. To be honest, I've not been so nervous giving a session for years - something about this topic worried me, I was concerned I was being too abstract in my thinking or that what I was saying was so obvious that everyone would know it, but it seems to have been well recieved which makes me a happy Speaker. Craig Murphy has some brilliant pictures of DDD Scotland 2010. After my session was done I grabbed some lunch and headed back to the hotel and into town to do some shopping (thus my conspicuous omission from the above photo). Later on we headed out to the geek dinner which again was a rum affair followed by a few drinks and a little boogie woogie. All in all a well run, well attended conference, by the community for the community. I tip my hat to the whole team who put on DDD Scotland!       

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• Which shopping cart / ecommerce platform to choose?

  - by fabien7474

  I need to build an ecommerce website within a tight budget and schedule. Of course, I have never done that before, so I have googled out what my solutions are and I have concluded that the following were not valid candidates anymore : Magento : Steep learning curve osCommerce : old, bad design, buggy and not user-friendly Zencart, CRE Loaded, CubeCart : based on osCommerce Virtuemart, uberCart, eCart : based on CMS (Joomal, Drupal, WordPress) that is not necessary for my use-case So I finally narrowed down my choices to these solutions : PrestaShop : easy-to-use, great templating engine (smarty) but many modules are not free buy yet indispensable OpenCart : security issues and not a great support from the main developer. See here and here. So, as you can see, I am a little bit confused and if you can help me choosing an easy-to-use, lightweight and cheap (not-necessarily free) ecommerce solution, I would really appreciate. By the way, I am a Java/Grails programmer but I am also familiar with PHP and .NET. (not with Python or Ruby/Rails) EDIT: It seems that this question is more appropriate for the Webmaster StackExchange site. So please move this question to where it belongs (I cannot do that) instead of downvoting it. BTW, I have found out a question quite similar on SO (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3315638/php-ecommerce-system-which-one-is-easiest-to-modify) which is quite popular.

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• Free NOSQL database for use with C# client [closed]

  - by Mitten

  I've never used NOSQL databases before, but so far it seems like the best data storage solution for my project. I am going to implement a datamining application. The data I would like to mine is thousands of documents which cannot be imported into datamining applications. To make to import easier and faster (than importing thousands of documents) I am planning to import these documents into a NOSQL database first and when import NOSQL database into datamining software. At the very least once I have all the data in NOSQL database I should be able to code simplest datamining logic myself. Am I correct that NOSQL databases allow to creates records of data, but they don't mandate all the records to adhere to the same data schema (same column names/types in a classic table oriended SQL databases)? I think for each document I would create a row/entry/object (not sure what is the correct term is in use in NOSQL world) which would be a string id, few (columns) with unstructured text data, and a dozens of columns mostly of datetime and integer types. From its name NOSQL does not support SQL query syntax, but it support locating the object(row/entry?) by its unique id. Does NOSQL support qyuering objects using property=value syntax? Unfortunately most of free NOSQL db only support Java/C++ clients, which free NOSQL db would you recommend for a C# programmer?

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• How to keep word document, html and pdf documentation aligned

  - by dendini

  Is there a way to write documentation in a WYSIWYG editor which can then export into HTML, WORD and PDF and keep copies synchronized? This documentation are mostly technical notes and some contextual help for some softwares so they must contain images and some styling, they are not programmer's documentation (API list or functions list) for which probably a program like Javadoc or Doxygen would be the best choice. For example how do companies with hundreds different software lines and thousands of programmers deal with this? I have several solutions but they all seem lacking in some aspect: Latex/Tex : very good pdf and html export, not very user friendly and no full-blown WYSIWYG editor available. LibreOffice/OpenOffice : full blown WYSIWYG editor however html export not so good (need to edit manually exported html which needs to be maintained separately ) Mediawiki or any other wiki : could be keeping documentation in wikitext format, so html is automatically generated, pdf exportation is quite good with many available plugins. Again however need some formation for the staff to use it and need to setup a server for this. Notice I'm not asking for software A vs software B, I'm asking for general advice, big companies procedures for documentation and yes some software product names if available.

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• exact answer for “what is j2ee?” - job interview

  - by shuuchan

  I'd like to ask if someone of you knows the exact meaning of JEE. That's because a collegue of mine was asked this question in a job interview, and was "unable to answer properly"... to speak with his interwiewer's words. And when he told me what he said to his interviewer I got really surprised, since it was more or less what I would have answered myself - in a concise form, the first paragraph of this article. J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) is a Java platform designed for the mainframe-scale computing typical of large enterprises. Sun Microsystems (together with industry partners such as IBM) designed J2EE to simplify application development in a thin client tiered environment. J2EE simplifies application development and decreases the need for programming and programmer training by creating standardized, reusable modular components and by enabling the tier to handle many aspects of programming automatically. That seems not to be enough, since the interviewer asked for "more precise and less general definition". Is there really a more precise definition for JEE? Or did my colleague just find the fussiest-interviewer-ever? :)

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• Learning to be a good developer: what parts can you skip over?

  - by Andrew M

  I have set myself the goal of becoming a decent developer by this time next year. By this I mean full experience of the development 'lifecycle,' a few good apps/sites/webapps under my belt, and most importantly being able to work at a steady pace without getting sidelined for hours by some should-know-this-already technique. I'm not starting from scratch. I've written a lot of html/css, SQL, javascript, python and VB.net, and studied other languages like C and Java. I know about things like OOP, design patterns, TDD, complexity, computational linguistics, pointers/references, functional programming, and other academic/theoretical matters. It's just I can't say I've really done these things yet. So I want to get up to speed, and I want to know what things I can leave till a later date. For instance, studying algorithms and the maths behind them is interesting and all, but so far I've hardly needed to write anything but the most basic nested loops. Investigating Assembly to have a clearer picture of low-level operations would be cool... but I imagine rarely infringes on daily work. On the other hand, looking at a functional programming language might help me write programs that are more comprehensible and less prone to hidden failures (at the moment I'm finding the biggest difficulty is when the complexity of the app exceeds my capacity to understand it - for instance passing data around was fine... until I had to start doing it with AJAX, which was a painful step up). I could spend time working through case studies of design patterns, but I'm not sure how many of them get used in 'real life.' I'm a programmer with basic abilities - what skills should I focus on developing? (also my Unix skills are very weak, and also knowledge of Windows configuration... not sure how much time I should spend on that)

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• Finding the right back-end developer

  - by John Watson

  I am creating a websites for mobile phone tests. Users can post their own tests and combine it with an existing rating of each product. I do only front-end development and I have no idea about back-end - php, sql, etc. I am not sure I should operate the website without this knowledge but my first thought is to get a professional whom I would give my website to, so that he can do the rest. Only thing is that I need to update it regularly and post my own tests. I don't know how that works and how I should approach this. My understanding is that, after I have finished the website (written in HTML, CSS, JavaScript/jQuery), I would go and find a php programmer and tell me to put it online, make it secure, make sure that the open-source facility (users post their own tests) and that it runs smoothly with the host/server I've chosen. Could you tell me if my approach makes sense (is that the way how to do it)? What should I consider when searching the right back-end developer concerning the right price performance, trust, etc. ?

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• Business Analyst role in development process

  - by Ryan

  I work as a business analyst and I currently oversee much of the development efforts of an internal project. I'm responsible for the requirements, specs, and overall testing. I work closely with the developers (onshore and offshore). The offshore team produces all of the reports. Version 1.0 had a 9 month development cycle and I had about 4-5 months to test all the reports. There was the usual back and forth to get the implementation right. Version 2.0 had a much shorter development cycle (3 months). I received the first version of the reports about 3 weeks ago and noticed a lot of things wrong with it. Many of the requirements were wrong and the performance of the queries was horrendous at 5x - 6x longer than it should have been. The onshore lead developer was out and did not supervise the offshore development team in generating the reports. Without consulting management, I took a look at the SQL in the reports and was able to improve performance greatly (by a factor of 6x) which is acceptable for this version. I sent the updated queries as guidelines to the offshore team and told them they should look at doing X instead of Y to improve performance and also to fix some specific logic issues. I then spoke to my managers about this because it doesn't feel right that I was developing SQL queries, but given our time crunch I saw no other way. We were able to fix the issue quite fast which I'm happy with. Current situation: the onshore managers aren't too pleased that the offshore team did not code for performance. I know there are some things I could have done better throughout this process and I do not in any way consider myself a programmer. My question is, if an offshore team that works apart from the onshore project resources fails to deliver an acceptable release, is it appropriate to clean up their work to meet a deadline? What kind of problems could this create in the future?

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• Did the developers of Java conciously abandon RAII?

  - by JoelFan

  As a long-time C# programmer, I have recently come to learn more about the advantages of Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII). In particular, I have discovered that the C# idiom: using (my dbConn = new DbConnection(connStr) { // do stuff with dbConn } has the C++ equivalent: { DbConnection dbConn(connStr); // do stuff with dbConn } meaning that remembering to enclose the use of resources like DbConnection in a using block is unnecessary in C++ ! This seems to a major advantage of C++. This is even more convincing when you consider a class that has an instance member of type DbConnection, for example class Foo { DbConnection dbConn; // ... } In C# I would need to have Foo implement IDisposable as such: class Foo : IDisposable { DbConnection dbConn; public void Dispose() { dbConn.Dispose(); } } and what's worse, every user of Foo would need to remember to enclose Foo in a using block, like: using (var foo = new Foo()) { // do stuff with "foo" } Now looking at C# and its Java roots I am wondering... did the developers of Java fully appreciate what they were giving up when they abandoned the stack in favor of the heap, thus abandoning RAII? (Similarly, did Stroustrup fully appreciate the significance of RAII?)

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• Which algorithms/data structures should I "recognize" and know by name?

  - by Earlz

  I'd like to consider myself a fairly experienced programmer. I've been programming for over 5 years now. My weak point though is terminology. I'm self-taught, so while I know how to program, I don't know some of the more formal aspects of computer science. So, what are practical algorithms/data structures that I could recognize and know by name? Note, I'm not asking for a book recommendation about implementing algorithms. I don't care about implementing them, I just want to be able to recognize when an algorithm/data structure would be a good solution to a problem. I'm asking more for a list of algorithms/data structures that I should "recognize". For instance, I know the solution to a problem like this: You manage a set of lockers labeled 0-999. People come to you to rent the locker and then come back to return the locker key. How would you build a piece of software to manage knowing which lockers are free and which are in used? The solution, would be a queue or stack. What I'm looking for are things like "in what situation should a B-Tree be used -- What search algorithm should be used here" etc. And maybe a quick introduction of how the more complex(but commonly used) data structures/algorithms work. I tried looking at Wikipedia's list of data structures and algorithms but I think that's a bit overkill. So I'm looking more for what are the essential things I should recognize?

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• XNA Masking Mayhem

  - by TropicalFlesh

  I'd like to start by mentioning that I'm just an amateur programmer of the past 2 years with no formal training and know very little about maximizing the potential of graphics hardware. I can write shaders and manipulate a multi-layered drawing environment, but I've basically stuck to minimalist pixel shaders. I'm working on putting dynamic point light shadows in my 2d sidescroller, and have had it working to a reasonable degree. Just chucking it in without working on serious optimizations outside of basic culling, I can get 50 lights or so onscreen at once and still hover around 100 fps. The only issue is that I'm on a very high end machine and would like to target the game at as many platforms I can, low and high end. The way I'm doing shadows involves a lot of masking before I can finally draw the light to my light layer. Basically, my technique to achieveing such shadows is as follows. See pics in this album http://imgur.com/a/m2fWw#0 The dark gray represents the background tiles, the light gray represents the foreground tiles, and the yellow represents the shadow-emitting foreground tile. I'll draw the light using a radial gradient and a color of choice I'll then exclude light from the mask by drawing some geometry extending through the tile from my point light. I actually don't mask the light yet at this point, but I'm just illustrating the technique in this image Finally, I'll re-include the foreground layer in my mask, as I only want shadows to collect on the background layer and finally multiply the light with it's mask to the light layer My question is simple - How can I go about reducing the amount of render target switches I need to do to achieve the following: a. Draw mask to exclude shadows from the foreground to it's own target once per frame b. For each light that emits shadows, -Begin light mask as full white -Render shadow geometry as transparent with an opaque blendmode to eliminate shadowed areas from the mask -Render foreground mask back over the light mask to reintroduce light to the foreground c. Multiply light texture with it's individual mask to the main light layer.

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• Intelligence as a vector quantity

  - by Senthil Kumaran

  I am reading this wonderful book called "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming" by Peter Seibel and I am at part wherein the conversation is with Joshua Bloch and I found this answer which is an important point for a programmer. The paragraph, goes something like this. There's this problem, which is, programming is so much of an intellectual meritocracy and often these people are the smartest people in the organization; therefore they figure they should be allowed to make all the decisions. But merely the fact they are the smartest people in the organization does not mean that they should be making all the decisions, because intelligence is not a scalar quantity; it's a vector quantity. Here at the last sentence, I fail to get the insight which is he trying to share. Can someone explain it in a little further as what he means by a vector quantity, possibly trying to present the same insight. Further down, I get the point that he is not taking about having an organization where non-technical people (sometimes clueless) can be managers of the technical people for some reason that they can spend more time to write emails well, because the very next statement following the above paragraph was. And if you lack empathy or emotional intelligence, then you shouldn't be designing APIs or GUIs or languages. I understand that he is saying that in Software engineering, programmers should know how the users will see their product and design for them. I felt the above paragraph was very interesting.

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• Java web app, with plugin framework and ability to connect to source for updates

  - by lessthancommon

  I've searched all around for some good sources, but either have been searching for the wrong keywords, or I'm just missing something. I'm looking to redevelop a web app I've been using for some time now. Many parts are out of date, and we're constantly throwing in little hacks to attempt to give it new life. So what I'd like to do is re-engineer it from the ground up, built on some sort of plug-in framework. Before I continue, I'm more or less an intermediate Java programmer. In some ways, I'm hoping to use this project as a big learning experience. I've read a lot about OSGi, and it seems that's the most complete framework. Ideally, I would like an end result web app which I can run one instance as my hosting environment, and other instances can connect to it to grab new and updated plug-ins. Eventually I'll want to lock down these plug-ins based on some undecided criteria of who can get them (basically some will simply be updates, others will provide new functionality and should be "purchased" through an external system). But that will probably be handled in a later phase. There should be an administration view for managing bundles in a hot environment (looking to avoid having to restart the server for an update). I know all these things are possible, I'm just trying to find some good resources for reference. All the OSGi tutorials I'm finding seem to be too simplistic. If anyone here can guide me in the right direction on any or all of the items I'm looking for, it would be much appreciated. Also, this is my first post, so I'll take any comments/criticisms about the content of my post. Thanks!

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• Optimizing lifestyle and training

  - by Gabe

  I am a college freshman who has recently discovered a passion for computer science. Having had my first lick of formal python training last semester, I have cast aside my previously hedonist way of life and tunneled my sights on becoming the most rounded and proficient programmer I can be. I know that I'm taking strides in the right direction (I've stopped smoking, I've been exercising every day, I've taught myself C++ and OpenGL, and I've begun training in kung-fu and meditation), yet I am still finding myself struggling to achieve satisfactory results. I would like to be able to spend a good 3-4 hours every day burning through textbooks. I have the time cleared and the resources allocated. The problem lies in the logistics-- I have never taken anything seriously before. Recently I've realized that I am clueless when it comes to taking care of myself and gaining control of my mind, and it drastically hinders my productivity. My question is this: How can I learn to manage my time and take care of myself such that I can spend the maximum amount of time every day studying with steady concentration? Personal tricks would be key here: techniques you use to get yourself to sleep, a diet that yields focus, even computer break stretching routines or active reading techniques. Anything you could think of here would be great. I was a low-life in high school and I have the drive to turn my life around, I'm just quite a bit behind in the way of good habits :)

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• Are programmers getting lazier and less competent

  - by Skeith

  I started programming in C++ at uni and loved it. In the next term we changed to VB6 and I hated it. I could not tell what was going on, you drag a button to a form and the ide writes the code for you. While I hated the way VB functioned I cannot argue that it was faster and easier than doing the same thing in C++ so i can see why it is a popular language. Now I am not calling VB developers lazy in just saying it easier than C++ and I have noticed that a lot of newer languages are following this trend such a C#. This leads me to think that as more business want quick results more people will program like this and sooner or later there will be no such thing as what we call programming now. Future programmers will tell the computer what they want and the compiler will write the program for them like in star trek. Is this just an under informed opinion of a junior programmer or are programmers getting lazier and less competent in general? EDIT: A lot of answers say why re invent the wheel and I agree with this but when there are wheels available people are not bothering to learn how to make the wheel. I can google how to do pretty much anything in any language and half the languages do so much for you when it come to debugging they have no idea what there code does of how to fix the error. That's how I cam up with the theory that programmers are becoming lazier and less competent as no one cares how stuff works just that it does until it does not.

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• Do you ever worry that you're more concerned with how something is built rather than what you are actually building?

  - by Rob Stevenson-Leggett

  As a programmer I have an inherent nagging annoyance at my tools, other peoples code, my code, the world in general. I always want to improve it. So I refactor, I stay on top of the latest techniques. I try and learn patterns, I try to use frameworks so as not to reinvent the wheel. I can write a tech spec that will blow your socks off with the amount of patterns I can squeeze in. However, lately I feel I actually know more about the tools I use than how to actually implement successful software. I feel like I'm lacking in the human factors skill set and I believe that to be a successful software engineer takes more than knowing the coolest framework. I think it needs some of the following skillsets too. Interaction design User experience Marketing I've got a bit of this that I've learned from people I've worked with and great projects I've worked on but I don't feel like I "own" these skills. Am I right? Should I be trying to develop these skills further, or should these be left to the people who do these for a career? How do you make sure you don't get too tied up in how you're doing something and make sure you "make your users awesome"? Does anyone know of good resources for learning these skills from a programming point of view?

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• Correct level of abstraction for a 3d rendering component?

  - by JohnB

  I've seen lots of questions around this area but not this exact question so apologies if this is a duplicate. I'm making a small 3d game. Well to be honest, it's just a little hobby project and likely won't turn out to be an actual game, I'll be happy to make a nice graphics demo and learn about 3d rendering and c++ design. My intent is to use direct3d9 for rendering as I have some little experience of it, and it seems to meet my requirements. However if I've learned one thing as a programmer it's to ask "is there any conceivable reason that this component might be replaced by a different implmentation" and if the answer is yes then I need to design a proper abstraction and interface to that component. So even though I intend to implment d3d9 I need to design a 3d interface that could be implemented for d3d11, opengl... My question then is what level is it best to do this at? I'm thinking that an interface capable of creating and later drawing Vertex buffers and index buffers Textures Vertex and Pixel "shaders" Some representation of drawing state (blending modes etc...) In other words a fairly low level interface where my code to draw for example an animated model would use the interface to obtain abstract vertex buffers etc. I worry though that it's too low level to abstract out all the functionallity I need efficiently. The alternative is to do this at a higher level where the interface can draw objects, animations, landscapes etc, and implement them for each system. This seems like more work, but it more flexible I guess. So that's my question really, when abstracting out the drawing system, what level of interface works best?

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• C#.NET (AForge) against Java (JavaCV, JMF) for video processing

  - by Leron

  I'm starting to get really confused looking deeper and deeper at video processing world and searching for optimal choices. This is the reason to post this and some other questions to try and navigate myself in the best possible way. I really like Java, working with Java, coding with Java, at the same time C# is not that different from Java and Visual Studio is maybe the best IDE I've been working with. So even though I really want to do my projects in Java so I can get better and better Java programmer at the same time I'm really attract to video processing and even though I'm still at the beginning of this journey I want to take the right path. So I'm really in doubt could Java be used in a production environment for serious video processing software. As the title says I already have been looking at maybe the two most used technologies for video processing in Java - JMF and JavaCV and I'm starting to think that even they are used and they provide some functionality, when it comes to real work and real project that's not the first thing that comes to once mind, I mean to someone that have a professional opinion about this. On the other hand I haven't got the time to investigate .NET (c# specificly) options but even AForge looks a lot more serious library then those provided for Java. So in general -either ways I'm gonna spend a lot of time learning some technology and trying to do something that make sense with it, but my plan is at the end the thing that I'll eventually come up to be my headline project. To represent my skills and eventually help me find a job in the field. So I really don't want to spend time learning something that will give me the programming result I want but at the same time is not something that is needed in the real world development. So what is your opinion, which language, technology is better for this specific issue. Which one worths more in terms that I specified above?

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• B.S.in Computer Science, weak eyes => career change

  - by Prometheus

  So I am going to earn B.S. in Computer Science soon. I like computers. I like programming. The problem is that my eyes are very weak. Depending on their condition, I can only put in about 6 hours in front of computer a day. If I push myself, I have trouble even keeping my eyes open because of soreness/pain, consequently headaches. My eyes do not have medical conditions. I was just born with weak eyes. I tried many different approaches to work around this problem - better monitor, breaks every 10 minutes, supplements... I even memorized a lot of shortcuts to reduce my time on computers! But I am finally giving up. I do not think I can be a programmer for the rest of my life. I was the top of my class in high school because all works were paper-based, I did average in college due to the nature of my eyes and the difficulty of the material. So what do you recommend I do? Or, Is there a career that is similar to programming but requires interacting with computers less?

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• C#: A "Dumbed-Down" C++?

  - by James Michael Hare

  I was spending a lovely day this last weekend watching my sons play outside in one of the better weekends we've had here in Saint Louis for quite some time, and whilst watching them and making sure no limbs were broken or eyes poked out with sticks and other various potential injuries, I was perusing (in the correct sense of the word) this month's MSDN magazine to get a sense of the latest VS2010 features in both IDE and in languages. When I got to the back pages, I saw a wonderful article by David S. Platt entitled, "In Praise of Dumbing Down"  (msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/ee336129.aspx).  The title captivated me and I read it and found myself agreeing with it completely especially as it related to my first post on divorcing C++ as my favorite language. Unfortunately, as Mr. Platt mentions, the term dumbing-down has negative connotations, but is really and truly a good thing.  You are, in essence, taking something that is extremely complex and reducing it to something that is much easier to use and far less error prone.  Adding safeties to power tools and anti-kick mechanisms to chainsaws are in some sense "dumbing them down" to the common user -- but that also makes them safer and more accessible for the common user.  This was exactly my point with C++ and C#.  I did not mean to infer that C++ was not a useful or good language, but that in a very high percentage of cases, is too complex and error prone for the job at hand. Choosing the correct programming language for a job is a lot like choosing any other tool for a task.  For example: if I want to dig a French drain in my lawn, I can attempt to use a huge tractor-like backhoe and the job would be done far quicker than if I would dig it by hand.  I can't deny that the backhoe has the raw power and speed to perform.  But you also cannot deny that my chances of injury or chances of severing utility lines or other resources climb at an exponential rate inverse to the amount of training I may have on that machinery. Is C++ a powerful tool?  Oh yes, and it's great for those tasks where speed and performance are paramount.  But for most of us, it's the wrong tool.  And keep in mind, I say this even though I have 17 years of experience in using it and feel myself highly adept in utilizing its features both in the standard libraries, the STL, and in supplemental libraries such as BOOST.  Which, although greatly help with adding powerful features quickly, do very little to curb the relative dangers of the language. So, you may say, the fault is in the developer, that if the developer had some higher skills or if we only hired C++ experts this would not be an issue.  Now, I will concede there is some truth to this.  Obviously, the higher skilled C++ developers you hire the better the chance they will produce highly performant and error-free code.  However, what good is that to the average developer who cannot afford a full stable of C++ experts? That's my point with C#:  It's like a kinder, gentler C++.  It gives you nearly the same speed, and in many ways even more power than C++, and it gives you a much softer cushion for novices to fall against if they code less-than-optimally.  A bug is a bug, of course, in any language, but C# does a good job of hiding and taking on the task of handling almost all of the resource issues that make C++ so tricky.  For my money, C# is much more maintainable, more feature-rich, second only slightly in performance, faster to market, and -- last but not least -- safer and easier to use.  That's why, where I work, I much prefer to see the developers moving to C#.  The quantity of bugs is much lower, and we don't need to hire "experts" to achieve the same results since the language itself handles those resource pitfalls so prevalent in poorly written C++ code.  C++ will still have its place in the world, and I'm sure I'll still use it now and again where it is truly the correct tool for the job, but for nearly every other project C# is a wonderfully "dumbed-down" version of C++ -- in the very best sense -- and to me, that's the smart choice.

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• Changing Career to Game Development

  - by Don Carleone

  I m enthusiastic about and ready to shifting my career to Game Development sector, but before that I wonder some situations, I m now working as Senior .net programmer, i can only write code in c# right now, but i started to learn c++, I m computer engineer so before I know how to write in C but I didnt work with big projects, I wrote "Game of Life" before with C and used only Linked List DataStructure becouse of pushed my limits. But now I m thinking to shift Game Development, I love to play Console Games, I respect people who works about that business. But I just wonder, I see a lot of great developers who write codes with C++ and I ask myself that guys dont think to join Game Industry so why I think I can join! is that True? I dont live in USA or big country like. I live in a poor country, and here is no any Game Development Company, so I have to move to USA for working that job. So can you tell me if I start to learn something (c++,game enginees,physic enginees,3d math etc.) right now and working my usual job, after 7-8 month is it good time to move and finding a job about Game development in USA as junior game developer? is that possible? or is this just a dream? I realy need your advices. You can give down vote about that no problem, at least one advice can help me in my life.

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• Keyboard layout - certain keys work with AltGr, other doesn't

  - by user23122

  I run Ubuntu 12.04 in VirtualBox 4.3.14 on Windows 7 with a Swedish keyboard layout. In Windows everything works fine but in Ubuntu some keys/characters (the most important for a programmer) doesn't work. This is the result from pressing the keys in the top row 1234567890+´ (Unmodified top row on keyboard) @£$€ {[]}\ (Windows with AltGr) ¡ £$€¥ ± (Ubuntu with "AltGr") More characters are broken (pipe | is a notable example) but the top row is the biggest problem. I can workaround this by enabling "direct connection" from my USB keyboard to VirtualBox but then I have to manually disable that every time I switch out of VirtualBox. I have tried different keyboard layout, sometimes @ et al works but then other characters are broken. I also tried sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration with default values, but it didn't change anything. I have guest additions installed (from the built in virtual CD). I got my VB disk image from a colleague who does not have this problem, however, he does not have guest additions installed (and hence can't use a higher resolution than 1024x768, and I need to run Ecplipse...). He also have different installation of Virtual Box and Windows. For example, the key for 2 should, in Ubuntu, produce four different characters, 2"²@. The first three works fine, including superscript 2 that requires AltGr-Shift-2, it is just plain AltGr-2 to get @ that does not work on this key (and all the other keys I have problem with). Any ideas for a fix?

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• How do you avoid jumping to a solution when under pressure? [closed]

  - by GlenPeterson

  When under a particularly strict programming deadline (like an hour), if I panic at all, my tendency is to jump into coding without a real plan and hope I figure it out as I go along. Given enough time, this can work, but in an interview it's been pretty unsuccessful, if not downright counter-productive. I'm not always comfortable sitting there thinking while the clock ticks away. Is there a checklist or are there techniques to recognize when you understand the problem well enough to start coding? Maybe don't touch the keyboard for the first 5-10 minutes of the problem? At what point do you give up and code a brute-force solution with the hope of reasoning out a better solution later? A related follow-up question might be, "How do you ensure that you are solving the right problem?" Or "When is it most productive to think and design more vs. code some experiments to and figure out the design later?" EDIT: One close vote already, but I'm not sure why. I wrote this in the first person, but I doubt I'm the only programmer to ever choke in an interview. Here is a list of techniques for taking a math test and another for taking an oral exam. Maybe I'm not expressing myself well, but I'm asking if there is a similar list of techniques for handling a programming problem under pressure?

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• How to use shared_ptr for COM interface pointers

  - by Seefer

  I've been reading about various usage advice relating to the new c++ standard smart pointers unique_ptr, shared_ptr and weak_ptr and generally 'grok' what they are about when I'm writing my own code that declares and consumes them. However, all the discussions I've read seem restricted to this simple usage situation where the programmer is using smart in his/her own code, with no real discussion on techniques when having to work with libraries that expect raw pointers or other types of 'smart pointers' such as COM interface pointers. Specifically I'm learning my way through C++ by attempting to get a standard Win32 real-time game loop up and running that uses Direct2D & DirectWrite to render text to the display showing frames per second. My first task with Direct2D is in creating a Direct2D Factory object with the following code from the Direct2D examples on MSDN: ID2D1Factory* pD2DFactory = nullptr; HRESULT hr = D2D1CreateFactory(D2D1_FACTORY_TYPE_SINGLE_THREADED, &pD2DFactory); pD2DFactory is obviously an 'out' parameter and it's here where I become uncertain how to make use of smart pointers in this context, if indeed it's possible. My inexperienced C++ mind tells me I have two problems: With pD2DFactory being a COM interface pointer type, how would smart_ptr work with the Add() / Release() member functions for a COM object instance? Are smart pointers able to be passed to functions in situations where the function is using an 'out' pointer parameter technique? I did experiment with the alternative of using _com_ptr_t in the comip.h header file to help with pointer lifetime management and declared the pD2DFactory pointer with the following code: _com_ptr_t<_com_IIID<pD2DFactory, &__uuidof(pD2DFactory)>> pD2DFactory = nullptr; and it appears to work so far but, as you can see, the syntax is cumbersome :) So, I was wondering if any C++ gurus here could confirm whether smart pointers are able to help in cases like this and provide examples of usage, or point me to more in-depth discussions of smart pointer usage when needing to work with other code libraries that know nothing of them. Or is it simply a case of my trying to use the wrong tool for the job? :)

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• How to talk a client out of a Flash website?

  - by bunglestink

  I have recently been doing a bunch of web side projects through word of mouth recommendations only. Although I am much more a of a programmer than a designer by any means, my design skills are not terrible, and do not hate dealing with UI like many programmers. As a result, I find myself lured into a bunch of side projects where aside from a minimal back end for content administration, most of the programming is on front end interfaces (read javascript/css). By far the biggest frustration I have had is convincing clients that they do not want Flash. Aside the fact that I really do not enjoy Flash "development", there are many practical reasons why Flash is not desirable (lack of compatibility across devices, decreased client accessibility, plug-in requirements, increased development time, etc.). Instead of just flat out telling the clients "I will not build you a flash website", I would much rather use tactics to convince/explain to them that this is not what they actually want, ie: meet their requirements any better than standard html/css/js and distract users from their content. What kind of first hand experience do others have with this? How do you explain to someone that javascript/css/AJAX is usually a better option for most websites? Why do people want to use Flash so bad to begin with? This question pertains to clients who do not have any technical reasons for wanting flash, but just want it because they think it makes pretty websites.

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