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• Where to find my website's source code?

  - by Aamir Berni

  my company ordered a website and we were given all usernames and passwords but I can't find the PHP source files and this is my first website assignment. I have no prior exposure to web technologies although I've been programming for a decade and know computer usage inside out. I tried to use the cPanel to find .php files but there aren't any. There are no MySQL databases either. I'm lost. I'll appreciate any help in this regards.

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• Layout of mathematical views (iOS)

  - by William Jockusch

  I am trying to figure out the right way to encapsulate graphical information about mathematical objects. It is not simple. For example, a matrix can include square brackets around its entries, or not. Some things carry down to sub-objects -- for example, a matrix might track the font size to be used by its entries. Similarly, the font color and the background color would carry down to the entries. Other things do not carry down. For example, the entries of the matrix do not need to know whether or not the matrix has those square brackets. Based on all of the above, I need to calculate sizes for everything, then frames. All of this can depend on the properties stored above. The size of a matrix depends on the sizes of its entries, and also on whether or not it has those brackets. What I am having a hard time with is not the individual ways to calculate sensible frames for this or that. It is the overall organizational structure of the whole thing. How can I keep track of it all without going crazy. One particular obstacle is worth mentioning -- for reasons I don't want to go into here, I need to calculate the sizes and frames for everything before I instantiate any actual views. So, for example, if I have a Matrix object, I need to calculate its size before I make a MatrixView. If I have an equation, I need to calculate the size of the view for the equation before I create the actual view. So I clearly need separate objects for those calculations. But I can't figure out a sensible class structure for those objects. If I put them all into a single class, I get some advantages because copying then becomes easy. But I also end up with a bloated class that contains info that is irrelevant for some objects -- such as whether or not to include those brackets around the matrix. But if I use a lot of different classes, copying properties becomes a real pain. If it matters, this is all in Objective C, for an iOS environment. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

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• @Microsoft: please provide universal and professional concepts

  - by Marko Apfel

  Why such constructs are included in the csproj-Files? <CodeAnalysisRuleSetDirectories>;c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Team Tools\Static Analysis Tools\\Rule Sets</CodeAnalysisRuleSetDirectories> <CodeAnalysisRuleDirectories>;c:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Team Tools\Static Analysis Tools\FxCop\\Rules</CodeAnalysisRuleDirectories> So it every projects needs some manual steps to clean the project file so the solution could be build on a continuous integration server. That annoying! And also in a Visual Studio mixed editions team that’s too specific for the ultimate edition. As good as Visual Studio in most cases is, sometimes it is really far away from professional coding fundamentals and best practices.

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• iPhone universal app. MoviePlayer.framwork problem.

  - by e40pud

  I have application based on 3.0 iPhone OS SDK One of tasks is playing video (I use MPMoviePlayerController for this task) Now I try to make universal app working on both 3.0 and 3.2 OS I did all steps described in apple documentation: Upgrade Current Target for iPad; make run-time checking for symbols using [[UIDevice currentDevice] respondsToSelector:@selector(userInterfaceIdiom)] function. But when I start my application on device - iPhone with OS 3.1.3 my apllication is crashes with next log: Tue May 25 18:00:28 unknown SpringBoard[24] <Notice>: MultitouchHID(208b30) uilock state: 1 -> 0 Tue May 25 18:00:29 unknown SpringBoard[24] <Notice>: MultitouchHID(292580) device bootloaded Tue May 25 18:00:34 unknown UIKitApplication:...[0xaa0f][1517] <Notice>: dyld: Symbol not found: _MPMoviePlayerWillEnterFullscreenNotification Tue May 25 18:00:34 unknown UIKitApplication:...[0xaa0f][1517] <Notice>: Referenced from: /var/mobile/Applications/876EA35E-5756-436B-A9E2-5481D4D62050/....app/... Tue May 25 18:00:34 unknown UIKitApplication:...[0xaa0f][1517] <Notice>: Expected in: /System/Library/Frameworks/MediaPlayer.framework/MediaPlayer Tue May 25 18:00:35 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: launchd[1517] Builtin profile: container (seatbelt) Tue May 25 18:00:35 unknown kernel[0] <Debug>: launchd[1517] Container: /private/var/mobile/Applications/876EA35E-5756-436B-A9E2-5481D4D62050 (seatbelt) Tue May 25 18:00:35 unknown ReportCrash[1518] <Notice>: Formulating crash report for process cnetmobile[1517] Tue May 25 18:00:36 unknown com.apple.launchd[1] <Warning>: (UIKitApplication:...[0xaa0f]) Job appears to have crashed: Trace/BPT trap Tue May 25 18:00:36 unknown com.apple.launchd[1] <Warning>: (UIKitApplication:...[0xaa0f]) Throttling respawn: Will start in 2147483646 seconds Tue May 25 18:00:36 unknown SpringBoard[24] <Warning>: Application '...' exited abnormally with signal 5: Trace/BPT trap Tue May 25 18:00:36 unknown ReportCrash[1518] <Error>: Saved crashreport to /var/mobile/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/..._2010-05-25-180034_...-iPhone.plist using uid: 0 gid: 0, synthetic_euid: 501 egid: 0 Tue May 25 18:01:36 unknown SpringBoard[24] <Notice>: MultitouchHID(208b30) uilock state: 0 -> 1 As you can see the error is "Symbol not found: _MPMoviePlayerWillEnterFullscreenNotification". This symbol is notification available in MediaPlayer.framework starting from iPhone OS 3.2 So, what am I doing wrong? What I should do to have universal application working correct on OS 3.2 (with new available functionality) and older OSes (with their functionality)?

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• Universal iPhone/iPad Windows-based app with Core Data crashes on iPhone SDK 4 beta 3

  - by Tarfa

  Hi all. I installed iPhone OS 4.0 Beta 3. When I create a new Windows-based universal app with Core Data (File New Project Windows-based Application --- select Universal in drop down and check the "Use Core Data for storage" check box) the app launches fine into the iPhone simulator but crashes in the iPad simulator. The console message returned is: dyld: Symbol not found: _OBJC_CLASS_$_NSURL Referenced from: /Users/tarfa/Library/Application Support/iPhone Simulator/3.2/Applications/5BB644DC-9370-4894-8884-BAEBA64D9ED0/Universal.app/Universal Expected in: /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneSimulator.platform/Developer/SDKs/iPhoneSimulator3.2.sdk/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreFoundation.framework/CoreFoundation I'm stumped. Anyone else experiencing this problem?

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• SimpleMembership, Membership Providers, Universal Providers and the new ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC 4 templates

  - by Jon Galloway

  The ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template adds some new, very useful features which are built on top of SimpleMembership. These changes add some great features, like a much simpler and extensible membership API and support for OAuth. However, the new account management features require SimpleMembership and won't work against existing ASP.NET Membership Providers. I'll start with a summary of top things you need to know, then dig into a lot more detail. Summary: SimpleMembership has been designed as a replacement for traditional the previous ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system SimpleMembership solves common problems people ran into with the Membership provider system and was designed for modern user / membership / storage needs SimpleMembership integrates with the previous membership system, but you can't use a MembershipProvider with SimpleMembership The new ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template AccountController requires SimpleMembership and is not compatible with previous MembershipProviders You can continue to use existing ASP.NET Role and Membership providers in ASP.NET 4.5 and ASP.NET MVC 4 - just not with the ASP.NET MVC 4 AccountController The existing ASP.NET Role and Membership provider system remains supported as is part of the ASP.NET core ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms does not use SimpleMembership; it implements OAuth on top of ASP.NET Membership The ASP.NET Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) is not compatible with SimpleMembership The following is the result of a few conversations with Erik Porter (PM for ASP.NET MVC) to make sure I had some the overall details straight, combined with a lot of time digging around in ILSpy and Visual Studio's assembly browsing tools. SimpleMembership: The future of membership for ASP.NET The ASP.NET Membership system was introduces with ASP.NET 2.0 back in 2005. It was designed to solve common site membership requirements at the time, which generally involved username / password based registration and profile storage in SQL Server. It was designed with a few extensibility mechanisms - notably a provider system (which allowed you override some specifics like backing storage) and the ability to store additional profile information (although the additional  profile information was packed into a single column which usually required access through the API). While it's sometimes frustrating to work with, it's held up for seven years - probably since it handles the main use case (username / password based membership in a SQL Server database) smoothly and can be adapted to most other needs (again, often frustrating, but it can work). The ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix efforts allowed the team an opportunity to take a new look at a lot of things - e.g. the Razor syntax started with ASP.NET Web Pages, not ASP.NET MVC. The ASP.NET Web Pages team designed SimpleMembership to (wait for it) simplify the task of dealing with membership. As Matthew Osborn said in his post Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages: With the introduction of ASP.NET WebPages and the WebMatrix stack our team has really be focusing on making things simpler for the developer. Based on a lot of customer feedback one of the areas that we wanted to improve was the built in security in ASP.NET. So with this release we took that time to create a new built in (and default for ASP.NET WebPages) security provider. I say provider because the new stuff is still built on the existing ASP.NET framework. So what do we call this new hotness that we have created? Well, none other than SimpleMembership. SimpleMembership is an umbrella term for both SimpleMembership and SimpleRoles. Part of simplifying membership involved fixing some common problems with ASP.NET Membership. Problems with ASP.NET Membership ASP.NET Membership was very obviously designed around a set of assumptions: Users and user information would most likely be stored in a full SQL Server database or in Active Directory User and profile information would be optimized around a set of common attributes (UserName, Password, IsApproved, CreationDate, Comment, Role membership...) and other user profile information would be accessed through a profile provider Some problems fall out of these assumptions. Requires Full SQL Server for default cases The default, and most fully featured providers ASP.NET Membership providers (SQL Membership Provider, SQL Role Provider, SQL Profile Provider) require full SQL Server. They depend on stored procedure support, and they rely on SQL Server cache dependencies, they depend on agents for clean up and maintenance. So the main SQL Server based providers don't work well on SQL Server CE, won't work out of the box on SQL Azure, etc. Note: Cory Fowler recently let me know about these Updated ASP.net scripts for use with Microsoft SQL Azure which do support membership, personalization, profile, and roles. But the fact that we need a support page with a set of separate SQL scripts underscores the underlying problem. Aha, you say! Jon's forgetting the Universal Providers, a.k.a. System.Web.Providers! Hold on a bit, we'll get to those... Custom Membership Providers have to work with a SQL-Server-centric API If you want to work with another database or other membership storage system, you need to to inherit from the provider base classes and override a bunch of methods which are tightly focused on storing a MembershipUser in a relational database. It can be done (and you can often find pretty good ones that have already been written), but it's a good amount of work and often leaves you with ugly code that has a bunch of System.NotImplementedException fun since there are a lot of methods that just don't apply. Designed around a specific view of users, roles and profiles The existing providers are focused on traditional membership - a user has a username and a password, some specific roles on the site (e.g. administrator, premium user), and may have some additional "nice to have" optional information that can be accessed via an API in your application. This doesn't fit well with some modern usage patterns: In OAuth and OpenID, the user doesn't have a password Often these kinds of scenarios map better to user claims or rights instead of monolithic user roles For many sites, profile or other non-traditional information is very important and needs to come from somewhere other than an API call that maps to a database blob What would work a lot better here is a system in which you were able to define your users, rights, and other attributes however you wanted and the membership system worked with your model - not the other way around. Requires specific schema, overflow in blob columns I've already mentioned this a few times, but it bears calling out separately - ASP.NET Membership focuses on SQL Server storage, and that storage is based on a very specific database schema. SimpleMembership as a better membership system As you might have guessed, SimpleMembership was designed to address the above problems. Works with your Schema As Matthew Osborn explains in his Using SimpleMembership With ASP.NET WebPages post, SimpleMembership is designed to integrate with your database schema: All SimpleMembership requires is that there are two columns on your users table so that we can hook up to it – an “ID” column and a “username” column. The important part here is that they can be named whatever you want. For instance username doesn't have to be an alias it could be an email column you just have to tell SimpleMembership to treat that as the “username” used to log in. Matthew's example shows using a very simple user table named Users (it could be named anything) with a UserID and Username column, then a bunch of other columns he wanted in his app. Then we point SimpleMemberhip at that table with a one-liner: WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseFile("SecurityDemo.sdf", "Users", "UserID", "Username", true); No other tables are needed, the table can be named anything we want, and can have pretty much any schema we want as long as we've got an ID and something that we can map to a username. Broaden database support to the whole SQL Server family While SimpleMembership is not database agnostic, it works across the SQL Server family. It continues to support full SQL Server, but it also works with SQL Azure, SQL Server CE, SQL Server Express, and LocalDB. Everything's implemented as SQL calls rather than requiring stored procedures, views, agents, and change notifications. Note that SimpleMembership still requires some flavor of SQL Server - it won't work with MySQL, NoSQL databases, etc. You can take a look at the code in WebMatrix.WebData.dll using a tool like ILSpy if you'd like to see why - there places where SQL Server specific SQL statements are being executed, especially when creating and initializing tables. It seems like you might be able to work with another database if you created the tables separately, but I haven't tried it and it's not supported at this point. Note: I'm thinking it would be possible for SimpleMembership (or something compatible) to run Entity Framework so it would work with any database EF supports. That seems useful to me - thoughts? Note: SimpleMembership has the same database support - anything in the SQL Server family - that Universal Providers brings to the ASP.NET Membership system. Easy to with Entity Framework Code First The problem with with ASP.NET Membership's system for storing additional account information is that it's the gate keeper. That means you're stuck with its schema and accessing profile information through its API. SimpleMembership flips that around by allowing you to use any table as a user store. That means you're in control of the user profile information, and you can access it however you'd like - it's just data. Let's look at a practical based on the AccountModel.cs class in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project. Here I'm adding a Birthday property to the UserProfile class. [Table("UserProfile")] public class UserProfile { [Key] [DatabaseGeneratedAttribute(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] public int UserId { get; set; } public string UserName { get; set; } public DateTime Birthday { get; set; } } Now if I want to access that information, I can just grab the account by username and read the value. var context = new UsersContext(); var username = User.Identity.Name; var user = context.UserProfiles.SingleOrDefault(u => u.UserName == username); var birthday = user.Birthday; So instead of thinking of SimpleMembership as a big membership API, think of it as something that handles membership based on your user database. In SimpleMembership, everything's keyed off a user row in a table you define rather than a bunch of entries in membership tables that were out of your control. How SimpleMembership integrates with ASP.NET Membership Okay, enough sales pitch (and hopefully background) on why things have changed. How does this affect you? Let's start with a diagram to show the relationship (note: I've simplified by removing a few classes to show the important relationships): So SimpleMembershipProvider is an implementaiton of an ExtendedMembershipProvider, which inherits from MembershipProvider and adds some other account / OAuth related things. Here's what ExtendedMembershipProvider adds to MembershipProvider: The important thing to take away here is that a SimpleMembershipProvider is a MembershipProvider, but a MembershipProvider is not a SimpleMembershipProvider. This distinction is important in practice: you cannot use an existing MembershipProvider (including the Universal Providers found in System.Web.Providers) with an API that requires a SimpleMembershipProvider, including any of the calls in WebMatrix.WebData.WebSecurity or Microsoft.Web.WebPages.OAuth.OAuthWebSecurity. However, that's as far as it goes. Membership Providers still work if you're accessing them through the standard Membership API, and all of the core stuff  - including the AuthorizeAttribute, role enforcement, etc. - will work just fine and without any change. Let's look at how that affects you in terms of the new templates. Membership in the ASP.NET MVC 4 project templates ASP.NET MVC 4 offers six Project Templates: Empty - Really empty, just the assemblies, folder structure and a tiny bit of basic configuration. Basic - Like Empty, but with a bit of UI preconfigured (css / images / bundling). Internet - This has both a Home and Account controller and associated views. The Account Controller supports registration and login via either local accounts and via OAuth / OpenID providers. Intranet - Like the Internet template, but it's preconfigured for Windows Authentication. Mobile - This is preconfigured using jQuery Mobile and is intended for mobile-only sites. Web API - This is preconfigured for a service backend built on ASP.NET Web API. Out of these templates, only one (the Internet template) uses SimpleMembership. ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template The Basic template has configuration in place to use ASP.NET Membership with the Universal Providers. You can see that configuration in the ASP.NET MVC 4 Basic template's web.config: <profile defaultProvider="DefaultProfileProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultProfileProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </profile> <membership defaultProvider="DefaultMembershipProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultMembershipProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultMembershipProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" enablePasswordRetrieval="false" enablePasswordReset="true" requiresQuestionAndAnswer="false" requiresUniqueEmail="false" maxInvalidPasswordAttempts="5" minRequiredPasswordLength="6" minRequiredNonalphanumericCharacters="0" passwordAttemptWindow="10" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </membership> <roleManager defaultProvider="DefaultRoleProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultRoleProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultRoleProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" applicationName="/" /> </providers> </roleManager> <sessionState mode="InProc" customProvider="DefaultSessionProvider"> <providers> <add name="DefaultSessionProvider" type="System.Web.Providers.DefaultSessionStateProvider, System.Web.Providers, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" connectionStringName="DefaultConnection" /> </providers> </sessionState> This means that it's business as usual for the Basic template as far as ASP.NET Membership works. ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet template The Internet template has a few things set up to bootstrap SimpleMembership: \Models\AccountModels.cs defines a basic user account and includes data annotations to define keys and such \Filters\InitializeSimpleMembershipAttribute.cs creates the membership database using the above model, then calls WebSecurity.InitializeDatabaseConnection which verifies that the underlying tables are in place and marks initialization as complete (for the application's lifetime) \Controllers\AccountController.cs makes heavy use of OAuthWebSecurity (for OAuth account registration / login / management) and WebSecurity. WebSecurity provides account management services for ASP.NET MVC (and Web Pages) WebSecurity can work with any ExtendedMembershipProvider. There's one in the box (SimpleMembershipProvider) but you can write your own. Since a standard MembershipProvider is not an ExtendedMembershipProvider, WebSecurity will throw exceptions if the default membership provider is a MembershipProvider rather than an ExtendedMembershipProvider. Practical example: Create a new ASP.NET MVC 4 application using the Internet application template Install the Microsoft ASP.NET Universal Providers for LocalDB NuGet package Run the application, click on Register, add a username and password, and click submit You'll get the following execption in AccountController.cs::Register: To call this method, the "Membership.Provider" property must be an instance of "ExtendedMembershipProvider". This occurs because the ASP.NET Universal Providers packages include a web.config transform that will update your web.config to add the Universal Provider configuration I showed in the Basic template example above. When WebSecurity tries to use the configured ASP.NET Membership Provider, it checks if it can be cast to an ExtendedMembershipProvider before doing anything else. So, what do you do? Options: If you want to use the new AccountController, you'll either need to use the SimpleMembershipProvider or another valid ExtendedMembershipProvider. This is pretty straightforward. If you want to use an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider in ASP.NET MVC 4, you can't use the new AccountController. You can do a few things: Replace  the AccountController.cs and AccountModels.cs in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet project with one from an ASP.NET MVC 3 application (you of course won't have OAuth support). Then, if you want, you can go through and remove other things that were built around SimpleMembership - the OAuth partial view, the NuGet packages (e.g. the DotNetOpenAuthAuth package, etc.) Use an ASP.NET MVC 4 Internet application template and add in a Universal Providers NuGet package. Then copy in the AccountController and AccountModel classes. Create an ASP.NET MVC 3 project and upgrade it to ASP.NET MVC 4 using the steps shown in the ASP.NET MVC 4 release notes. None of these are particularly elegant or simple. Maybe we (or just me?) can do something to make this simpler - perhaps a NuGet package. However, this should be an edge case - hopefully the cases where you'd need to create a new ASP.NET but use legacy ASP.NET Membership Providers should be pretty rare. Please let me (or, preferably the team) know if that's an incorrect assumption. Membership in the ASP.NET 4.5 project template ASP.NET 4.5 Web Forms took a different approach which builds off ASP.NET Membership. Instead of using the WebMatrix security assemblies, Web Forms uses Microsoft.AspNet.Membership.OpenAuth assembly. I'm no expert on this, but from a bit of time in ILSpy and Visual Studio's (very pretty) dependency graphs, this uses a Membership Adapter to save OAuth data into an EF managed database while still running on top of ASP.NET Membership. Note: There may be a way to use this in ASP.NET MVC 4, although it would probably take some plumbing work to hook it up. How does this fit in with Universal Providers (System.Web.Providers)? Just to summarize: Universal Providers are intended for cases where you have an existing ASP.NET Membership Provider and you want to use it with another SQL Server database backend (other than SQL Server). It doesn't require agents to handle expired session cleanup and other background tasks, it piggybacks these tasks on other calls. Universal Providers are not really, strictly speaking, universal - at least to my way of thinking. They only work with databases in the SQL Server family. Universal Providers do not work with Simple Membership. The Universal Providers packages include some web config transforms which you would normally want when you're using them. What about the Web Site Administration Tool? Visual Studio includes tooling to launch the Web Site Administration Tool (WSAT) to configure users and roles in your application. WSAT is built to work with ASP.NET Membership, and is not compatible with Simple Membership. There are two main options there: Use the WebSecurity and OAuthWebSecurity API to manage the users and roles Create a web admin using the above APIs Since SimpleMembership runs on top of your database, you can update your users as you would any other data - via EF or even in direct database edits (in development, of course)

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• “It’s only test code…”

  - by Chris George

  “Let me hack this in, it’s only test code”, “Don’t worry about getting it reviewed, it’s only test code”, “It doesn’t have to be elegant or efficient, it’s only test code”… do these phrases sound familiar? Chances are if you’ve working with test automation, at one point or other you will have heard these phrases, you have probably even used them yourself! What is certain is that code written under this “it’s only test code” mantra will come back and bite you in the arse! I’ve recently encountered a case where a test was giving a false positive, therefore hiding a real product bug because that test code was very badly written. Firstly it was very difficult to understand what the test was actually trying to achieve let alone how it was doing it, and this complexity masked a simple logic error. These issues are real and they do happen. Let’s take a step back from this and look at what we are trying to do. We are writing test code that tests product code, and we do this to create a suite of tests that will help protect our software against regressions. This test code is making sure that the product behaves as it should by employing some sort of expected result verification. The simple cases of these are generally not a problem. However, automation allows us to explore more complex scenarios in many more permutations. As this complexity increases then so does the complexity of the test code. It is at this point that code which has not been architected properly will cause problems.   Keep your friends close… So, how do we make sure we are doing it right? The development teams I have worked on have always had Test Engineers working very closely with their Software Engineers. This is something that I have always tried to take full advantage of. They are coding experts! So run your ideas past them, ask for advice on how to structure your code, help you design your data structures. This may require a shift in your teams viewpoint, as contrary to this section title and folklore, Software Engineers are not actually the mortal enemy of Test Engineers. As time progresses, and test automation becomes more and more ingrained in what we do, the two roles are converging more than ever. Over the 16 years I have spent as a Test Engineer, I have seen the grey area between the two roles grow significantly larger. This serves to strengthen the relationship and common bond between the two roles which helps to make test code activities so much easier!   Pair for the win Possibly the best thing you could do to write good test code is to pair program on the task. This will serve a few purposes. you will get the benefit of the Software Engineers knowledge and experience the Software Engineer will gain knowledge on the testing process. Sharing the love is a wonderful thing! two pairs of eyes are always better than one… And so are two brains. Between the two of you, I will guarantee you will derive more useful test cases than if it was just one of you.   Code reviews Another policy which certainly pays dividends is the practice of code reviews. By having one of your peers review your code before you commit it serves two purposes. Firstly, it forces you to explain your code. Just the act of doing this will often pick up errors in your code. Secondly, it gets yet another pair of eyes on your code! I cannot stress enough how important code reviews are. The benefits they offer apply as much to product code as test code. In short, Software and Test Engineers should all be doing them! It can be extended even further by getting test code reviewed by a Software Engineer and a Test Engineer, and likewise product code. This serves to keep both functions in the loop with changes going on within your code base.   Learn from your devs I briefly touched on this earlier but I’d like to go into more detail here. Pairing with your Software Engineers when writing your test code is such an amazing opportunity to improve your coding skills. As I sit here writing this article waiting to be called into court for jury service, it reminds me that it takes a lot of patience to be a Test Engineer, almost as much as it takes to be a juror! However tempting it is to go rushing in and start writing your automated tests, resist that urge. Discuss what you want to achieve then talk through the approach you’re going to take. Then code it up together. I find it really enlightening to ask questions like ‘is there a better way to do this?’ Or ‘is this how you would code it?’ The latter question, especially, is where I learn the most. I’ve found that most Software Engineers will be reluctant to show you the ‘right way’ to code something when writing tests because they perceive the ‘right way’ to be too complicated for the Test Engineer (e.g. not mentioning LINQ and instead doing something verbose). So by asking how THEY would code it, it unleashes their true dev-ness and advanced code usually ensues! I would like to point out, however, that you don’t have to accept their method as the final answer. On numerous occasions I have opted for the more simple/verbose solution because I found the code written by the Software Engineer too advanced and therefore I would find it unreadable when I return to the code in a months’ time! Always keep the target audience in mind when writing clever code, and in my case that is mostly Test Engineers.  

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• When is someone else's code I use from the internet "mine"?

  - by robault

  I'm building a library from methods that I've found on the internet. Some are free to use or modify with no requirements, others say that if I leave a comment in the code it's okay to use, others say when I use the code I have to attribute the use of someone's code in my application (in the credits for my app I guess). What I've been doing is reorganizing classes, renaming methods, adding descriptions (code comments), renaming the parameters and names inside the methods to something meaningful, optimizing loops if applicable, changing return types, adding try/catch/throw blocks, adding parameter checks and cleaning up resources in the methods. For example; I didn't come up with the algorithm for blurring a Bitmap but I've taken the basic example of iterating through the pixels and turned it into a decent library method (applying the aforementioned modifications). I understand how to go about building it now myself but I didn't actually hit the keystrokes to make it and I couldn't have come up with it before learning from their example. What about code people get in answers on Stackoverflow or examples from Codeproject? At what point can I drop their requirements because at n% their code became mine? FWIW I intend on using the libraries to create products that I will sell.

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• How to make iPhone universal binary for iOS4 and iOS3?

  - by abuharsky

  It is possible to make universal binary for os 2.x and 3.x, you can see sample code for MFMailComposer But how to make it for iOS4 and iOS3 and XCode 3.2.3?

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• What is the point of padding?

  - by ktm5124

  In particular, I'm reading into the Mach-O binary file format for Intel 32 on OS X. After the FAT header there is a whole bunch of padding before the offset of the first archive. What is the point of all this padding? To be more specific, there is upwards of 4000 bytes of padding between the FAT header and the first archive (in particular, the mach_header). Why include all these extra bytes?! Is OS X fond of adding 4 MB to all their universal binaries?

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• Should a programmer take writing lessons to enhance code expressiveness?

  - by Jose Faeti

  Given that programmers are authors and write code to express abstract thoughts and concepts, and good code should be read by other programmers without difficulties and misunderstandings, should a programmer take writing lessons to write better code? Abstracting concepts and real world problems/entities is an important part of writing good code, and a good mastery of the language used for coding should allow the programmer to express his thoughts more easily, or in a better way. Besides, when trying to write or rewrite some code to make it better, much time can be spent in deciding the names for functions, variables or data structures. I think this could also help to avoid writing code with more than one meaning, often cause of misunderstanding between different programmers. Code should always express clearly its function unambiguously.

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• how many types of code signing certificates do I need?

  - by gerryLowry

  in Canada, website SSL certificates can be had for as low as US$10. unfortunately, code signing certificates cost about 10 time as much, one website mentions Vista compatibility ... this seems strange because my assumption is they must support XP, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2003, and Server 2008 or they would be useless. https://secure.ksoftware.net/code_signing.html US$99 Support Platforms Microsoft Authenticode. Sign any Microsoft executable format (32 and 64 bit EXE, DLL, OCX, DLL or any Active X control). Signing hardware drivers is not currently supported. Abode AIR. Sign any Adobe AIR application. Java. Sign any JAR applet Microsoft Office. Sign any MS Office Macro or VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) file. Mozilla. Sign any Mozilla Object file. The implication is that a single code signing certificate can do ALL of the above. ksoftware actually discounts Commodo certificates and the Commode website is unclear. QUESTION: Will ONE code signing certificate be enough or do I need one for Microsoft executables, and a second for things like Word and Excel macros? my main goal is to sign things like vs2008 code snippets so that I can export them securely; however, I would like to be able to use the same code signing certificate for signing other items too. Thank you ~~ regards, Gerry (Lowry)

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• Is there any tool to standardize format of C++ code?

  - by BillyONeal

  Hello, all :) I'm looking for a tool that works on Windows to reformat some C++ code in my codebase. Essentially, I've got some code I wrote a while ago that I'd like to use, but it doesn't match the style I'm using in a more recent project. What's the best way to reformat C++ code in a standard manner? Billy3

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• New release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available for download - March 2011

  - by Jialiang

  A new release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available on March 8th. Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62267#DownloadId=215627 You can download individual code samples or browse code samples grouped by technology in the updated code sample index. If it’s the first time that you hear about Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, please read this Microsoft News Center article http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/jan11/01-13codeframework.mspx, or watch the introduction video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO5Li3APU58, or read the introduction on our homepage http://1code.codeplex.com/. -------------- New Silverlight code samples CSSLTreeViewCRUDDragDrop Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215808 The code sample was created by Amit Dey. It demonstrates a custom TreeView with added functionalities of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) and drag-and-drop operations. Silverlight TreeView control with CRUD and drag & drop is a frequently asked programming question in Silverlight  forums. Many customers also requested this code sample in our code sample request service. We hope that this sample can reduce developers' efforts in handling this typical programming scenario. The following blog article introduces the sample in detail: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codefx/archive/2011/02/15/silverlight-treeview-control-with-crud-and-drag-amp-drop.aspx. CSSL4FileDragDrop and VBSL4FileDragDrop Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215809 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215810 The code sample demonstrates the new drag&drop feature of Silverlight 4 to implement dragging picures from the local file system to a Silverlight application.   Sometimes we want to change SiteMapPath control's titles and paths according to Query String values. And sometimes we want to create the SiteMapPath dynamically. This code sample shows how to achieve these goals by handling SiteMap.SiteMapResolve event. CSASPNETEncryptAndDecryptConfiguration, VBASPNETEncryptAndDecryptConfiguration Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215027 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215106 In this sample, we encrypt and decrypt some sensitive information in the config file of a web application by using the RSA asymmetric encryption. This project contains two snippets. The first one demonstrates how to use RSACryptoServiceProvider to generate public key and the corresponding private key and then encrypt/decrypt string value on page. The second part shows how to use RSA configuration provider to encrypt and decrypt configuration section in web.config of web application. connectionStrings section in plain text: Encrypted connectionString:  Note that if you store sensitive data in any of the following configuration sections, we cannot encrypt it by using a protected configuration provider <processModel> <runtime> <mscorlib> <startup> <system.runtime.remoting> <configProtectedData> <satelliteassemblies> <cryptographySettings> <cryptoNameMapping> CSASPNETFileUploadStatus Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215028 I believe ASP.NET programmers will like this sample, because in many cases we need customers know the current status of the uploading files, including the upload speed and completion percentage and so on. Under normal circumstances, we need to use COM components to accomplish this function, such as Flash, Silverlight, etc. The uploading data can be retrieved in two places, the client-side and the server-side. For the client, for the safety factors, the file upload status information cannot be got from JavaScript or server-side code, so we need COM component, like Flash and Silverlight to accomplish this, I do not like this approach because the customer need to install these components, but also we need to learn another programming framework. For the server side, we can get the information through coding, but the key question is how to tell the client results. In this case, We will combine custom HTTPModule and AJAX technology to illustrate how to analyze the HTTP protocol, how to break the file request packets, how to customize the location of the server-side file caching, how to return the file uploading status back to the client and so on . CSASPNETHighlightCodeInPage, VBASPNETHighlightCodeInPage Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215029 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215108 This sample imitates a system that needs display the highlighted code in an ASP.NET page . As a matter of fact, sometimes we input code like C# or HTML in a web page and we need these codes to be highlighted for a better reading experience. It is convenient for us to keep the code in mind if it is highlighted. So in this case, the sample shows how to highlight the code in an ASP.NET page. It is not difficult to highlight the code in a web page by using String.Replace method directly. This  method can return a new string in which all occurrences of a specified string in the current instance are replaced with another specified string. However, it may not be a good idea, because it's not extremely fast, in fact, it's pretty slow. In addition, it is hard to highlight multiple keywords by using String.Replace method directly. Sometimes we need to copy source code from visual studio to a web page, for readability purpose, highlight the code is important while set the different types of keywords to different colors in a web page by using String.Replace method directly is not available. To handle this issue, we need to use a hashtable variable to store the different languages of code and their related regular expressions with matching options. Furthermore, define the css styles which used to highlight the code in a web page. The sample project can auto add the style object to the matching string of code. A step-by-step guide illustrating how to highlight the code in an ASP.NET page: 1. the HighlightCodePage.aspx page Choose a type of language in the dropdownlist control and paste the code in the textbox control, then click the HighLight button. 2.  Display the highlighted code in an ASP.NET page After user clicks the HighLight button, the highlighted code will be displayed at right side of the page.        CSASPNETPreventMultipleWindows Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215032 This sample demonstrates a step-by-step guide illustrating how to detect and prevent multiple windows or tab usage in Web Applications. The sample imitates a system that need to prevent multiple windows or tabs to solve some problems like sharing sessions, protect duplicated login, data concurrency, etc. In fact, there are many methods achieving this goal. Here we give a solution of use JavaScript, Sample shows how to use window.name property check the correct links and throw other requests to invalid pages. This code-sample use two user controls to make a distinction between base page and target page, user only need drag different controls to appropriate web form pages. so user need not write repetitive code in every page, it will make coding work lightly and convenient for modify your code.  JSVirtualKeyboard Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215093 This article describes an All-In-One framework sample that demonstrates a step-by-step guide illustrating how to build a virtual keyboard in your HTML page. Sometimes we may need to offer a virtual keyboard to let users input something without their real keyboards. This scenario often occurs when users will enter their password to get access to our sites and we want to protect the password from some kinds of back-door software, a Key-logger for example, and we will find a virtual keyboard on the page will be a good choice here. To create a virtual keyboard, we firstly need to add some buttons to the page. And when users click on a certain button, the JavaScript function handling the onclick event will input an appropriated character to the textbox. That is the simple logic of this feature. However, if we indeed want a virtual keyboard to substitute for the real keyboard completely, we will need more advanced logic to handle keys like Caps-Lock and Shift etc. That will be a complex work to achieve. CSASPNETDataListImageGallery Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62261#DownloadId=215267 This code sample demonstrates how to create an Image Gallery application by using the DataList control in ASP.NET. You may find the Image Gallery is widely used in many social networking sites, personal websites and E-Business websites. For example, you may use the Image Gallery to show a library of personal uploaded images on a personal website. Slideshow is also a popular tool to display images on websites. This code sample demonstrates how to use the DataList and ImageButton controls in ASP.NET to create an Image Gallery with image navigation. You can click on a thumbnail image in the Datalist control to display a larger version of the image on the page. This sample code reads the image paths from a certain directory into a FileInfo array. Then, the FileInfo array is used to populate a custom DataTable object which is bound to the Datalist control. This code sample also implements a custom paging system that allows five images to be displayed horizontally on one page. The following link buttons are used to implement a custom paging system:   •     First •     Previous •     Next •     Last Note We recommend that you use this method to load no more than five images at a time. You can also set the SelectedIndex property for the DataList control to limit the number of the thumbnail images that can be selected. To indicate which image is selected, you can set the SelectedStyle property for the DataList control. VBASPNETSearchEngine Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215112 This sample shows how to implement a simple search engine in an ASP.NET web site. It uses LIKE condition in SQL statement to search database. Then it highlights keywords in search result by using Regular Expression and JavaScript. New Windows General code samples CSCheckEXEType, VBCheckEXEType Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215045 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215120 The sample demonstrates how to check an executable file type.  For a given executable file, we can get 1 whether it is a console application 2 whether it is a .Net application 3 whether it is a 32bit native application. 4 The full display name of a .NET application, e.g. System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089, processorArchitecture=MSIL New Internet Explorer code samples CSIEExplorerBar, VBIEExplorerBar Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215060 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215133 The sample demonstrates how to create and deploy an IE Explorer Bar which could list all the images in a web page. CSBrowserHelperObject, VBBrowserHelperObject Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215044 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215119 The sample demonstrates how to create and deploy a Browser Helper Object,  and the BHO in this sample is used to disable the context menu in IE. New Windows Workflow Foundation code samples CSWF4ActivitiesCorrelation Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215085 Consider that there are two such workflow instances:       start                                   start          |                                           | Receive activity      Receive activity         |                                           | Receive2 activity      Receive2 activity         |                                           | A WCF request comes to call the second Receive2 activity. Which one should take care of the request? The answer is Correlation. This sample will show you how to correlate two workflow service to work together. -------------- New ASP.NET code samples CSASPNETBreadcrumbWithQueryString Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215022

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• How do you overcome your own coding biases when handed legacy code?

  - by Bryan M.

  As programmers, we often take incredible pride in our skills and hold very strong opinions about what is 'good' code and 'bad' code. At any given point in our careers, we've probably had some legacy system dropped in our laps, and thought 'My god, this code sucks!' because it didn't fit into our notion of what good code should be, despite the fact that it may have well been perfectly functional, maintainable code. How do you prepare yourself mentally when trying to get your head around another programmer's work?

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• Porting iPhone app to iPad fails to sign?

  - by mobibob

  I am able to create a new application profile targeted for my iPad, however, when I convert from iPhone to "Universal" device, I am getting an error in signing. [BEROR]Code Sign error: a valid provisioning profile matching the application's Identifier 'rfc1034identifier' could not be found Also note: I am able to run it in the simulator (which does not require signing). It is a very old application ~OS version 2.x or 3.1 that had SDK problems which required more manual process to get the signing code into the build settings, so I would not be surprised if there is some residual foo in the build settings.

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• Which things instantly ring alarm bells when looking at code? [closed]

  - by FinnNk

  I attended a software craftsmanship event a couple of weeks ago and one of the comments made was "I'm sure we all recognize bad code when we see it" and everyone nodded sagely without further discussion. This sort of thing always worries me as there's that truism that everyone thinks they're an above average driver. Although I think I can recognize bad code I'd love to learn more about what other people consider to be code smells as it's rarely discussed in detail on people's blogs and only in a handful of books. In particular I think it'd be interesting to hear about anything that's a code smell in one language but not another. I'll start off with an easy one: Code in source control that has a high proportion of commented out code - why is it there? was it meant to be deleted? is it a half finished piece of work? maybe it shouldn't have been commented out and was only done when someone was testing something out? Personally I find this sort of thing really annoying even if it's just the odd line here and there, but when you see large blocks interspersed with the rest of the code it's totally unacceptable. It's also usually an indication that the rest of the code is likely to be of dubious quality as well.

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• How do I maintain a really poorly written code base?

  - by onlineapplab.com

  Recently I got hired to work on existing web application because of NDA I'm not at liberty to disclose any details but this application is working online in sort of a beta testing stage before official launch. We have a few hundred users right now but this number is supposed to significantly increase after official launch. The application is written in PHP (but it is irrelevant to my question) and is running on a dual xeon processor standalone server with severe performance problems. I have seen a lot of bad PHP code but this really sets new standards, especially knowing how much time and money was invested in developing it. it is as badly coded as possible there is PHP, HTML, SQL mixed together and code is repeated whenever it is necessary (especially SQL queries). there are not any functions used, not mentioning any OOP there are four versions of the app (desktop, iPhone, Android + other mobile) each version has pretty much the same functionality but was created by copying the whole code base, so now there are some differences between each version and it is really hard to maintain the database is really badly designed, which is causing severe performance problems also for fixing some errors in PHP code there is a lot of database triggers used which are updating data on SELECT and on INSERT so any testing is a nightmare Basically, any sin of a bad programming you can imagine is there for example it is not only possible to use SQL injections in literally every place but you can log into app if you use a login which doesn't exist and an empty password. The team which created this app is not working on it any more and there is an outsourced team which suggested that there are some problems but was never willing to deal with the elephant in the room partially because they've got a very comfortable contract and partially due to lack of skills (just my opinion). My job was supposed to be fixing some performance problems and extending existing functionality but first thing I was asked to do was a review of the existing code base. I've made my review and it was quite a shock for the management but my conclusions were after some time finally confirmed by other programmers. Management made it clear that it is not possible to start rewriting this app from scratch (which in my opinion should be done). We have to maintain its operable state and at the same time fix performance errors and extend the functionality. My question is, as I don't want just to patch the existing code, how to transform this into properly written app while keeping the existing code working at the same time? My plan is: Unify four existing versions into common code base (fixing only most obvious errors). Redesign db and use triggers to populate it with data (so data will be maintained in two formats at the same time) All new functionality will be written as separate project. Step by step transfer existing functionality into the new project After some time everything will be in the new project Some explanation about #2, right now it is practically impossible to make any updates in existing db any change requires reviewing whole code and making changes in many places. Is such plan feasible at all? Another solution is to walk away and leave the headache to someone else.

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• Basis for claim that the number of bugs per line of code is constant regardless of the language used

  - by Matt R

  I've heard people say (although I can't recall who in particular) that the number of bugs per line of code is roughly constant regardless of what language is used. What is the research that backs this up? Edited to add: I don't have access to it, but apparently the authors of this paper "asked the question whether the number of bugs per lines of code (LOC) is the same for programs written in different programming languages or not."

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• Cross-forest universal groups on Windows Server?

  - by DotGeorge

  I would like to create a Universal Group whose members are a mix of cross-forests users and groups. In the following example, two forests are mentioned (US and UK) and two domains in each forest (GeneralStaff and Java): For example, the universalDevelopers group may comprise of members from UK.Java.Developers and US.Java.Developers. Then, for example, there may be a group of universalSales which contains the users UK.GeneralStaff.John and US.GeneralStaff.Dave. In UK forest at the minute, I can freely add members and groups from the UK. But there is no way to add members from the US forest, despite having a two-way trust in place... e.g. I can login with US members into UK and vice-versa. A further complication is that, with a Universal group in the UK (which contains three domains), I can only add two of the three. It can't see the third. Could people please provide some thoughts on why cross-forest groups can't be created and ways of 'seeing' all domains within a forest. EDIT: This is on a combination of Windows 2003 and 2008 server. Answers can be regarding either. Thanks!

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• QR Codes for Files on Google Code

  - by Synetech inc.

  Hi, When you download files from Google Code now (example), in addition to the text version of the SHA1 hash, it includes a QR code of it. The device that the file was downloaded to is the one that has to hash the file. But, if it can download the file (ie, has access to the webpage), it also has access to the text version of the hash, so the QR code seems completely useless—and more work to decode when the raw text is available. How would reading the hash into a mobile phone allow you to verify the file you download to the computer? Or if you download the file to the phone, how would you use the phone to take a picture of the QR code displayed on the webpage on its own screen? Does anyone know what the point to the QR code is or how you would use it to verify the downloaded file (I don’t mean QR codes in general, but specifically in this context).

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• What to watch out for when writing code at an Interview?

  - by Philip

  Hi, I have read that at a lot of companies you have to write code at an interview. On the one hand I see that it makes sense to ask for a work sample. On the other hand: What kind of code do you expect to be written in 5 minutes? And what if they tell me "Write an algorithm that does this and that" but I cannot think of a smart solution or even write code that doesn't semantically work? I am particularly interested in that question because I do not have that much commercial programming experience, 2 years part-time, one year full-time. (But I am interested in programming languages since nearly 15 years though usually I was more concentrated in playing with the language rather than writing large applications...) And actually I consider my debugging and problem solving skills much better than my coding skills. I sometimes see myself not writing the most beautiful code when looking back, but on the other hand I often come up with solutions for hard problems. And I think I am very good at optimizing, fixing, restructuring existing code, but I have problems with writing new applications from scratch. The software design sucks... ;-) Therefore I don't feel comfortable when thinking about this code writing situation at an interview... So what do the interviewers expect? What kind of information about my code writing are they interested in? Philip

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• Rawr Code Clone Analysis&ndash;Part 0

  - by Dylan Smith

  Code Clone Analysis is a cool new feature in Visual Studio 11 (vNext).  It analyzes all the code in your solution and attempts to identify blocks of code that are similar, and thus candidates for refactoring to eliminate the duplication.  The power lies in the fact that the blocks of code don't need to be identical for Code Clone to identify them, it will report Exact, Strong, Medium and Weak matches indicating how similar the blocks of code in question are.   People that know me know that I'm anal enthusiastic about both writing clean code, and taking old crappy code and making it suck less. So the possibilities for this feature have me pretty excited if it works well - and thats a big if that I'm hoping to explore over the next few blog posts. I'm going to grab the Rawr source code from CodePlex (a World Of Warcraft gear calculator engine program), run Code Clone Analysis against it, then go through the results one-by-one and refactor where appropriate blogging along the way.  My goals with this blog series are twofold: Evaluate and demonstrate Code Clone Analysis Provide some concrete examples of refactoring code to eliminate duplication and improve the code-base Here are the initial results:   Code Clone Analysis has found: 129 Exact Matches 201 Strong Matches 300 Medium Matches 193 Weak Matches Also indicated is that there was a total of 45,181 potentially duplicated lines of code that could be eliminated through refactoring.  Considering the entire solution only has 109,763 lines of code, if true, the duplicates lines of code number is pretty significant. In the next post we’ll start examining some of the individual results and determine if they really do indicate a potential refactoring.

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• How do you stay productive when dealing with extremely badly written code?

  - by gaearon

  I don't have much experience in working in software industry, being self-taught and having participated in open source before deciding to take a job. Now that I work for money, I also have to deal with some unpleasant stuff, which is normal of course. Recently I was assigned to add logging to a large SharePoint project which is written by some programmer who obviously was learning to code on the job. After 2 years of collaboration, the client switched to our company, but the damage was done, and now somehow I need to maintain this code. Not that the code was too hard to read. Despite problems - each project has one class with several copy-pasted methods, enormous if nestings, Systems Hungarian, undisposed connections — it's still readable. However, I found myself absolutely unproductive despite working on something as simple as adding logging. Basically, I just need to go through the code step by step and add some trace calls. However, the idiocy of the code is so annoying that I get tired within 10 minutes of starting. In the beginning, I used to add using constructs, reduce nesting by reversing if's, rename the variables to readable names—but the project is large, and eventually I gave up. I know this is not the task I should be doing, but at least reducing the mess gave me some kind of psychological reward so I could keep going. Now the trick stopped working, and I still have 60% of my work to do. I started having headaches after work, and I no longer get the feeling of satisfaction I used to get - which would usually allow me to code for 10 hours straight and still feel fresh. This is not just one big rant, for I really do have an actual question: Is there a way to stay productive and not to fight the windmills? Is there some kind of psychological trick to stay focused on the task, instead of thinking “How stupid is that?” each time I see another clever trick by the previous programmer? The problem with adding logging is that I actually have to understand what the code does, and doing so hurts my brain in an unpleasant fashion.

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• Which reference provides your definition of "elegant" or "beautiful" code?

  - by Donnied

  This question is phrased in a very specific way - it asks for references. There was a similar question posted which was closed because it was considered a duplicate to a good code question. The Programmers FAQ points out that answers should have references - or its just an unproductive sharing of (seemingly) baseless opinions. There is a difference between shortest code and most elegant code. This becomes clear in several seminal texts: Dijkstra, E. W. (1972). The humble programmer. Communications of the ACM, 15(10), 859–866. Kernighan, B. W., & Plauger, P. J. (1974). Programming style: Examples and counterexamples. ACM Comput. Surv., 6(4), 303–319. Knuth, D. E. (1984). Literate programming. The Computer Journal, 27(2), 97–111. doi:10.1093/comjnl/27.2.97 They all note the importance of clarity over brevity. Kernighan & Plauger (1974) provide descriptions of "good" code, but "good code" is certainly not synonymous with "elegant". Knuth (1984) describes the impo rtance of exposition and "excellence of style" to elegant programs. He cites Hoare - who describes that code should be self documenting. Dijkstra (1972) indicates that beautiful programs optimize efficiency but are not opaque. This sort of conversation is qulaitatively different than a random sharing of opinions. Therefore, the question - Which reference provides your definition of "elegant" or "beautiful" code? "Which *reference*" is not subjective - anything else will most likely shut the thread down, so please supply *references* not opinions.

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