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• Who should be the architect in an agile project?

  - by woni

  We are developing the agile way for a few months now and I have some troubles understanding the agile manifesto as interpreted by my colleagues. The project we are developing is a framework for future projects and will be reused many times in the next years. Code is only written to fulfill the needs of the current user story. The product owner tells us what to do, but not how to do it. What would be right, in my opinion, because he is not implicitly a programmer. The project advanced and in my eyes it messed up a little bit. After I recognized an assembly that was responsible for 3 concerns (IoC-Container, communication layer and project internal things), I tried to address this to my colleagues. They answered that this would be the result of applying YAGNI, because know one told them to respect that functionalities have to be split up in different assemblies for further use. In my opinion no one has to tell us that we should respect the Separation of Concerns principle. On the other side, they mentioned to prefer YAGNI over SoC because it is less effort to implement and therefore faster and cheaper. We had changing requirements a lot at the beginning of the project and ended up in endless refactoring sessions, because to much has to be adapted. Is it better to make such rather simple design decisions up front, even there is no need in the current situation, or do we have to change a lot in the later progress of the project?

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• Using Python to traverse a parent-child data set

  - by user132748

  I have a dataset of two columns in a csv file. Th purpose of this dataset is to provide a linking between two different id's if they belong to the same person. e.g (2,3,5 belong to 1) e.g COLA COLB 1 2 ; 1 3 ; 1 5 ; 2 6 ; 3 7 ; 9 10 In the above example 1 is linked to 2,3,5 and 2 is the linked to 6 and 3 is linked to 7. What I am trying to achieve is to identify all records which are linked to 1 directly (2,3,5) or indirectly(6,7) and be able to say that these id's in column B belong to same person in column A and then either dedupe or add a new column to the output file which will have 1 populated for all rows that link to 1 e.g of expected output colA colB GroupField 1 2 1; 1 3 1; 1 5 1 ; 2 6 1 ;3 7 1; 9 10 9; 10 11 9 I am a newbie and so am not sure on how to approach this problem.Appreciate any inputs you'll can provide.

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• Multiplayer online game engine/pipeline

  - by Slav

  I am implementing online multiplayer game where client must be written in AS3 (Flash) to embed game into browser and server in C++ (abstract part of which is already written and used with other games). Networking models may differ from each other, but currently I'm looking toward game's logic run on both client and server parts but they're written on different languages while it's not the main problem. My previous game (pretty big one - was implemented with efforts of ~5 programmers in 1.5 years) was mainly "written" within electronic tables as structured objects with implemented inheritance: was written standalone tool which generated AS3 and C++ (languages of platforms to which the game was published) using specified electronic tables file (.xls or .ods). That file contained ~50 tables with ~50 rows and ~50 columns each and was mainly written by game designers which do not know any programming languages. But that game was single-player. Having declared problem with my currently implementing MMO, I'm looking toward some vast pipeline, where will be resolved such problems like: game objects descriptions (which starships exist within game, how much HP they have, how fast move, what damage deal...) actions descriptions (what players or NPCs can do: attack each other, collect resources, build structures, move, teleport, cast spells) - actions are transmitted through server between clients influences (what happens when specified action applied on specified object, e.i "Ship A attacked Ship B: field "HP" of Ship B reduced by amount of field "damage" of Ship A" Influences can be much more difficult, yes, e.i. "damage is twice it's size when Ship has =5 allies around him in a 200 units range during night" and so on. If to be able to write such logic within some "design document" it will be easily possible to: let designers to do their job without programmer's intervention or any bug-prone programming validate described logic transfer (transform, convert) to any programming language where it will be executed Did somebody worked on something like that? Is there some tools/engines/pipelines which concernes with it? How to handle all of this problems simultaneously in a best way or do I properly imagine my tasks and problems to myself?

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• How often is seq used in Haskell production code?

  - by Giorgio

  I have some experience writing small tools in Haskell and I find it very intuitive to use, especially for writing filters (using interact) that process their standard input and pipe it to standard output. Recently I tried to use one such filter on a file that was about 10 times larger than usual and I got a Stack space overflow error. After doing some reading (e.g. here and here) I have identified two guidelines to save stack space (experienced Haskellers, please correct me if I write something that is not correct): Avoid recursive function calls that are not tail-recursive (this is valid for all functional languages that support tail-call optimization). Introduce seq to force early evaluation of sub-expressions so that expressions do not grow to large before they are reduced (this is specific to Haskell, or at least to languages using lazy evaluation). After introducing five or six seq calls in my code my tool runs smoothly again (also on the larger data). However, I find the original code was a bit more readable. Since I am not an experienced Haskell programmer I wanted to ask if introducing seq in this way is a common practice, and how often one will normally see seq in Haskell production code. Or are there any techniques that allow to avoid using seq too often and still use little stack space?

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• Is it possible to procure venture capital based on in-progress ideas? [migrated]

  - by Clay Shannon

  I hope this is not the wrong forum for this question, but I can't find one in the Stack Exchange "family" that would be more appropriate. I have ideas for two web sites which I think will be quite popular (they are totally unrelated to each other). I am a programmer, and a "creative" (photographer, author, musician). So I have the "vision" as well as the technical know-how to bring these websites into being. My "problem" is that I'm champing at the bit to complete them, and don't have much time to work on them (being employed fulltime, etc.) If I continue to work on them in my so-called spare time, it will probably be a year or more before they are both done. If I was in a position to work on them fulltime (IOW, if I had a "silent partner" willing to invest enough money that I could quit my job), I could have them complete in about three months. I would be willing to partner with somebody or some group who would back me financially in this way. My vision/work combined with their monetary investment could bring about "great things" or at least moderately great things. I know you can "crowd fund" startups and so on, but for that you need to expose your idea. My ideas are not something I would want to make public, as somebody might "steal" them. I'm willing to discuss them with serious individual potential investors, though (provided they were willing to sign a non-disclosure agreement). Does anybody have any recommendation on how I might find a suitable partner[s] for this/these ventures?

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• Abstract Factory Method and Polymorphism

  - by Scotty C.

  Being a PHP programmer for the last couple of years, I'm just starting to get into advanced programming styles and using polymorphic patterns. I was watching a video on polymorphism the other day, and the guy giving the lecture said that if at all possible, you should get rid of if statements in your code, and that a switch is almost always a sign that polymorphism is needed. At this point I was quite inspired and immediately went off to try out these new concepts, so I decided to make a small caching module using a factory method. Of course the very first thing I have to do is create a switch to decide what file encoding to choose. DANG! class Main { public static function methodA($parameter='') { switch ($parameter) { case 'a': $object = new \name\space\object1(); break; case 'b': $object = new \name\space\object2(); break; case 'c': $object = new \name\space\object3(); break; default: $object = new \name\space\object1(); } return (sekretInterface $object); } } At this point I'm not really sure what to do. As far as I can tell, I either have to use a different pattern and have separate methods for each object instance, or accept that a switch is necessary to "switch" between them. What do you guys think?

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• Flash Player for IPTV

  - by Le Mystique

  Hi All, We have to design a flash player for three video sources of IPTV. Educational videos on the system that can be played on demand. (VOD or Video on Demand local) Streaming videos available on different websites that can be played on demand (VOD or Video on Demand remote) IPTV live streaming video feed Videos from three sources have to be played within single flash player that we need to design. There are 2 basic requirements: For the two VOD types, we have to provide the pause and play functionality. For IPTV, pause and play is not required, However, channel switching time is critically important here. The user should get the program behaviour as close to TV experience as possible. This means channel switching should be fast. To provide this, buffering of video is required for multiple channels. Now the questions is, is this possible? If yes, how? Secondly, what skill set (e.g. action script 3.0 , flash 10) should the flash programmer have to be able to design this? Thirdly is it as simple as making a normal FLV player? Or is it a more complex job?

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• Which pattern is best for large project

  - by shamim

  I have several years of software development experience, but I am not a keen and adroit programmer, to perform better I need helping hands. Recently I engaged in an ERP project. For this project want a very effective structure, which will be easily maintainable and have no compromise about performance issue. Below structures are now present in my old projects. Entity Layer BusinessLogic Layer. DataLogic Layer UI Layer. Bellow picture describe how they are internally connected. For my new project want to change my project structure, I want to follow below steps: Core Layer(common) BLL DAL Model UI Bellow picture describe how they are internally connected. Though goggling some initial type question’s are obscure to me, they are : For new project want to use Entity framework, is it a good idea? Will it increase my project performance? Will it more maintainable than previous structure? Entity Framework core disadvantages/benefits are? For my project need help to select best structure. Will my new structure be better than the old one?

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• Making money from a custom built interpreter?

  - by annoying_squid

  I have been making considerable progress lately on building an interpreter. I am building it from NASM assembly code (for the core engine) and C (cl.exe the Microsoft compiler for the parser). I really don't have a lot of time but I have a lot of good ideas on how to build this so it appeals to a certain niche market. I'd love to finish this but I need to face reality here ... unless I can make some good monetary return on my investment, there is not a lot of time for me to invest. So I ask the following questions to anyone out there, especially those who have experience in monetizing their programs: 1) How easy is it for a programmer to make good money from one design? (I know this is vague but it will be interesting to hear from those who have experience or know of others' experiences). 2) What are the biggest obstacles to making money from a programming design? 3) For the parser, I am using the Microsoft compiler (no IDE) I got from visual express, so will this be an issue? Will I have to pay royalties or a license fee? 4) As far as I know NASM is a 2-clause BSD licensed application. So this should allow me to use NASM for commericial development unless I am missing something? It's good to know these things before launching into the meat and potatoes of the project.

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• I've been told that Exceptions should only be used in exceptional cases. How do I know if my case is exceptional?

  - by tieTYT

  My specific case here is that the user can pass in a string into the application, the application parses it and assigns it to structured objects. Sometimes the user may type in something invalid. For example, their input may describe a person but they may say their age is "apple". Correct behavior in that case is roll back the transaction and to tell the user an error occurred and they'll have to try again. There may be a requirement to report on every error we can find in the input, not just the first. In this case, I argued we should throw an exception. He disagreed, saying, "Exceptions should be exceptional: It's expected that the user may input invalid data, so this isn't an exceptional case" I didn't really know how to argue that point, because by definition of the word, he seems to be right. But, it's my understanding that this is why Exceptions were invented in the first place. It used to be you had to inspect the result to see if an error occurred. If you failed to check, bad things could happen without you noticing. Without exceptions every level of the stack needs to check the result of the methods they call and if a programmer forgets to check in one of these levels, the code could accidentally proceed and save invalid data (for example). Seems more error prone that way. Anyway, feel free to correct anything I've said here. My main question is if someone says Exceptions should be exceptional, how do I know if my case is exceptional?

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• Capturing BizTalk 2004 SQLAdapter failures

  - by DanBedassa

  I was recently working on a BizTalk 2004 project where I encountered an issue with capturing exceptions (inside my orchestration) occurring from an external source. Like database server down, non-existing stored procedure, …   I thought I might write-up this in case it might help someone …   To reproduce an issue, I just rename the database to something different.   The orchestration was failing at the point where I make a SQL request via a Response-Request Port. The exception handlers were bypassed but I can see a warning in the event log saying: "The adapter failed to transmit message going to send port "   After scratching my head for a while (as a newbie to BTS 2004) to find a way to catch the exceptions from the SQLAdapter in an orchestration, here is the solution I had.   ·         Put the Send and Receive shapes inside a Scope shape ·         Set the Scope’s transaction type to “Long Running” ·         Add a Catch block expecting type “System.Exception” ·         Set the “Delivery Notification” of the associated Port to “Transmitted” ·         Change the “Retry Count” of the associated port to 0 (This will make sure BizTalk will raise the exception, instead of a warning, and you can capture that) ·         Now capture and do whatever with the exception inside the Catch block

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• Worthless Anti-Spam (What can we learn)

  - by smehaffie

  I recently can across a site that had a “anti-spam” field at the bottom of the entry from.  The first issue I had with it was that at 1280X800 you could not read the value you were suppose to enter (see below).  You tell me, should you enter div, dlv, piv, or plv. But even worse than not being readable at high resolutions is the fact that the programmer who coded it really did not understand what this was used for.  An anti-spam (aka: catpcha) entry field should not be able to be read by looking at the HTML DOM object (so entry of value cannot be scripted).  In this case the value is simply a disabled text input filed that has the value you need to type.  So a hacker would simply need to search for text input field named “spam2” and then they could flood the site with spam. 1: <td> 2: <label> 3: <input name="spam1" type="text" class="small" id="spam1" size="6" maxlength="3" /> 4: <input name="spam2" type="text" class="small" id="spam2" value="plv" 5: disabled="disabled" size="6" maxlength="3" /> 6: * <span class="small">- Anti-SPAM key - please enter matching value</span> 7: </label> 8: </td>   There are some things to learn from this example: 1) Always make sure you understand why you are coding a feature/function for any program you write.  Just following the requirements without realizing the “why” will sooner or later come back to bite you.  I think the above example appears to be an example of this. 2) Always check how the screen appears in different resolutions.  In this case it was pretty much unreadable in 1280x800, but you could read it in 800X600 (but most people I know do not have their resolution set that low).  Lucky for me I could “View Source” and get the value I needed to enter.

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• How to manage Areas/Levels in an RPG?

  - by Hexlan

  I'm working on an RPG and I'm trying to figure out how to manage the different levels/areas in the game. Currently I create a new state (source file) for every area, defining its unique aspects. My concern is that as the game grows the number of class files will become unmanageable with all the towns, houses, shops, dungeons, etc. that I need to keep track of. I would also prefer to separate my levels from the source code because non-programmer members of the team will be creating levels, and I would like the engine to be as free from game specific code as possible. I'm thinking of creating a class that provides all the functions that will be the same between all the levels/areas with a unique member variable that can be used to look up level specifics from data. This way I only need to define level/area once in the code, but can create multiple instances each with its own unique aspects provided by data. Is this a good way to go about solving the issue? Is there a better way to handle a growing number of levels?

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• Estimate angle to launch missile, maths question

  - by Jonathan

  I've been working on this for an hour or two now and my maths really isn't my strong suit which is definitely not a good thing for a game programmer but that shouldn't stop me enjoying a hobby surely? After a few failed attempts I was hoping someone else out there could help so here's the situation. I'm trying to implement a bit of faked intelligence when the A.I fires it's missiles at a target in a 2D game world. By predicting the likely position the target will be in given it's current velocity and the time it will take the missile to reach it's target. I created an image to demonstrate my thinking: http://i.imgur.com/SFmU3.png which also contains the logic I use for accelerating the missile after launch. The ship that fires the missile can fire within a total of 40 degree angle, 20 either side of itself, but this could likely become variable. My current attempt was to break the space between the two lines into segments which match the targets width. Then calculate the time it would take the missile to get to that location using the formula. So for each iteration of this we total up the values and that tells us the distance travelled, ad it would then just need compared to distance to the segment. startVelocity * ((startVelocity * acceleration)^(currentframe-1) So for example. If we start at a velocity of 1f/frame with an acceleration of 0.1f the formula, at frame 4, would be 1 * (1.1^3) = 1.331 But I quickly realized I was getting lost when trying to put this into practice. Does this seem like a correct starting point or am I going completely the wrong way about it? Any pointers would help me greatly. Maths really isn't my strong suit so I get easily lost in these matters and don't even really know a good phrase to search for with this. So I guess in summary my question is more about the correct way to approach this problem and any additional code samples on top of that would be great but I'm not averse to working out the complete code from helpful pointers.

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• Problem with wake after suspend using USB remote.

  - by Bod

  Hi, I'm a linux newbie looking for some help. I'm currently setting up an XBMC HTPC using a laptop and 10.10 and all works great except for waking from resume using the power button on the remote. The suspend works from remote works fine as does the resume using the power button on the laptop. I've checked /proc/acpi/wakeup which initially showed the following. Device S-state Status Sysfs node C096 S5 *disabled pci:0000:00:1e.0 C0F1 S3 *disabled pci:0000:00:1d.0 C0F8 S3 *disabled pci:0000:00:1d.1 C0F9 S3 *disabled pci:0000:00:1d.2 C0FA S3 *disabled pci:0000:00:1d.3 C0FB S3 *disabled pci:0000:00:1d.7 C102 S5 *disabled pci:0000:00:1c.0 C22B S5 *disabled pci:0000:08:00.0 C115 S5 *disabled pci:0000:00:1c.2 C22C S5 *disabled C118 S5 *disabled pci:0000:00:1c.3 C22C S5 *disabled I've since configured the above so that the S3 devices above are enabled. I've confirmed that they are the correct devices using lspci 00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 01) 00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 01) 00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 01) 00:1d.3 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB UHCI Controller #4 (rev 01) 00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation N10/ICH 7 Family USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 01) None of this has worked unfortunately and I'm now stuck. It simply refuses to wakeup from the remote. The USB receiver shows no activity LED while suspended. Suspend/resume from the remote works fine from Windows 7 so I know the laptop is ok with it. Any ideas? I need to get this sorted to gain Wife Approval for this system. Thanks, Bod.

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• Am I an idealist?

  - by ereOn

  This is not only a question, this is also a call for help. Since I started my career as a programmer, I always tried to learn from my mistakes. I worked hard to learn best-practices and while I don't consider myself a C++ expert, I still believe I'm not a beginner either. I was recently hired into a company for C++ development. There I was told that my way to work was "against the rules" and that I would have to change my mind. Here are the topics I disagree with my hierarchy (their words): "You should not use separate header files for your different classes. One big header file is both easier to read and faster to compile." "Trying to use different headers is counter-productive : use the same super-set of headers everywhere, and enforce the use #pragma hdrstop to hasten compilation" "You may not use Boost or any other library that uses nested directories to organize its files. Our build-machine doesn't work with nested directories. Moreover, you don't need Boost to create great software." One might think I'm somehow exaggerated things, but the sad truth is that I didn't. That's their actual words. I believe that having separate files enhance maintainability and code-correctness and can fasten compilation time by the use of the proper includes. Have you been in a similar situation? What should I do? I feel like it's actually impossible for me to work that way and day after day, my frustration grows.

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• Need help with ColdFusion and ASP.NET site [closed]

  - by Michael Stone

  To begin, I wasn't too sure how to title this.. I've got a few questions. First off, I've got a very big site that's in ColdFusion and we've been migrating to ASP.NET C# 4.0 the last 8 months. I've got a team of 7 programmers and no one can seem to figure out these answers, not even our senior C# programmer. We're using Team Foundation Server and we can't figure out how to only push up one small change at time. Right now we're stuck to publishing the entire site and it's causing serious issues. We've currently got the site as a Project and not a Website. We're wondering if that's one issue. I actually think it might be a problem. We're also dealing with an issue where we can't access our regular folders with relative paths. So we're first developing our admin side in .NET and We've got our regular site and then we've got another site within that for our .NET admin tools. By site, I'm referring to them actually being Sites in IIS. This also creates a problem for us when we're creating tools that upload images and want to store them and access them from our parent Site. I'd very much appreciate any advice on how to go about this in the most standardized way. So what I'm hoping for is advise on: -Publishing and managing a site/project in Team Foundation Server. Being able to push up one fix at a time if needed would be GREAT! -Any help figuring out the issuing referencing folders from my .NET child site to my parent ColdFusion site using regular relative paths. "/a/images/b/" would be nice nice instead of only being able to do "/b/images/" We're using ColdFusion 8, C# Asp.NET 4.0/Entity Framework/POCO Templates, and a Windows 2008 R2 Server. Thank you in advance for any help.

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• Graduating soon with a computer science degree, but have unique circumstances [closed]

  - by Donnie

  I joined the Navy in 1998, and was admitted into Nuclear Power Training. I got my electrician's mate certificate, but was put on medical hold when I was in Nuclear Power Training. I was sent to the Naval Hospital, and received a medical (honorable) discharge in the middle of 2000. I decided to stay at home and raise my son, and my girlfriend worked. a few years ago, I decided that I want to work as a programmer, so I went to college and will soon be graduating with a degree in computer science. I hope to finish with a relatively high GPA, 3.8 or 3.9. My question is this: How much, if any, of my Navy experience should I put on my resume? And how do I explain my nine year gap as a stay at home dad? Do I even try to explain it? I know recent college graduates typically have no experience, but obviously I'm not the typical college graduate. Will my long absence from working, or my relatively short duration in the Navy hurt my chances? Should I just put the college on my resume, and hope that HR thinks I'm younger than I am? Obviously, then, my age would show at the interview and there would be questions. Any help is appreciated.

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• How to deal with the need to know multiple programming languages? When to stop learning new languages?

  - by Raphael

  I am a relatively young programmer. I am 23 and I have been programming professionally for about 5 years. As most programmers I started with C, learned some x86 assembly for fun and then I found C++ which turned out to be my greatest passion in the programming world. Programming with C and C++ forces you to learn platform specific APIs, libs and frameworks all of each requires constant study and experimentation. After some time I had to move on to Java and C# as the demand on my region is basically for these languages. With these languages I entered the world of web development and then I had to learn javascript. Developing for the .NET Framework was exciting at first but I constantly felt as I was getting tied up by Microsoft (and of course the .NET Framework was driving me away from Linux). For desktop development I could do pretty much everything I did with .NET using C++ with Qt but for web development I had to look for an alternative. Quickly I found Django and then I proceeded to learn Python so I could use Django. Nowadays I am learning iOS development with Objective-C. So far it was pretty much easy to learn all these languages (C++ trained me well) but I am worried that someday I won't be able to keep track of them all. Just to clarify. The only languages I learned cause I had to were C# and Java. All of the others I learned for fun, because I love programming and learning new things. Also I like to keep my skills sharp on desktop, web and mobile development. My question is: How do you keep track of multiple programming languages? (I mean, keep track of changes to these languages and keep your skills sharp) and: Is there such a thing as enough programming languages?

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• Open Source Project all dressed up but nowhere to go...

  - by Calanus

  Over the past 2 years myself and a colleague have built an online statistical analysis application using a mixture of silverlight, wcf and R. I (a c# programmer) wrote all the silverlight and wcf stuff whilst my colleague (a statistician) came up with the stats algorithms and wrote the R code. Now we think that this app is fairly unique - a rich gui online statistics application that is much more intuitive than all the other online stat apps that I've seen. But despite this we don't really know where to go with the project, mainly for the following reasons: 1) Its fairly complicated stuff - without the mix of programing and stats skills it would be difficult for anyone to "get into" the project and contribute. 2) We are stalled by a lack of a proper place to host the site. Currently it sits on the family windows 7 media centre, not exactly the best place to host it as it could interfere with the missus trying to watch Corrie/Friends/Oprah etc. Soo, anyone got any ideas on how to move forward with this? I guess that my strength is programing not marketing so despite working hard at this for the past couple of years I feel that I've reached a dead end! Also, does anyone know of any free windows hosting for open source projects? If I could find a proper place to put the app I might feel re-energised about the whole thing. The source code is on codeplex at: http://silverstats.codeplex.com, whilst the app is currently hosted at http://silverstats.co.uk

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• Advice on choosing a book to read

  - by Kioshiki

  I would like to ask for some recommendations on useful books to read. Initially I had intended on posting quite a long description of my current issue and asking for advice. But I realised that I didn’t have a clear idea of what I wanted to ask. One thing that is clear to me is that my knowledge in various areas needs improving and reading is one method of doing that. Though choosing the right book to read seems like a task in itself when there are so many books out there. I am a programmer but I also deal with analysis, design & testing. So I am not sure what type of book to read. One option might be to work through two books at the same time. I had thought maybe one about design or practices and another of a more technical focus. Recently I came across one book that I thought might be useful to read: http://xunitpatterns.com/index.html It seems like an interesting book, but the comments I read on amazon.co.uk show that the book is probably longer than it needs to be. Has anyone read it and can comment on this? Another book that I already own and would probably be a good one to finish reading is this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1309438553&sr=8-1 Has anyone else read this who can comment on its usefulness? Beyond these two I currently have no clear idea of what to read. I have thought about reading a book related to OO design or the GOF design patterns. But I wonder if I am worrying too much about the process and practices and not focusing on the actual work. I would be very grateful for any suggestions or comments. Many Thanks, Kioshiki

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• "Programming error" exceptions - Is my approach sound?

  - by Medo42

  I am currently trying to improve my use of exceptions, and found the important distinction between exceptions that signify programming errors (e.g. someone passed null as argument, or called a method on an object after it was disposed) and those that signify a failure in the operation that is not the caller's fault (e.g. an I/O exception). As far as I understand, it makes little sense for an immediate caller to actually handle programming error exceptions, he should instead assure that the preconditions are met. Only "outer" exception handlers at task boundaries should catch them, so they can keep the system running if a task fails. In order to ensure that client code can cleanly catch "failure" exceptions without catching error exceptions by mistake, I create my own exception classes for all failure exceptions now, and document them in the methods that throw them. I would make them checked exceptions in Java. Now I have a few questions: Before, I tried to document all exceptions that a method could throw, but that sometimes creates an unwiedly list that needs to be documented in every method up the call chain until you can show that the error won't happen. Instead, I document the preconditions in the summary / parameter descriptions and don't even mention what happens if they are not met. The idea is that people should not try to catch these exceptions explicitly anyway, so there is no need to document their types. Would you agree that this is enough? Going further, do you think all preconditions even need to be documented for every method? For example, calling methods in IDisposable objects after calling Dispose is an error, but since IDisposable is such a widely used interface, can I just assume a programmer will know this? A similar case is with reference type parameters where passing null makes no conceivable sense: Should I document "non-null" anyway? IMO, documentation should only cover things that are not obvious, but I am not sure where "obvious" ends.

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• What's a way to implement a flexible buff/debuff system?

  - by gkimsey

  Overview: Lots of games which RPG-like statistics allow for character "buffs", ranging from simple "Deal 25% extra damage" to more complicated things like "Deal 15 damage back to attackers when hit." The specifics of each type of buff aren't really relevant. I'm looking for a (presumably object-oriented) way to handle arbitrary buffs. Details: In my particular case, I have multiple characters in a turn-based battle environment, so I envisioned buffs being tied to events like "OnTurnStart", "OnReceiveDamage", etc. Perhaps each buff is a subclass of a main Buff abstract class, where only the relevant events are overloaded. Then each character could have a vector of buffs currently applied. Does this solution make sense? I can certainly see dozens of event types being necessary, it feels like making a new subclass for each buff is overkill, and it doesn't seem to allow for any buff "interactions". That is, if I wanted to implement a cap on damage boosts so that even if you had 10 different buffs which all give 25% extra damage, you only do 100% extra instead of 250% extra. And there's more complicated situations that ideally I could control. I'm sure everyone can come up with examples of how more sophisticated buffs can potentially interact with each other in a way that as a game developer I may not want. As a relatively inexperienced C++ programmer (I generally have used C in embedded systems), I feel like my solution is simplistic and probably doesn't take full advantage of the object-oriented language. Thoughts? Has anyone here designed a fairly robust buff system before?

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• I've inherited 200K lines of spaghetti code -- what now?

  - by kmote

  I hope this isn't too general of a question; I could really use some seasoned advice. I am newly employed as the sole "SW Engineer" in a fairly small shop of scientists who have spent the last 10-20 years cobbling together a vast code base. (It was written in a virtually obsolete language: G2 -- think Pascal with graphics). The program itself is a physical model of a complex chemical processing plant; the team that wrote it have incredibly deep domain knowledge but little or no formal training in programming fundamentals. They've recently learned some hard lessons about the consequences of non-existant configuration management. Their maintenance efforts are also greatly hampered by the vast accumulation of undocumented "sludge" in the code itself. I will spare you the "politics" of the situation (there's always politics!), but suffice to say, there is not a consensus of opinion about what is needed for the path ahead. They have asked me to begin presenting to the team some of the principles of modern software development. They want me to introduce some of the industry-standard practices and strategies regarding coding conventions, lifecycle management, high-level design patterns, and source control. Frankly, it's a fairly daunting task and I'm not sure where to begin. Initially, I'm inclined to tutor them in some of the central concepts of The Pragmatic Programmer, or Fowler's Refactoring ("Code Smells", etc). I also hope to introduce a number of Agile methodologies. But ultimately, to be effective, I think I'm going to need to hone in on 5-7 core fundamentals; in other words, what are the most important principles or practices that they can realistically start implementing that will give them the most "bang for the buck". So that's my question: What would you include in your list of the most effective strategies to help straighten out the spaghetti (and prevent it in the future)?

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• Am I programming too slow?

  - by Jonn

  I've only been a year in the industry and I've had some problems making estimates for specific tasks. Before you close this, yes, I've already read this: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/648/how-to-respond-when-you-are-asked-for-an-estimate and that's about the same problem I'm having. But I'm looking for a more specific gauge of experiences, something quantifiable or probably other programmer's average performances which I should aim for and base my estimates. The answers range from weeks, and I was looking more for an answer on the level of a task assigned for a day or so. (Note that this doesn't include submitting for QA or documentations, just the actual development time from writing tests if I used TDD, to making the page, before having it submitted to testing) My current rate right now is as follows (on ASP.NET webforms): Right now, I'm able to develop a simple data entry page with a grid listing (no complex logic, just Creating and Reading) on an already built architecture, given one full day's (8 hours) time. Adding complex functionality, and Update and Delete pages add another full day to the task. If I have to start the page from scratch (no solution, no existing website) it takes me another full day. (Not always) but if I encounter something new or haven't done yet it takes me another full day. Whenever I make an estimate that's longer than the expected I feel that others think that I'm lagging a lot behind everyone else. I'm just concerned as there have been expectations that when it's just one page it should take me no more than a full day. Yes, there definitely is more room for improvement. There always is. I have a lot to learn. But I would like to know if my current rate is way too slow, just average, or average for someone no longer than a year in the industry.

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