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• What does a WinForm application need to be designed for usability, and be robust, clean, and profess

  - by msorens

  One of the principal problems impeding productivity in software implementation is the classic conundrum of “reinventing the wheel”. Of late I am a .NET developer and even the wonderful wizardry of .NET and Visual Studio covers only a portion of this challenging issue. Below I present my initial thoughts both on what is available and what should be available from .NET on a WinForm, focusing on good usability. That is, aspects of an application exposed to the user and making the user experience easier and/or better. (I do include a couple items not visible to the user because I feel strongly about them, such as diagnostics.) I invite you to contribute to these lists. LIST A: Components provided by .NET These are substantially complete components provided by .NET, i.e. those requiring at most trivial coding to use. “About” dialog -- add it with a couple clicks then customize. Persist settings across invocations -- .NET has the support; just use a few lines of code to glue them together. Migrate settings with a new version -- a powerful one, available with one line of code. Tooltips (and infotips) -- .NET includes just plain text tooltips; third-party libraries provide richer ones. Diagnostic support -- TraceSources, TraceListeners, and more are built-in. Internationalization -- support for tailoring your app to languages other than your own. LIST B: Components not provided by .NET These are not supplied at all by .NET or supplied only as rudimentary elements requiring substantial work to be realized. Splash screen -- a small window present during program startup with your logo, loading messages, etc. Tip of the day -- a mini-tutorial presented one bit at a time each time the user starts your app. Check for available updates -- facility to query a server to see if the user is running the latest version of your app, then provide a simple way to upgrade if a new version is found. Maximize to multiple monitors -- the canonical window allows you to maximize to a single monitor only; in my apps I allow maximizing across multiple monitors with a click. Taskbar notifier -- flash the taskbar when your backgrounded app has new info for the user. Options dialogs -- multi-page dialogs letting the user customize the app settings to his/her own preferences. Progress indicator -- for long running operations give the user feedback on how far there is left to go. Memory gauge -- an indicator (either absolute or percentage) of how much memory is used by your app. LIST C: Stylistic and/or tiny bits of functionality This list includes bits of functionality that are too tiny to merit being called a component, along with stylistic concerns (that admittedly do overlap with the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines). Design a form for resizing -- unless you are restricting your form to be a fixed size, use anchors and docking so that it does what is reasonable when enlarged or shrunk by the user. Set tab order on a form -- repeated tab presses by the user should advance from field to field in a logical order rather than the default order in which you added fields. Adjust controls to be aware of operating modes -- When starting a background operation with, for example, a “Go” button, disable that “Go” button until the operation completes. Provide access keys for all menu items (per UXGuide). Provide shortcut keys for commonly used menu items (per UXGuide). Set up some (global or important or common) shortcut keys without associating to menu items. Allow some menu items to be invoked with or without modifier keys (shift, control, alt) where the modifier key is useful to vary the operation slightly. Hook up Escape and Enter on child forms to do what is reasonable. Decorate any library classes with documentation-comments and attributes -- this allows Visual Studio to leverage them for Intellisense and property descriptions. Spell check your code! What else would you include?

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• What are the advantages to use StringBuilder versus XmlDocument or related to create XML documetns?

  - by Rob

  This might be a bit of a code smell, but I have seen it is some production code, namely the use of StringBuilder as opposed to XmlDocument when creating XML documents. In some cases these are write once operations (e.g. create the document and save it to disk) where as others are passing the built string to an XmlDocument to preform an XslTransform to a document that is returned to the client. So obvious question: is there merit to doing things this way, is it something that should be done on a case-by-case basis, or is this the wrong way of doing things?

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• Should I create subclass NSManagedObject or not?

  - by TP

  Hi, I have spent a few days learning and writing NSCoding and finally got it working. However, it took very long to archive and unarchive the (quite complex) object graph, which is unacceptable. After searching the internet for some time, I think the better way is to use core data. Do you recommend that 1) I should rewrite all my classes as subclasses of NSManagedObject or 2) should I create an instance variable of NSManagedObject in each of my class so that any changes to the class also updates its core data representation? Doing either way will need significant changes to the exiting classes and I think I have to update lots of unit test cases as well if it changes the way the classes are initialized. What do you recommend? I really don't want to head to the wrong approach again... Thanks!

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• What should go in each MVVM triad?

  - by Harry

  OK, let's say I am creating a program that will list users contacts in a ListBox on the left side of the screen. When a user clicks on the contact, a bunch of messages or whatever appears in the main part of the window. Now my question is: how should the MVVM triads look? I have two models: Contact, and Message. The Contact model contains a list of Message models. Each ViewModel object will contain a single corresponding Model, right? And what about the Views? I have a "MainView" that is the main window, that will have things like the menu, toolbar etc. Do I put the ListBox in the MainView? My confusion is with what to put where; for example, what should the ContactView contain? Just a single instance of a contact? So the DataTemplate, ControlTemplate, context menus, styles etc for that single contact, and then just have a ListBox of them in the MainView...? Thanks.

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• Where to draw the line between efficiency and practicality

  - by dclowd9901

  I understand very well the need for websites' front ends to be coded and compressed as much as possible, however, I feel like I have more lax standards than others when it comes to practical applications. For instance, while I understand why some would, I don't see anything wrong with putting selectors in the <html> or <body> tags on a website with an expected small visitation rate. I would only do this for a cheap website for a small client, because I can't really justify the cost of time otherwise. So, that said, do you think it's okay to draw a line? Where do you draw yours?

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• HTTP POST with URL query parameters -- good idea or not?

  - by Steven Huwig

  I'm designing an API to go over HTTP and I am wondering if using the HTTP POST command, but with URL query parameters only and no request body, is a good way to go. Considerations: "Good Web design" requires non-idempotent actions to be sent via POST. This is a non-idempotent action. It is easier to develop and debug this app when the request parameters are present in the URL. The API is not intended for widespread use. It seems like making a POST request with no body will take a bit more work, e.g. a Content-Length: 0 header must be explicitly added. It also seems to me that a POST with no body is a bit counter to most developer's and HTTP frameworks' expectations. Are there any more pitfalls or advantages to sending parameters on a POST request via the URL query rather than the request body? Edit: The reason this is under consideration is that the operations are not idempotent and have side effects other than retrieval. See the HTTP spec: In particular, the convention has been established that the GET and HEAD methods SHOULD NOT have the significance of taking an action other than retrieval. These methods ought to be considered "safe". This allows user agents to represent other methods, such as POST, PUT and DELETE, in a special way, so that the user is made aware of the fact that a possibly unsafe action is being requested. ... Methods can also have the property of "idempotence" in that (aside from error or expiration issues) the side-effects of N 0 identical requests is the same as for a single request. The methods GET, HEAD, PUT and DELETE share this property. Also, the methods OPTIONS and TRACE SHOULD NOT have side effects, and so are inherently idempotent.

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• Best practice to modularise a large Grails app?

  - by Mulone

  Hi all, A Grails app I'm working on is becoming pretty big, and it would be good to refactor it into several modules, so that we don't have to redeploy the whole thing every time. In your opinion, what is the best practice to split a Grails app in several modules? In particular I'd like to create a package of domain classes + relevant services and use it in the app as a module. Is this possible? Is it possible to do it with plugins? Cheers, Mulone

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• Why is there so much poorly indented code out there?

  - by dsimcha

  The more I browse the code to open source projects in languages that aren't Python, the more I realize that it seems a lot of programmers don't believe in proper indentation. (I won't mention any projects specifically to avoid having anyone take this question too personally.) Usually code is indented, but in a way just different enough from the standard style that it drives me crazy, especially in old/crufty code. I've noticed that when I write in C-like languages, I tend to indent correctly as religiously as when I'm writing in Python, with the exception of debugging code that I actually want to stick out like a sore thumb. Given how easy it is with a modern IDE to fix incorrect indentation, what are some rationales for not religiously keeping indentation in sync with braces?

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• Preprocessor "macro function" vs. function pointer - best practice?

  - by Dustin

  I recently started a small personal project (RGB value to BGR value conversion program) in C, and I realised that a function that converts from RGB to BGR can not only perform the conversion but also the inversion. Obviously that means I don't really need two functions rgb2bgr and bgr2rgb. However, does it matter whether I use a function pointer instead of a macro? For example: int rgb2bgr (const int rgb); /* * Should I do this because it allows the compiler to issue * appropriate error messages using the proper function name, * not to mention possible debugging benefits? */ int (*bgr2rgb) (const int bgr) = rgb2bgr; /* * Or should I do this since it is merely a convenience * and they're really the same function anyway? */ #define bgr2rgb(bgr) (rgb2bgr (bgr)) I'm not necessarily looking for a change in execution efficiency as it's more of a subjective question out of curiosity. I am well aware of the fact that type safety is neither lost nor gained using either method. Would the function pointer merely be a convenience or are there more practical benefits to be gained of which I am unaware?

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• When should I write my own Look and Feel for Java Swing instead of customizing one?

  - by Jonas

  I have used a few different Look and Feels for Java Swing, but I don't really like anyone to 100% so I often end up with customizing it a lot. Sometimes I am thinking about if it is a better idea to write my own LaF (by extending an existing one), but I don't really know. For the moment, I mostly use Nimbus, but I change all colors (to darker ones) and rewrite the appearance of some components, like sliders and scrollbars. I also mostly customize all tables and I am thinking about to change the look of a few other components. When is it recommended to create a new Look-and-Feel instead of customizing one? What are the pros and cons? I.e. customize Nimbus or create a new one by extending Nimbus? Related article: Creating a Custom Look and Feel (old)

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• Are there any downsides in using C++ for network daemons?

  - by badcat

  Hey guys! I've been writing a number of network daemons in different languages over the past years, and now I'm about to start a new project which requires a new custom implementation of a properitary network protocol. The said protocol is pretty simple - some basic JSON formatted messages which are transmitted in some basic frame wrapping to have clients know that a message arrived completely and is ready to be parsed. The daemon will need to handle a number of connections (about 200 at the same time) and do some management of them and pass messages along, like in a chat room. In the past I've been using mostly C++ to write my daemons. Often with the Qt4 framework (the network parts, not the GUI parts!), because that's what I also used for the rest of the projects and it was simple to do and very portable. This usually worked just fine, and I didn't have much trouble. Being a Linux administrator for a good while now, I noticed that most of the network daemons in the wild are written in plain C (of course some are written in other languages, too, but I get the feeling that 80% of the daemons are written in plain C). Now I wonder why that is. Is this due to a pure historic UNIX background (like KISS) or for plain portability or reduction of bloat? What are the reasons to not use C++ or any "higher level" languages for things like daemons? Thanks in advance! Update 1: For me using C++ usually is more convenient because of the fact that I have objects which have getter and setter methods and such. Plain C's "context" objects can be a real pain at some point - especially when you are used to object oriented programming. Yes, I'm aware that C++ is a superset of C, and that C code is basically C++. But that's not the point. ;)

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• Reading ResultSet from multiple threads

  - by superdario

  Hello, In the database, I have a definition table that is read from the application once upon starting. This definition table rarely changes, so it makes sense to read it once and restart the application every time it changes. However, after the table is read (put into a ResultSet), it will be read by multiple handlers running in their own threads. How do you suggest to accomplish this? My idea was to populate a CachedRowSet, and then create a copy of this set (through the createCopy() method) for each handler every time a new request comes. Do you think this is wise? Does this offer a good performance? Thanks.

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• [MySQL] Efficiently store last X records per item

  - by Saif Bechan

  I want to store the last X records in an MySQL database in an efficient way. So when the 4th record is stored the first should be deleted. The way I do this not is first run a query getting the items. Than check what I should do then insert/delete. There has to be a better way to do this. Any suggestions? Edit I think I should add that the records stored do not have a unique number. They have a mixed par. For example article_id and user_id. Then I want to make a table with the last X items for user_x. Just selecting the article from the table grouped by user and sorted by time is not an option for me. The table where I do the sort and group on has millions of records and gets hit a lot for no reason. So making a table in between with the last X records is way more effient. PS. I am not using this for articles and users.

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• Constructor Overload Problem in C++ Inheritance

  - by metdos

  Here my code snippet: class Request { public: Request(void); ……….. } Request::Request(void) { qDebug()<<"Request: "<<"Hello World"; } class LoginRequest :public Request { public: LoginRequest(void); LoginRequest(QDomDocument); …………… } LoginRequest::LoginRequest(void) { qDebug()<<"LoginRequest: "<<"Hello World"; requestType=LOGIN; requestId=-1; } LoginRequest::LoginRequest(QDomDocument doc){ qDebug()<<"LoginRequest: "<<"Hello World with QDomDocument"; LoginRequest::LoginRequest(); xmlDoc_=doc; } When call constructor of Overrided LoginRequest LoginRequest *test=new LoginRequest(doc); I came up with this result: Request: Hello World LoginRequest: Hello World with QDomDocument Request: Hello World LoginRequest: Hello World Obviously both constructor of LoginRequest called REquest constructor. Is there any way to cape with this situation? I can construct another function that does the job I want to do and have both constructors call that function. But I wonder is there any solution?

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• C# Async call garbage collection

  - by Troy

  Hello. I am working on a Silverlight/WCF application and of course have numerous async calls throughout the Silverlight program. I was wondering on how is the best way to handle the creation of the client classes and subscribing. Specifically, if I subscribe to an event in a method, after it returns does it fall out of scope? internal MyClass { public void OnMyButtonClicked() { var wcfClient = new WcfClient(); wcfClient.SomeMethodFinished += OnMethodCompleted; wcfClient.SomeMethodAsync(); } private void OnMethodCompleted(object sender, EventArgs args) { //Do something with the result //After this method does the subscription to the event //fall out of scope for garbage collection? } } Will I run into problems if I call the function again and create another subscription? Thanks in advance to anyone who responds.

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• SQL Server error handling: exceptions and the database-client contract

  - by gbn

  We’re a team of SQL Servers database developers. Our clients are a mixed bag of C#/ASP.NET, C# and Java web services, Java/Unix services and some Excel. Our client developers only use stored procedures that we provide and we expect that (where sensible, of course) they treat them like web service methods. Some our client developers don’t like SQL exceptions. They understand them in their languages but they don’t appreciate that the SQL is limited in how we can communicate issues. I don’t just mean SQL errors, such as trying to insert “bob” into a int column. I also mean exceptions such as telling them that a reference value is wrong, or that data has already changed, or they can’t do this because his aggregate is not zero. They’d don’t really have any concrete alternatives: they’ve mentioned that we should output parameters, but we assume an exception means “processing stopped/rolled back. How do folks here handle the database-client contract? Either generally or where there is separation between the DB and client code monkeys. Edits: we use SQL Server 2005 TRY/CATCH exclusively we log all errors after the rollback to an exception table already we're concerned that some of our clients won't check output paramaters and assume everything is OK. We need errors flagged up for support to look at. everything is an exception... the clients are expected to do some message parsing to separate information vs errors. To separate our exceptions from DB engine and calling errors, they should use the error number (ours are all 50,000 of course)

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• how to share a variable between two threads

  - by prmatta

  I just inherited some code, two threads within this code need to perform a system task. One thread should do the system task before the other thread. They should not be performing the system task together. The two threads do not have references to each other. Now, I know I can use some sort of a semaphore to achieve this. But my question is what is the right way to get both threads to access this semaphore. I could create a static variable/method a new class : public class SharedSemaphore { private static Semaphore s = new Semaphore (1, true); public static void performSystemTask () { s.acquire(); } public static void donePerformingSystemTask() { s.release(); } } This would work (right?) but this doesn't seem like the right thing to do. Because, the threads now have access to a semaphore, without ever having a reference to it. This sort of thing doesn't seem like a good programming practice. Am I wrong?

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• When should we use Views, Temporary Tables and Direct Queries ? What are the Performance issues in a

  - by Shantanu Gupta

  I want to know the performance of using Views, Temp Tables and Direct Queries Usage in a Stored Procedure. I have a table that gets created every time when a trigger gets fired. I know this trigger will be fired very rare and only once at the time of setup. Now I have to use that created table from triggers at many places for fetching data and I confirms it that no one make any changes in that table. i.e ReadOnly Table. I have to use this tables data along with multiple tables to join and fetch result for further queries say select * from triggertable By Using temp table select ... into #tx from triggertable join t2 join t3 and so on select a,b, c from #tx --do something select d,e,f from #tx ---do somethign --and so on --around 6-7 queries in a row in a stored procedure. By Using Views create view viewname ( select ... from triggertable join t2 join t3 and so on ) select a,b, c from viewname --do something select d,e,f from viewname ---do somethign --and so on --around 6-7 queries in a row in a stored procedure. This View can be used in other places as well. So I will be creating at database rather than at sp By Using Direct Query select a,b, c from select ... into #tx from triggertable join t2 join t3 join ... --do something select a,b, c from select ... into #tx from triggertable join t2 join t3 join ... --do something . . --and so on --around 6-7 queries in a row in a stored procedure. Now I can create a view/temporary table/ directly query usage in all upcoming queries. What would be the best to use in this case.

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• What is the procedure for debugging a production-only error?

  - by Lord Torgamus

  Let me say upfront that I'm so ignorant on this topic that I don't even know whether this question has objective answers or not. If it ends up being "not," I'll delete or vote to close the post. Here's the scenario: I just wrote a little web service. It works on my machine. It works on my team lead's machine. It works, as far as I can tell, on every machine except for the production server. The exception that the production server spits out upon failure originates from a third-party JAR file, and is skimpy on information. I search the web for hours, but don't come up with anything useful. So what's the procedure for tracking down an issue that occurs only on production machines? Is there a standard methodology, or perhaps category/family of tools, for this? The error that inspired this question has already been fixed, but that was due more to good fortune than a solid approach to debugging. I'm asking this question for future reference. Some related questions: Test accounts and products in a production system Running test on Production Code/Server

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• What's the best way to write a maintainable web scraping app?

  - by Benj

  I wrote a perl script a while ago which logged into my online banking and emailed me my balance and a mini-statement every day. I found it very useful for keeping track of my finances. The only problem is that I wrote it just using perl and curl and it was quite complicated and hard to maintain. After a few instances of my bank changing their webpage I got fed up of debugging it to keep it up to date. So what's the best way of writing such a program in such a way that it's easy to maintain? I'd like to write a nice well engineered version in either Perl or Java which will be easy to update when the bank inevitably fiddle with their web site.

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• Structuring the UI code of a single-page EXTjs Web app using Rails?

  - by Daniel Beardsley

  I’m in the process of creating a large single-page web-app using ext-js for the UI components with Rails on the backend. I’ve come to good solutions for transferring data using Whorm gem and Rails support of RESTful Resources. What I haven’t come to a conclusion on is how to structure the UI and business logic aspects of the application. I’ve had a look at a few options, including Netzke but haven’t seen anything that I really think fits my needs. How should a web-application that uses ext-js components, layouts, and controls in the browser and Rails on the server best implement UI component re-use, good organization, and maintainability while maintaining a flexible layout design. Specifically I’m looking for best-practice suggestions for structuring the code that creates and configures UI components (many UI config options will be based on user data) Should EXT classes be extended in static JS for often re-used customizations and then instantiated with various configuration options by generated JS within html partials? Should partials create javascript blocks that instantiate EXT components? Should partials call helpers that return ruby hashes for EXT component config which is then dumped to Json? Something else entirely? There are many options and I'd love to hear from people who've been down this road and found some methodology that worked for them.

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• Using switch and enumerations as substitute for named methods

  - by MatthewMartin

  This pattern pops up a lot. It looks like a very verbose way to move what would otherwise be separate named methods into a single method and then distinguished by a parameter. Is there any good reason to have this pattern over just having two methods Method1() and Method2() ? The real kicker is that this pattern tends to be invoked only with constants at runtime-- i.e. the arguments are all known before compiling is done. public enum Commands { Method1, Method2 } public void ClientCode() { //Always invoked with constants! Never user input. RunCommands(Commands.Method1); RunCommands(Commands.Method2); } public void RunCommands(Commands currentCommand) { switch (currentCommand) { case Commands.Method1: // Stuff happens break; case Commands.Method2: // Other stuff happens break; default: throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("currentCommand"); } }

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• Loading data in rails migration?

  - by tesmar

  Hi everyone, I have a large database I need to populate with data before initially running the application. Is it best to do this in an external rake task or inside migrations? Sincerely, Tyler

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• Good code architecture for this problem?

  - by RCIX

  I am developing a space shooter game with customizable ships. You can increase the strength of any number of properties of the ship via a pair of radar charts*. Internally, i represent each ship as a subclassed SpaceObject class, which holds a ShipInfo that describes various properties of that ship. I want to develop a relatively simple API that lets me feed in a block of relative strengths (from minimum to maximum of what the radar chart allows) for all of the ship properties (some of which are simplifications of the underlying actual set of properties) and get back a ShipInfo class i can give to a PlayerShip class (that is the object that is instantiated to be a player ship). I can develop the code to do the transformations between simplified and actual properties myself, but i would like some recommendations as to what sort of architecture to provide to minimize the pain of interacting with this translator code (i.e. no methods with 5+ arguments or somesuch other nonsense). Does anyone have any ideas? *=not actually implemented yet, but that's the plan.

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• How do you refer to the currently logged user in your code?

  - by Emanuil

  In other words - what would be a good name for a variable that references the currently logged user? I've come up with a few: logged_user visitor me I'm not convinced either of them is good enough though.

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