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• Coding standards in programming?

  - by vicky

  I am an WordPress Plugin Developer. I am not sure how to follow the coding standard while creating a plugin of wordpress. I check with some of the plugins like woocommerce and All in one SEO Plugin in that they are maintaining the proper coding standard. Basically I am Using the NetBeans IDE. Is it possible to make the proper space and coding standards in that IDE. I am Wondering to View his code is very neat and clean. How can i do this or how they are maintaining this. Anyone suggest me to make the wordpress plugin with well coding standards. Thanks, vicky

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• How can I improve my error checking and handling?

  - by Google

  Lately I have been struggling to understand what the right amount of checking is and what the proper methods are. I have a few questions regarding this: What is the proper way to check for errors (bad input, bad states, etc)? Is it better to explicitly check for errors, or use functions like asserts which can be optimized out of your final code? I feel like explicitly checking clutters a program with a lot of extra code which shouldn't be executed in most situations anyway-- and not to mention most errors end up with an abort/exit failure. Why clutter a function with explicit checks just to abort? I have looked for asserts versus explicit checking of errors and found little to truly explain when to do either. Most say 'use asserts to check for logic errors and use explicit checks to check for other failures.' This doesn't seem to get us very far though. Would we say this is feasible: Malloc returning null, check explictly API user inserting odd input for functions, use asserts Would this make me any better at error checking? What else can I do? I really want to improve and write better, 'professional' code.

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• MVVM - child windows and data contexts

  - by GlenH7

  Should a child window have it's own data context (View-Model) or use the data context of the parent? More broadly, should each View have its own View-Model? Are there are any rules to guide making that decision? What if the various View-Models will be accessing the same Model? I haven't been able to find any consistent guidance on my question. The MS definition of MVVM appears to be silent on child windows. For one example, I have created a warning message notification View. It really didn't need a data context since it was passed the message to display. But if I needed to fancy it up a bit, I would have tapped the parent's data context. I have run into another scenario that needs a child window and is more complicated than the notification box. The parent's View-Model is already getting cluttered, so I had planned on generating a dedicated VM for the child window. But I can't find any guidance on whether this is a good idea or what the potential consequences may be. FWIW, I happen to be working in Silverlight, but I don't know that this question is strictly a Silverlight issue.

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• Java - learning / migrating fast

  - by Yippie-Kai-Yay

  Hello! This is not one of those questions like "How do I learn Java extremely fast, I know nothing about programming, but I heard Java is cool, yo". I have an interview for a Java Software Developer in a couple of weeks and the thing is that I think that I know C++ really good and I am somewhat good at C# (like, here I can probably answer on a lot of questions related to these languages), but I have almost zero experience with Java. I have a lot of projects written in both languages, I participiated in several open-source projects (mostly C++, though). Now, what should I do (in your opinion) to prepare myself for this Java interview. I guess migrating from C# to Java should be kind of fast, especially when you know a lot about programming in global, patterns, modern techniques and have a lot of practical experience behind you. But still two weeks is obviously not enough to get Java in-depth - so what should I focus on to have the best chances to pass the interview? Thank you.

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• What quality standards to consider for software development process?

  - by Ron-Damon

  Hi, i'm looking for metrics/standards/normatives to evaluate a given "Software Development Process". I'm NOT looking to evaluate the SOFTWARE itself (trough SQUARE and such), i'm trying to evaluate software development PROCESS. So, my question is if you could give me some pointers to find this standard, considering that "evaluation objetives" would be documentation quality, how good is the customer relation, how efective is the process, etc. Very much like a ISO 9000, and like CMMI on a sense, but much lightweight and concrete and process oriented, not company oriented. Please help, i'm trying to stablish the advantages of our development process as formal as i can.

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• When would I use pseudocode instead of flowchart?

  - by user1276078

  I'm a student working with various techniques of programming, and I've come across pseudocode and flowchart. I know that these are both used in order to think through the problem before actually programming, but I have a few questions with this. When would I use pseudocode to plan out and when would I use flowcharts? Or is it better to do both before actually programming. Particularly for a small arcade sort of game in JAVA since that is my next project. I've noticed that pseudocode is very similar to the actual code rather than flowcharts. Would this make pseudocoding better because you essentially copy/paste the pseudocode into your program (of course, you have to change it to fit the language. I understand that part). Is it practical to use both of these while programming? Particularly the same game mentioned earlier. Thanks.

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• What is the best way to do development with git?

  - by marlene

  I have been searching the web for best practices, but don't see anything that is consistent. If you have an excellent development process that includes successful releases of your product as well as hotfixes/patches and maintenance releases and you use git. I would love to hear how you use git to accomplish this. Do you use branches, tags, etc? How do you use them? I am looking for details, please.

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• What Technology can Render Medium Scale 3d Environments in a Web-Browser

  - by JakeM

  I intend to make a web application that displays 3d environments that can be navigated by dragging(with a finger or mouse depending on the platform). The web app will render 3d environments of development sites including contours, water pipeline locations, buildings etc. I am trying to decide what technology/libraries to use that will create a web-app that will work on Android-Web-Browser, iOS-Safari, IE9, Safari, Firefox and Chrome. And also what technology will provide speed in development. I understand that this is 'asking for my cake and eating it too'/'asking for the moon' but I don't know all the technologies out there - so there may be advanced libraries that can render 3d environments across many web-browsers including the main smart phone ones and I dont know of them. The 3d rendering would not be highly detailed buildings or water with effects, but rather simple 3d representations of these objects. The environment would be navigable by dragging around and you could view the landscape in layers(view only contour lines, view only underground pipelines, view only sewerage pipes, etc.). Are there any 3d libraries for web-browsers out there? Is there a way to run OpenGL(or OpenGL ES) through a webbrowser? What technology would you use if you were making this kind of app/web app that should work on desktop Windows, Android, iOS and WindowsPhone? Is there any technology I have failed to mention that would be good for this kind of project? I am tending towards a Browser Driven Web App because I get that cross platform ability(where it even works on linux and MacOS by using compatible web-browsers). Also I know of CSS3 transforms that can create cubes that can rotate in 3d space(NOTE only works for WebKit browsers - so no IE :( ). But I don't know if CSS3 is robust enough to render whole 3d environments? Do you think it could? Maybe I could use HTML5 canvas's for this? Can Google maps create custom 3d maps?

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• Generic log analyzer that produces reports

  - by Eugene

  About 600 customers use our application. We have very detailed logs for everything that happens in the application, from changes in the data model, memory and CPU/GPU usage to clicks on the UI elements. We want to be able to parse the logs coming from these customers and analyze them to understand how users use our application and what happens internally in the application. Is there a log analyzer that can produce such reports automatically?

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• How to TDD test that objects are being added to a collection if the collection is private?

  - by Joshua Harris

  Assume that I planned to write a class that worked something like this: public class GameCharacter { private Collection<CharacterEffect> _collection; public void Add(CharacterEffect e) { ... } public void Remove(CharacterEffect e) { ... } public void Contains(CharacterEffect e) { ... } } When added an effect does something to the character and is then added to the _collection. When it is removed the effect reverts the change to the character and is removed from the _collection. It's easy to test if the effect was applied to the character, but how do I test that the effect was added to _collection? What test could I write to start constructing this class. I could write a test where Contains would return true for a certain effect being in _collection, but I can't arrange a case where that function would return true because I haven't implemented the Add method that is needed to place things in _collection. Ok, so since Contains is dependent on having Add working, then why don't I try to create Add first. Well for my first test I need to try and figure out if the effect was added to the _collection. How would I do that? The only way to see if an effect is in _collection is with the Contains function. The only way that I could think to test this would be to use a FakeCollection that Mocks the Add, Remove, and Contains of a real collection, but I don't want _collection being affected by outside sources. I don't want to add a setEffects(Collection effects) function, because I do not want the class to have that functionality. The one thing that I am thinking could work is this: public class GameCharacter<C extends Collection> { private Collection<CharacterEffect> _collection; public GameCharacter() { _collection = new C<CharacterEffect>(); } } But, that is just silly making me declare what some private data structures type is on every declaration of the character. Is there a way for me to test this without breaking TDD principles while still allowing me to keep my collection private?

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• Does FFMpeg support gpu acceleration of media encoding/decoding?

  - by Jason123

  I was wondering if ffmpeg supported gpu acceleration. I was reading on their websites and came across contradicting information. http://www.ffmpeg.org/general.html#Video-Codecs -H.264 / AVC / MPEG-4 AVC / MPEG-4 part 10 (VDPAU acceleration) http://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/x264EncodingGuide -Will a graphics card make x264 encode faster? No. libx264 doesn't use them (at least not yet). There are some proprietary encoders that utilize the GPU, but that does not mean they are well optimized, though encoding time may be faster; and they might be worse than x264 anyway, and possibly slower. Regardless, FFmpeg today doesn't support any means of gpu encoding, outside of libx264. If not, is there any way to add gpu acceleration to h.264 encoding/decoding?

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• Should all new web projects build their backend based on xml/json result sets?

  - by Blankman

  If you were building a new Saas project, would it make sense to start with all of the backend services returning xml/json? Because these days you need to build for both the web and mobile devices, and having a backend that is build from the start to return xml and json, you are ready to go mobile (all services have the business logic, so you won't be repeating anything). Now the web would be MVC, so the controller would just be routing the request to your service backend, and converting the json or xml to html. The obviousl downside is that you have to build a backend, and then another web project that calls your backend. But this also goes to you favor as it forces you to seperate your concerns, and not leak business logic in your controller/view layer. Thoughts?

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• Simple method for reliably detecting code in text?

  - by Jeff Atwood

  GMail has this feature where it will warn you if you try to send an email that it thinks might have an attachment. Because GMail detected the string see the attached in the email, but no actual attachment, it warns me with an OK / Cancel dialog when I click the Send button. We have a related problem on Stack Overflow. That is, when a user enters a post like this one: my problem is I need to change the database but I don't won't to create a new connection. example: DataSet dsMasterInfo = new DataSet(); Database db = DatabaseFactory.CreateDatabase("ConnectionString"); DbCommand dbCommand = db.GetStoredProcCommand("uspGetMasterName"); This user did not format their code as code! That is, they didn't indent by 4 spaces per Markdown, or use the code button (or the keyboard shortcut ctrl+k) which does that for them. Thus, our system is accreting a lot of edits where people have to go in and manually format code for people that are somehow unable to figure this out. This leads to a lot of bellyaching. We've improved the editor help several times, but short of driving over to the user's house and pressing the correct buttons on their keyboard for them, we're at a loss to see what to do next. That's why we are considering a Google GMail style warning: Did you mean to post code? You wrote stuff that we think looks like code, but you didn't format it as code by indenting 4 spaces, using the toolbar code button or the ctrl+k code formatting command. However, presenting this warning requires us to detect the presence of what we think is unformatted code in a question. What is a simple, semi-reliable way of doing this? Per Markdown, code is always indented by 4 spaces or within backticks, so anything correctly formatted can be discarded from the check immediately. This is only a warning and it will only apply to low-reputation users asking their first questions (or providing their first answers), so some false positives are OK, so long as they are about 5% or less. Questions on Stack Overflow can be in any language, though we can realistically limit our check to, say, the "big ten" languages. Per the tags page that would be C#, Java, PHP, JavaScript, Objective-C, C, C++, Python, Ruby. Use the Stack Overflow creative commons data dump to audit your potential solution (or just pick a few questions in the top 10 tags on Stack Overflow) and see how it does. Pseudocode is fine, but we use c# if you want to be extra friendly. The simpler the better (so long as it works). KISS! If your solution requires us to attempt to compile posts in 10 different compilers, or an army of people to manually train a bayesian inference engine, that's ... not exactly what we had in mind.

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• Version control and personal configuration file

  - by Erel Segal Halevi

  Our project uses a user-specific configuration file. This file is currently not in version control, since it is different for each user. The problem is, whenever a developer adds a new module that requires configuration, or changes the name of an existing modules, the other developers get errors because their private configuration files are not updated. To solve the problem, we thought of working with two configuration files: a default/global configuration file that will be in version control and will be updated regularly by each developer that adds a new module, and a private configuration file that will be kept out of version control and will contain only the user-specific changes. However, this still seems like an ad-hoc solution. Can you propose a better solution? What do the professionals do?

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• C Problem with Compiler?

  - by Solomon081

  I just started learning C, and wrote my hello world program: #include <stdio.h> main() { printf("Hello World"); return 0; } When I run the code, I get a really long error: Apple Mach-O Linker (id) Error Ld /Users/Solomon/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/CProj-cwosspupvengheeaapmkrhxbxjvk/Build/Products/Debug/CProj normal x86_64 cd /Users/Solomon/Desktop/C/CProj setenv MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET 10.7 /Developer/usr/bin/clang -arch x86_64 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.7.sdk -L/Users/Solomon/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/CProj-cwosspupvengheeaapmkrhxbxjvk/Build/Products/Debug -F/Users/Solomon/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/CProj-cwosspupvengheeaapmkrhxbxjvk/Build/Products/Debug -filelist /Users/Solomon/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/CProj-cwosspupvengheeaapmkrhxbxjvk/Build/Intermediates/CProj.build/Debug/CProj.build/Objects-normal/x86_64/CProj.LinkFileList -mmacosx-version-min=10.7 -o /Users/Solomon/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/CProj-cwosspupvengheeaapmkrhxbxjvk/Build/Products/Debug/CProj ld: duplicate symbol _main in /Users/Solomon/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/CProj-cwosspupvengheeaapmkrhxbxjvk/Build/Intermediates/CProj.build/Debug/CProj.build/Objects-normal/x86_64/helloworld.o and /Users/Solomon/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/CProj-cwosspupvengheeaapmkrhxbxjvk/Build/Intermediates/CProj.build/Debug/CProj.build/Objects-normal/x86_64/main.o for architecture x86_64 Command /Developer/usr/bin/clang failed with exit code 1 I am running xCode Should I reinstall DevTools?

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• Working for free?

  - by Jonny

  I came across this article Work for Free that got me thinking. The goal of every employer is to gain more value from workers than the firm pays out in wages; otherwise, there is no growth, no advance, and no advantage for the employer. Conversely, the goal of every employee should be to contribute more to the firm than he or she receives in wages, and thereby provide a solid rationale for receiving raises and advancement in the firm. I don't need to tell you that the refusenik didn't last long in this job. In contrast, here is a story from last week. My phone rang. It was the employment division of a major university. The man on the phone was inquiring about the performance of a person who did some site work on Mises.org last year. I was able to tell him about a remarkable young man who swung into action during a crisis, and how he worked three 19-hour days, three days in a row, how he learned new software with diligence, how he kept his cool, how he navigated his way with grace and expertise amidst some 80 different third-party plug-ins and databases, how he saw his way around the inevitable problems, how he assumed responsibility for the results, and much more. What I didn't tell the interviewer was that this person did all this without asking for any payment. Did that fact influence my report on his performance? I'm not entirely sure, but the interviewer probably sensed in my voice my sense of awe toward what this person had done for the Mises Institute. The interviewer told me that he had written down 15 different questions to ask me but that I had answered them all already in the course of my monologue, and that he was thrilled to hear all these specifics. The person was offered the job. He had done a very wise thing; he had earned a devotee for life. The harder the economic times, the more employers need to know what they are getting when they hire someone. The job applications pour in by the buckets, all padded with degrees and made to look as impressive as possible. It's all just paper. What matters today is what a person can do for a firm. The resume becomes pro forma but not decisive under these conditions. But for a former boss or manager to rave about you to a potential employer? That's worth everything. What do you think? Has anyone here worked for free? If so, has it benefited you in any way? Why should(nt) you work for free (presuming you have the money from other means to keep you going)? Can you share your experience? Me, I am taking a year out of college and haven't gotten a degree yet so that's probably why most of my job applications are getting ignored. So im thinking about working for free for the experience?

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• Can a recursive function have iterations/loops?

  - by Omega

  I've been studying about recursive functions, and apparently, they're functions that call themselves, and don't use iterations/loops (otherwise it wouldn't be a recursive function). However, while surfing the web for examples (the 8-queens-recursive problem), I found this function: private boolean placeQueen(int rows, int queens, int n) { boolean result = false; if (row < n) { while ((queens[row] < n - 1) && !result) { queens[row]++; if (verify(row,queens,n)) { ok = placeQueen(row + 1,queens,n); } } if (!result) { queens[row] = -1; } }else{ result = true; } return result; } There is a while loop involved. ... so I'm a bit lost now. Can I use loops or not?

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• With a small development team, how do you organize second-level support?

  - by Lenny222

  Say, you have a team of 5 developers and your inhouse customers demand a reasonable support availability of say 5 days a week, 9am-6pm. I can imagine the following scenarios: the customers approach the same guy, every time. Downside: single point of failure, if the guy is unavailable. each developer is assigned one week of support duty. Downside: how to you distribute the work evenly in times of planned (vacation) and unplanned (sickness) unavailability? each developer is assigned one day of support duty. Downside: similar to above, but not as bad. a randomly picked developer handles the support request. Downside: maybe not fair, see above. What is your experience?

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• Future of WPF and free controls ? [closed]

  - by Justin

  I am willing to work on a personal project that I would like to release publicly. I am working with Silverlight and have experience with XAML, as it is my full-time job. It is enjoyably for me to create UIs in Blend and XAML. I am also a big fan of C# language. I don't know what I would do without LINQ now. Anyways, I was looking at using WPF for my personal project. It seems that a lot of the controls out on the web are pay for items. The only place I have found to have a significant number of free controls is the WPF extended framework on codeplex. I want to make a financial application and need a powerful datagrid type of control that will allow me to enter transaction data. I haven't found such control for free in the net. It doesn't seem like there is much free community libraries/controls out there for Microsoft products. So, I was wondering if WPF would be the right way for me to go. I couldn't find any information on WPF usage in Windows 8, which coming very soon. I don't know Microsoft's plans for this technology. Would it be a better idea to use something different for the UI instead of WPF?

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• What source code organization approach helps improve modularity and API/Implementation separation?

  - by Berin Loritsch

  Few languages are as restrictive as Java with file naming standards and project structure. In that language, the file name must match the public class declared in the file, and the file must live in a directory structure matching the class package. I have mixed feelings about that approach. While I never have to guess where a file lives, there's still a lot of empty directories and artificial constraints. There's several languages that define everything about a class in one file, at least by convention. C#, Python (I think), Ruby, Erlang, etc. The commonality in most these languages is that they are object oriented, although that statement can probably be rebuffed (there is one non-OO language in the list already). Finally, there's quite a few languages mostly in the C family that have a separate header and implementation file. For C I think this makes sense, because it is one of the few ways to separate the API interface from implementations. With C it seems that feature is used to promote modularity. Yet, with C++ the way header and implementation files are split seems rather forced. You don't get the same clean API separation that you do with C, and you are forced to include some private details in the header you would rather keep only in the implementation. There's quite a few languages that have a concept that overlaps with interfaces like Java, C#, Go, etc. Some languages use what feels like a hack to provide the same concept like C# using pure virtual abstract classes. Still others don't really have an interface concept and rely on "duck" typing--for example Ruby. Ruby has modules, but those are more along the lines of mixing in behaviors to a class than they are for defining how to interact with a class. In OO terms, interfaces are a powerful way to provide separation between an API client and an API implementation. So to hurry up and ask the question, from a personal experience point of view: Does separation of header and implementation help you write more modular code, or does it get in the way? (it helps to specify the language you are referring to) Does the strict file name to class name scheme of Java help maintainability, or is it unnecessary structure for structure's sake? What would you propose to promote good API/Implementation separation and project maintenance, how would you prefer to do it?

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• Determining Cost of API Calls

  - by Sam

  [This is a cross-post originally posted by me in SO. I think the question is more appropriate here.] I was going through the adwords API and came across their rate sheet - http://code.google.com/apis/adwords/docs/ratesheet.html . They charge $0.25 per 1000 API units and under the 'Operation Costs' sections list the cost (in API units) of different API calls. I am curious - based on what factors do they (and others API developers) calculate the cost of an API call? Is there any simple formula or a standard way to determine this? Note: When I say 'cost' of an API call, I don't mean the money but the API units. For example, how do you determine one API call costs 100 'units' and another 1000?

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• Basic web architecture : Perl -> PHP

  - by Sunny Jim

  This is an architecture question. If there is a better forum, please redirect me. Apologies in advance. Essentially every website is built around a relational database, right? When a user uploads form data, that data is stored in a table. The problem is that the table structure(s) need to be modified whenever the website form is modified. Although I understand that modern web frameworks work around this problem by automatically building forms based on the table structure. For the last 20 years, I have been building websites using Perl. When I first encountered this problem, the easiest solution was to save serialized Perl objects as data BLOBS. After XML's introduction, this solution worked even better because XML is so effective for representing arbitrary data. This approach is consistent with the original Perl principles of Hubris, Laziness, and Impatience and I'm pretty committed to it. Obviously, the biggest drawback is that this solution locks me into the Perl interpreter. So instead, I've just completed a prototype of a universal RDB table. The prototype is written in Perl but porting it to PHP will be a good chance to develop those skills. The principal is based on the XML::Dumper module, which converts arbitrary Perl data structures into uniform XML. With my approach, each XML node is stored as a table record. I underestimated this undertaking and rolled something up myself. But the effort allows me to discuss the basic design instead of implementation details. As mentioned, I'm pretty committed to this approach of using flexible data structures. It's been successfully deployed on many websites, large, and complex. But are there any drawbacks I've overlooked? I rolled my own. Are other people taking a similar approach to their data? What kinds of solutions are available? I have not abandoned my dream of eventually contributing something useful to the worldwide community. In order to proceed, the next step would be peer review. How does one pursue that effort? Thanks! -Jim

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• Valid concerns over shared developer team

  - by alphadogg

  Say your company is committed (and don't want to consider not doing this) to sharing/pooling a development team across a handful of business units. What would you setup as concerns/expectations that must be cleared before doing this? For example: Need agreement between units on how much actual time (FTE) is allocated to each unit Need agreement on scheduling of staff need agreement on request procedure if extra time is required by one party etc... Have you been in a situation like this as a manager of one unit destined to use this? If so, what were problems you experienced? What would you have or did implement? Same if you were the manager of the shared team. Please assume, for discussion, that the people concerned know that you can swap devs in and out on a whim. I don't want to know the disadvantages of this approach; I know them. I want to anticipate issues and know how to mitigate the fallout.

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• Is it possible to make a MS-SQL Scalar function do this?

  - by Hokken

  I have a 3rd party application that can call a MS-SQL scalar function to return some summary information from a table. I was able to return the summary values with a table-valued function, but the application won't utilize table-valued functions, so I'm kind of stuck. Here's a sample from the table: trackingNumber, projTaskAward, expenditureType, amount 1122, 12345-67-89, Supplies, 100 1122, 12345-67-89, Supplies, 150 1122, 12345-67-89, Supplies, 250 1122, 12345-67-89, Misc, 50 1122, 12345-67-89, Misc, 100 1122, 98765-43-21, General, 200 1122, 98765-43-21, Conference, 500 1122, 98765-43-21, Misc, 300 1122, 98765-43-21, Misc, 100 1122, 98765-43-21, Misc, 100 I want to summarize the amounts by projTaskAward & expenditureType, based on the trackingNumber. Here is the output I'm looking for: Proj/Task/Award: 12345-67-89 Expenditure Type: Supplies Total: 500 Proj/Task/Award: 12345-67-89 Expenditure Type: Misc Total: 150 Proj/Task/Award: 98765-43-21 Expenditure Type: General Total: 200 Proj/Task/Award: 98765-43-21 Expenditure Type: Conference Total: 500 Proj/Task/Award: 98765-43-21 Expenditure Type: Misc Total: 500 I'd appreciate any help anyone can give in steering me in the right direction.

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• When does "proper" programming no longer matter?

  - by Kai Qing

  I've been a full time programmer for about 8 years now. Web based mostly, ranging in weird jobs for clients. Never anything I "want" to do. So my experience is limited to what I've been contracted to do, having no real incentive to master anything in particular. So here's my scenario and ultimately what I wonder about... I've been building an android game in my spare time. It's using the libgdx library so quite a bit of the heavy lifting is done for me. I don't read much of the docs cause unless it's in tutorial format I will just not care, and ultimately most of my questions have already been asked on stackoverflow. I get along fine and my game works as expected... Suspiciously well, even. So much so that I wonder why one should bother to be "proper" when coding if the end result is ultimately the same. To be more specific, I used a hashtable because I wanted something close to an associative array. Human readable key values. In other places to achieve similar things, I use a vector. I know libgdx has vector2 and vector3 classes, but I've never used them. When I come across weird problems and search stackoverflow for help, I see a lot of people just reaming the questions that use a certain datatype when another one is technically "proper." Like using an ArrayList because it does not require defined bounds versus re-defining an int[] with new known boundaries. Or even something trivial like this: for(int i = 0; i < items.length; i ++) { // do something } I know it evaluates item.length on every iteration. I just don't care. I know items will never be more than 15 to 20 items. So why bother caring if I evaluate items.length on every iteration? So I wonder - why does everyone get all up in arms over this? Who cares if I use a less efficient datatype to get the job done? I ran some tests to see how the app performs using the lazy, get it done fast and don't look back method I just described versus the proper, follow the tutorial and use the exact data types suggested by the community. The results: Same thing. Average 45 fps. I opened every app on the phone and galaxy tab. Same deal. No difference. My game is pretty graphic intensive. It's not like it's just a simple thing. I expected it to perform kind of badly since I don't care to optimize image assets or... well, you probably get the idea. I'm making the game for fun. As a joke, really. But in doing so I'm working outside the normal scope of my job, which is to always follow the rules and do it the right way. So to say, I am without bounds here and this has caused me to wonder why I ever really care to be "proper" So I guess my question to you is this: Is there a threshold when it no longer matters to be proper? Is there a lasting, longer term consequence to the lazy, get it done and don't look back route? Is it ok to say - "so long as it gets the job done, I don't care?" Disclaimer: When I program my game, I am almost always drunk. I do it to remember why I got into this stuff to begin with because the monotony of client based web work will make you hate being a programmer. I'm having a blast and my game is not crashing, tests well, performs well, looks good on all devices so far and has no noticeable negative impact on any of my testing devices. I expected failure because I was being so drunkenly careless with my code, but to my surprise, it had no noticeable impact. I am now starting to question the need to be careful. Help me regain the ability to care! ... or explain why it's not a bad thing to not care. Secondary disclaimer: I am aware of the benefits of maintainability. For myself and others. Agreed. But it's not like someone happening across my inefficient int[] loop won't know what it does. As an experienced programmer those kinds of things are just clear on sight. I document the complex stuff for myself knowing I was drunk and will probably need a reminder. Those notes would clarify any confusion for someone who might ever gaze upon my ridiculous game - though the reality is that either I maintain it myself or it fades into time. I'm ok with that. But if it doesn't slow the device down, or crash, then crossing the t's and dotting the i's might actually require more time than it's worth.

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