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• Build one to throw away vs Second-system effect

  - by m3th0dman

  One one hand there is an advice that says "Build one to throw away". Only after finishing a software system and seeing the end product we realize what went wrong in the design phase and understand how we should have really done it. On the other hand there is the "second-system effect" which says that the second system of the same kind that is designed is usually worse than the first one; there are many features that did not fit in the first project and were pushed into the second version usually leading to overly complex and overly engineered. Isn't here some contradiction between these principles? What is the correct view over the problems and where is the border between these two? I believe that these "good practices" are were firstly promoted in the seminal book The Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks. I know that some of these issues are solved by Agile methodologies, but deep down, the problem is still the principles still stand; for example we would not make important design changes 3 sprints before going live.

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• Visual Basic link to SQL output to Word

  - by CLO_471

  I am in need of some advice/references. I am currently trying to develop a legal document interface. There are certain fields in which I need to query out of my sql db and have those fields output into a document that can be printed. I am trying to develop a user interface where people can enter fields that will output to a document template but at the same time I need the template to be able to pull data from the SQL database. This is the reason why I think that VB might be my best choice and because it is one of the only OOP languages I am familiar with presently. Does anyone know that best way to be able to handle this type of job?? I know that you can use VBA within MS Word and have the form output variables to a word template. But, is there a way to have the word document also pull information from the SQL db? Is the best option to use VB linked to SQL and run queries to get the information from the database and then have it output to a for within VB? Is it possible for VB to be linked to a SQL db and output variables and SQL fields to a Word Template? I have looked into Mail Merge and I see that it allows users to pull data from an Access query but I dont think it would be easy to automate and it seems that users would need to have an advanced knowledge of MS Word and Access to handle this. I am not finding much useful information online so I came here. Any advice or references would be greatly appreciated. If there is a better way please let me know.

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• Difference between jquery.clone() and simple concatenation of string [closed]

  - by Francis Cebu

  Which of the following code samples is faster in generating HTML code using jQuery? Sample 1: var div = $("<div>"); $.each(data,function(count,item){ var Elem = div.clone().addClass("message").html(item.Firstname); $(".container").append(Elem); }); Sample 2: $.each(data,function(count,item){ var Elem = "<div class = 'Elem'>" + item.Firstname + "</div>"; $(".container").append(Elem); });

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• Is there a language or design pattern that allows the *removal* of object behavior or properties in a class hierarchy?

  - by Sebastien Diot

  A well-know shortcoming of traditional class hierarchies is that they are bad when it comes to model the real world. As an example, trying to represent animals species with classes. There are actually several problems when doing that, but one that I never saw a solution to is when a sub-class "looses" a behavior or properties that was defined in a super-class, like a penguin not being able to fly (there are probably better examples, but that's the first one that comes to my mind, having seen "Madagascar 2" recently). On the one hand, you don't want to define for every property and behavior some flag that specifies if it is at all present, and check it every time before accessing that behavior or property. You would just like to say that birds can fly, simply and clearly, in the Bird class. But then it would be nice if one could define "exceptions" afterward, without having to use some horrible hacks everywhere. This often happens when a system has been productive for a while. You suddenly find an "exception" that doesn't fit in the original design at all, and you don't want to change a large portion of your code to accommodate it. So, is there some language or design patterns that can cleanly handle this problem, without requiring major changes to the "super-class", and all the code that uses it? Even if a solution only handle a specific case, several solutions might together form a complete strategy. [EDIT] Forgot about the Liskov Substitution Principle. That is why you can't do it. Assuming you define "traits/interfaces" for all major "feature groups", you can freely implement traits in different branches of the hierarchy, like the Flying trait could be implemented by Birds, and some special kind of squirrels and fish. So my question could amount to "How could I un-implement a trait?" If your super-class is a Java Serializable, you have to be one too, even if there is no way for you to serialize your state, for example if you contained a "Socket". So one way to do it is to always define all your traits in pair from the start: Flying and NotFlying (which would throw UnsupportedOperationExceiption, if not checked against). The Not-trait would not define any new interface, and could be simply checked for. Sounds like a "cheap" solution, in particular if used from the start.

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• Why do I have to choose between "management" and "technical" tracks in my career?

  - by Stephen Gross

  I was recently laid off, and although I found a new gig I'm a bit frustrated with how career tracks work in the land of software development. I really love doing a bit of everything: coding, testing, architect(ing), leadership/management, customer contact, requirements gathering, staff development, etc. Software companies, however, want me to fit into a niche: I'm either a coder, a tester, or a manager. When I try to explain to them that I'm best when I'm doing all of those at once, they seem very confused. I'm sympathetic to their interests, but at the same time frustrated that the industry works this way. Any advice? Do I just need to get with the program, so to speak?

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• Rights and use of developed software

  - by Nils Munch

  I have been working on a piece of software for a company, that they wish to resell. There was an mail-based agreement upon a flat hourly rate for my work, and eager me chose to accept a rather low fee. Due to the stress and tempo of the task, a direct contract was never formed or signed. The software was developed locally on my machine, and I was pretty much alone with it, except by excellent help from StackOverflow when I got stuck. Now, the software is nearing completion, I suddenly hear that they have hired a new developer to make the same piece of software as me, and that I was expected to resign within long. Confused I ask around, and realize that the CEO of the company had informed the rest of the company that I was terminally ill and had cancer, and was expected to leave the company soon. Since I'm perfectly healthy, this confused me even more, until I realized what was going on. When I confronted my boss with this, I was no longer seen as a member of the company, and I left the same day, never to return. Later, I raised the question about my missing pay, since I had been working for quite a bit, and not received any payment for my software. I saw that they had already sold a fair copy of my software, and since it's not exactly sold cheap, the company should have plenty of gold to pay me. The company refused, and said that they owned the software, and everything it contained. That was a lot of drama, but my question is this: Who has the rights to the software ? The source code had my personal watermarks and copyrights inprinted, but they have since simply deleted it. The company claim that they have all the rights, because they have a website made about the product, where they write that they have "All rights reserved" in the bottom. My instinct tells me that if a company buys a service like this, and then refuses to pay their developer, then they should not be allowed to keep, and much less resell the product. I have not signed any agreements about giving the company the use of this product, I have made it in my own time and without help from the rest of the company. This all takes place in Denmark, Europe, but I would guess that the rules about this is somewhat universal. Im not the strongest person to legal-talk, so I might be wrong.

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• Difference between "Data Binding'","Data Hiding","Data Wraping" and "Encapsulation"?

  - by krishna Chandra

  I have been studying the conpects of Object oriented programming. Still I am not able to distinguish between the following concepts of object oriented programming.. a) Data Binding b) Data Hiding c) Data Wrapping d) encapsulation e) Data Abstraction I have gone through a lot of books ,and I also search the difference in google. but still I am not able to make the difference between these? Could anyone please help me ?

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• Junior software developer - How to understand web aplications in depth?

  - by nat_gr

  I am currently a junior developer in web applications and specifically in asp.net mvc technology. My problem is that the c# senior developer in the company has no experience with this technology and I try to learn without any guidance. I went through all tutorials (e.g music store), codeplex projects and also read pro asp.net mvc 4. However, most of the examples are about crud and e-commerce applications. What I don't understand is how dependency injection fits in web applications (I have realized that is not only used for facilitating unit testing) or when i should use a custom model binder or how to model the business logic when there is already a database schema in place. I read the forum quite often and it would very helpful if some experienced developers could give me an insight about how to proceed. Do I need to read some books to understand the overall idea behind web applications? And what kind of application should I start building myself - I don't think it would be useful to create similar examples with the tutorials.

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• What is history and concept of code annotation?

  - by Eonil

  C# and Java has code attribute and code annotation. I don't know about other languages, but I know the code annotation feature is used to expand language itself. I knew what it is, but I want to know how it developed over time. I want to know its history. How it demanded and how it implemented. Is this possible to implement this in kind of concept on LISP, Smalltalk or C++? And is there a general term to call the concept of annotation?

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• Is it useful to unit test methods where the only logic is guards?

  - by Vaccano

  Say I have a method like this: public void OrderNewWidget(Widget widget) { if ((widget.PartNumber > 0) && (widget.PartAvailable)) { WigdetOrderingService.OrderNewWidgetAsync(widget.PartNumber); } } I have several such methods in my code (the front half to an async Web Service call). I am debating if it is useful to get them covered with unit tests. Yes there is logic here, but it is only guard logic. (Meaning I make sure I have the stuff I need before I allow the web service call to happen.) Part of me says "sure you can unit test them, but it is not worth the time" (I am on a project that is already behind schedule). But the other side of me says, if you don't unit test them, and someone changes the Guards, then there could be problems. But the first part of me says back, if someone changes the guards, then you are just making more work for them (because now they have to change the guards and the unit tests for the guards). For example, if my service assumes responsibility to check for Widget availability then I may not want that guard any more. If it is under unit test, I have to change two places now. I see pros and cons in both ways. So I thought I would ask what others have done.

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• How is dependency inversion related to higher order functions?

  - by Gulshan

  Today I've just seen this article which described the relevance of SOLID principle in F# development- F# and Design principles – SOLID And while addressing the last one - "Dependency inversion principle", the author said: From a functional point of view, these containers and injection concepts can be solved with a simple higher order function, or hole-in-the-middle type pattern which are built right into the language. But he didn't explain it further. So, my question is, how is the dependency inversion related to higher order functions?

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• Is it a bug or a task when something doesn't work, yet, in development process

  - by Patkos Csaba

  We usually have this dilemma in our team. Sometimes, in order to implement a task or a story we find out that the system must be in a specific state. For example, a specific system configuration has to be made beforehand. The task / story can be completed and it is working as specified on it with the proper configuration in place. Note that the configuration is not directly related with the task. Next, we have to create a new ... ??? ... something for the process of generating that configuration file. This is where the problems appear. Some say that it is a bug others say it is a task or an extra feature. So, where is the limit between bugs and tasks in the development phase? Should we even consider something a bug if all the tasks are working as stated in their definitions? Can a thing be considered a bug because one compares it to the current (unstable) state of the system? Short example: A feature requires configuring a communication service for a specific operation. In the process of the implementation the team discovers that the service requires the hostnames of the pears to be resolvable to an IP address. The team adds the hostnames to the DNS server (or hosts files) and continues implementing the required feature. After the initial feature is working, a question is risen. Should the sysadmin configure the DNS or hosts file or should our application do it automatically? An automatic solution is possible. So a decision is made to implement it. ... here start the discussions ... is this a bug or an extra feature / task? PS: I know that I mixed feature / task / story in the question. It is intentional. I am interested in separating bugs from the rest. Doesn't matter what the rest means in a particular case.

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• Good resources and tools for modern, heavy JavaScript development?

  - by Matt Greer

  I am interested in doing some projects that involve heavy use of JavaScript. Namely HTML5 based canvas games, potentially using node.js as well. I am interested in learning modern best practices, tools and resources for JavaScript. JavaScript is tough to research because you end up wading through a lot of really outdated material, hailing from the times that "JavaScript" was a four letter word. If you are heavily involved in JavaScript programming... What text editor or IDE do you use? What unit testing framework do you use? Do you use Selenium, or something else? What other tools do you use? What communities exist that discuss recent advents in JavaScript? What books do you read/refer to? What blogs do you read?

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• Is Morton Code algorithm patented?

  - by Statement

  Synonyms: Morton Code, Morton Curve, Z-Order Curve, invented 1966 by G. M. Morton according to wiki. Not to be confused with Hilbert Curves which is closely related and have similar name. I was wondering if mentioned algorithm is patented. More generally, is there any place one can browse patented algorithms? I am quite new to all this legal stuff and I am keen to know more. The real question I have, I guess, is: Can I make money off a library that provides Morton Coding, legally?

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• What tools exist for assessing an organisation's development capability?

  - by Eric Smith

  I have a bit of a challenge at work at the moment. Presently (and in fact, for some time now), we have been experiencing the following problems with some in-house maintained applications: Defects (sometimes quite serious) being released into production; The Customer (that is, the relevant business unit) perpetually changing their minds (or appearing to do so) about what issue to work on next; A situation where everyone seems to be in a "fire-fighting" mode a lot of the time; Development staff responding to operational requests from business users; ("operational" here means something that needs to be done in order to continue with business, or perhaps just to make a business user's life a little less painful, as opposed to fixing a bug in the application, or enhancing the application); Now I'm sure this doesn't sound particularly new or surprising to most of the participants on this Q&A site and no prizes for identifying the "usual suspects" when it comes to root causes. My challenge is that I have to persuade the higher-ups to do uncomfortable things in order to address all of this. The folk I need to persuade come from a mixture of the following two cultures: Accounting; IT Infrastructure. I have therefore opted for a strategy that draws from things with-which folk from such a culture would be most comfortable (at least, in my estimation), namely: numbers and tangibles. Of course modern development practitioners know all too well that this sort of thing isn't easily solved using an analytical mindset (some would argue that that mindset is, in fact, entirely inappropriate). Never-the-less, this is the dichotomy with-which I am faced, so that's the stake that I've put in the ground. I would like to be able to do research and use the outputs to present findings in the form of metrics and measures. I am finding it quite difficult, though, to find an agreed-upon methodology and set of templates for assessing an organisations development capability--the only thing that seems applicable is the Software Engineering Institute's Capability Maturity Model. The latter, however, seems dated and even then rather vague. So, the question is: Do any tools or methodologies (free or commercial) exist that would assist me in completing this assessment?

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• What if(event) statement means in JavaScript?

  - by j flo

  I'm rather new to JavaScript and programming in general so I am pretty much only used to seeing if statements that have some kind of comparison operator like, if (x < 10) or if(myBool). I have seen an if statement checking against an event, but I don't understand what or why the event is being checked like that. What's the semantic meaning behind that check or comparison? Here is the code in question: if(event){ event.preventDefault(); }

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• Odd company release cycle: Go Distributed Source Control?

  - by MrLane

  sorry about this long post, but I think it is worth it! I have just started with a small .NET shop that operates quite a bit differently to other places that I have worked. Unlike any of my previous positions, the software written here is targetted at multiple customers and not every customer gets the latest release of the software at the same time. As such, there is no "current production version." When a customer does get an update, they also get all of the features added to he software since their last update, which could be a long time ago. The software is highly configurable and features can be turned on and off: so called "feature toggles." Release cycles are very tight here, in fact they are not on a shedule: when a feature is complete the software is deployed to the relevant customer. The team only last year moved from Visual Source Safe to Team Foundation Server. The problem is they still use TFS as if it were VSS and enforce Checkout locks on a single code branch. Whenever a bug fix gets put out into the field (even for a single customer) they simply build whatever is in TFS, test the bug was fixed and deploy to the customer! (Myself coming from a pharma and medical devices software background this is unbeliveable!). The result is that half baked dev code gets put into production without being even tested. Bugs are always slipping into release builds, but often a customer who just got a build will not see these bugs if they don't use the feature the bug is in. The director knows this is a problem as the company is starting to grow all of a sudden with some big clients coming on board and more smaller ones. I have been asked to look at source control options in order to eliminate deploying of buggy or unfinished code but to not sacrifice the somewhat asyncronous nature of the teams releases. I have used VSS, TFS, SVN and Bazaar in my career, but TFS is where most of my experience has been. Previously most teams I have worked with use a two or three branch solution of Dev-Test-Prod, where for a month developers work directly in Dev and then changes are merged to Test then Prod, or promoted "when its done" rather than on a fixed cycle. Automated builds were used, using either Cruise Control or Team Build. In my previous job Bazaar was used sitting on top of SVN: devs worked in their own small feature branches then pushed their changes to SVN (which was tied into TeamCity). This was nice in that it was easy to isolate changes and share them with other peoples branches. With both of these models there was a central dev and prod (and sometimes test) branch through which code was pushed (and labels were used to mark builds in prod from which releases were made...and these were made into branches for bug fixes to releases and merged back to dev). This doesn't really suit the way of working here, however: there is no order to when various features will be released, they get pushed when they are complete. With this requirement the "continuous integration" approach as I see it breaks down. To get a new feature out with continuous integration it has to be pushed via dev-test-prod and that will capture any unfinished work in dev. I am thinking that to overcome this we should go down a heavily feature branched model with NO dev-test-prod branches, rather the source should exist as a series of feature branches which when development work is complete are locked, tested, fixed, locked, tested and then released. Other feature branches can grab changes from other branches when they need/want, so eventually all changes get absorbed into everyone elses. This fits very much down a pure Bazaar model from what I experienced at my last job. As flexible as this sounds it just seems odd to not have a dev trunk or prod branch somewhere, and I am worried about branches forking never to re-integrate, or small late changes made that never get pulled across to other branches and developers complaining about merge disasters... What are peoples thoughts on this? A second final question: I am somewhat confused about the exact definition of distributed source control: some people seem to suggest it is about just not having a central repository like TFS or SVN, some say it is about being disconnected (SVN is 90% disconnected and TFS has a perfectly functional offline mode) and others say it is about Feature Branching and ease of merging between branches with no parent-child relationship (TFS also has baseless merging!). Perhaps this is a second question!

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• Acceptance tests done first...how can this be accomplished?

  - by Crazy Eddie

  The basic gist of most Agile methods is that a feature is not "done" until it's been developed, tested, and in many cases released. This is supposed to happen in quick turnaround chunks of time such as "Sprints" in the Scrum process. A common part of Agile is also TDD, which states that tests are done first. My team works on a GUI program that does a lot of specific drawing and such. In order to provide tests, the testing team needs to be able to work with something that at least attempts to perform the things they are trying to test. We've found no way around this problem. I can very much see where they are coming from because if I was trying to write software that targeted some basically mysterious interface I'd have a very hard time. Although we have behavior fairly well specified, the exact process of interacting with various UI elements when it comes to automation seems to be too unique to a feature to allow testers to write automated scripts to drive something that does not exist. Even if we could, a lot of things end up turning up later as having been missing from the specification. One thing we considered doing was having the testers write test "scripts" that are more like a set of steps that must be performed, as described from a use-case perspective, so that they can be "automated" by a human being. This can then be performed by the developer(s) writing the feature and/or verified by someone else. When the testers later get an opportunity they automate the "script" for regression purposes mainly. This didn't end up catching on in the team though. The testing part of the team is actually falling behind us by quite a margin. This is one reason why the apparently extra time of developing a "script" for a human being to perform just did not happen....they're under a crunch to keep up with us developers. If we waited for them, we'd get nothing done. It's not their fault really, they're a bottle neck but they're doing what they should be and working as fast as possible. The process itself seems to be set up against them. Very often we end up having to go back a month or more in what we've done to fix bugs that the testers have finally gotten to checking. It's an ugly truth that I'd like to do something about. So what do other teams do to solve this fail cascade? How can we get testers ahead of us and how can we make it so that there's actually time for them to write tests for the features we do in a sprint without making us sit and twiddle our thumbs in the meantime? As it's currently going, in order to get a feature "done", using agile definitions, would be to have developers work for 1 week, then testers work the second week, and developers hopefully being able to fix all the bugs they come up with in the last couple days. That's just not going to happen, even if I agreed it was a reasonable solution. I need better ideas...

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• C#/.net features to cut off assuming no backward compatibility needed?

  - by Gulshan

  Any product or framework evolves. Mainly it's done to catch up the needs of it's users, leverage new computing powers and simply make it better. Sometimes the primary design goal also changes with the product. C# or .net framework is no exception. As we see, the present day 4th version is very much different comparing with the first one. But thing comes as a barricade to this evolution- backward compatibility. In most of frameworks/products there are features would have been cut off if there was no need to support backward compatibility. According to you, what are these features in C#/.net? Please mention one feature per answer.

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• Applications affected by memory performance

  - by robotron

  I'm writing a paper on the topic of applications affected more by memory performance than processor performance. I've got a lot written regarding the gap between the two, however I can't seem to find anything about the applications that might be affected more by memory performance than by processor speed. I suppose these are applications that make a large amount of memory references, but I have no idea what kind of applications would make such large number of references to make it stand out? Perhaps databases? Can you please give me any pointers on how to proceed, some links to papers? I'm really stuck.

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• Performing user authentication in a CodeIgniter controller constructor?

  - by msanford

  In "The Clean Code Talks -- Unit Testing" (http://youtu.be/wEhu57pih5w), Miško Hevery mentions that "as little work as possible should be done in constructors [to make classes more easily testable]'. It got me thinking about the way I have implemented my user authentication mechanism. Having delved into MVC development through CodeIgniter, I designed my first web application to perform user authentication for protected resources in controllers' constructors in cases where every public function in that controller requires the user to be authenticated. For controllers with public methods having mixed authentication requirements, I would naturally move the authentication from the constructor to each method requiring authentication (though I don't currently have a need for this). I made this choice primarily to keep the controller tight, and to ensure that all resources in the controller are always covered. As for code longevity and maintainability: given the application structure, I can't foresee a situation in which one of the affected controllers would need a public method that didn't require user authentication, but I can see this as a potential drawback in general with this implementation (i.e., requiring future refactoring). Is this a good idea?

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• Is it worth to learn programming for windows?

  - by Herr Kaleun

  as a programmer, i was skeptical about (Microsoft) desktop software back in the early 2000s (i was a kid then) and yet, i was right. So i advanced to PHP in 2004 and began working on Web applications. When i look at the software world today, i really can't understand, how software for Microsoft or call it, "windows" should have a future. Is it still worth, learning it? I have a strong feeling that, in about 3-4 years, mac will have the dominance in the Personal Computer market. If i am wrong, please correct me. Thanks!

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• ASP.NET web-application example for newbies

  - by A-Cube

  I want to learn ASP.NET web-application development by example. I want to learn it from an already developed web-application that is good as a tutorial for newbies. A fully functional web application that is small but powerful enough to teach newbies the development effort required for web-application development. I am looking for some application that is made using software engineering principles and not just a code written haphazardly.

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• Good questions to ask a potential new boss?

  - by David Johnstone

  I first asked this question on Stack Overflow, but it turns out this is a better place for it. Imagine you were working as a software developer. Imagine that the manager of your team leaves and your company is looking for a replacement. Imagine that as part of the hiring process you had the opportunity to talk with him. You are not the only person doing an interview, and while it is not ultimately your decision whether or not to hire him, you do have an influence. What questions would you ask? What would you talk with him about?

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• Transition from maintenance programming to design

  - by andrew wang

  What to do people do develop a design for a s/w for a given set of requirements? I like many people joined a Semiconductor MNC and got stuck in maintenance for quite a couple of years. My work was usually changing a lines of code for windows drivers supplied by my company or a couple of small script (style like) C programs for validating h/w. As a result I developed the bad habit of 'programming by coincidence'. I have not developed the ability for designing tools/programs from scratch. I was the only s/w member of the local team and thus some grunt work from the well established other site of the company came to be done by me. Now I have moved to a different company and thus finding developing from scratch very difficult. How do I unlearn my bad habit and develop this ability of designing s/w and then coding it ?

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