Search Results

Search found 14074 results on 563 pages for 'programmers'.

Page 179/563 | < Previous Page | 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186  | Next Page >

• Complex Release Vehicle Management

  - by Sharon

  I'm looking into improving our build and release system. We are a .Net/Windows shop, and I don't see any really good tools for Windows for generating the files that are to be dropped in patch or hotfix. We are currently using TFSBuild 2010 with Windows Workflows for our continuous integration builds as well as our daily full build which includes an Installshield package for deployment. What is a good way of generating the list of files to be included in a "patch" style release, where one does not redistribute all the files, but only those necessary to accomplish the necessary changes? Are there any open source tools that work well for this, or do teams usually roll their own? I have considered using Beyond Compare but I would prefer something open source. The file "patch" creation must be 100% automatable. Which release vehicles really ought to be patch style? And which releases should replace all system files related to our application? Assume we have a very large amount of resources necessary to maintain. Is there any established material that is trusted within the industry for strategies about this? I realize it is different for "enterprise" rather than with typical websites. I am looking more for "enterprise" strategies due to our product distribution style. tl;dr Looking for info on how to ship more reliable packages?

  Read the article

• How to measure the right time to bring a new client?

  - by Byron Sommardahl

  My growing company has a team of developers working on a number of separate projects. Our developers depend on us to keep them working, and we depend on them to make our clients happy. Our projects have differing start and end dates, as you can imagine. The company's responsibility to the developers is to make sure we have clients waiting in the wings so that when one project ends, another can start. For now, finding clients is not a problem and not the topic of this question. What I'm trying to think through right now is, how can I best measure/view/evaluate the end dates of projects so that I know when I need to start courting the next client. Is there a tool that does this? If it's just a spreadsheet, what might it look like?

  Read the article

• Developing for Windows CE platform?

  - by grmbl

  I'm looking in creating some applications for workers to use on the workfloor. They'll be using Psion NEO devices running Windows CE 5.0. My skillset allows for C#, PHP, ASP.Net (+ webservices). Application requirements: should connect to our ERP system running on IBM iSeries (AS400). should be run in fullscreen (effectively hiding the OS). usability touch functionality. I have tried the following: Full winform application ran through RDP session: [+] easy deployment using .rdp file. [+] application can be run on desktop environment too. [+] rdp host can easily access DB2 using IBM drivers. [+] GUI works ok on small screen. [-] environment = terminal server. (which is already under heavy use) Full winform application running on device OS: [+] environment = local. [+] responsive. [-] must use a webservice to access DB2. [-] deployment... [-] fixed platform (no desktop) Console application running on device OS: [+] environment = local. [+] very responsive. [-] must use a webservice to access DB2. [-] no fullscreen or other window options? [-] deployment... [-] fixed platform (no desktop) I'm considering creating a web application but it seems the OS comes with IE 5? I don't want to alter the OS in any way! (install other browsers etc.) I would like to have an application that's responsive, easy to deploy, fullscreen and optionally multiplatform. I have seen handheld devices using terminal (emulation?) with a console like interface. This seems to be native to the device but I'm afraid this requires modest knowledge of C++? It seems that using RDP is the way to go but, I came here for advice and look for people that have been in the same situation willing to share their experience. There does not seem to be many "best practices" on the web that could help me decide the best way of working. Greetings

  Read the article

• Workflow versioning

  - by Nitra

  I believe I have a fundamental misunderstanding when it comes to workflow engines which I would appreciate if you could help me sort out. I'm not sure if my misunderstanding is specific to the workflow engine I'm using, or if it's a general misunderstanding. I happen to use Windows Workflow Foundation (WWF). TLDR-version WWF allows you to implement business processes in long-running workflows (think months or even years). When started, the workflows can't be changed. But what business process can't change at any time? And if a business process changes, wouldn't you want your software to reflect this change for already started 'instances' of the business process? What am I missing? Background In WWF you define a workflow by combining a set of activites. There are different types of activities - some of them are for flow control, such as the IfElseActivity and the WhileActivty while others allows you to perform actual tasks, such as the CodeActivity wich allows you to run .NET code and the InvokeWebServiceActivity which allows you to call web services. The activites are combined to a workflow using a visual designer. You pretty much drag-and-drop activities from a toolbox to a designer area and connect the activites to each other. The workflow and activities have input paramters, output parameters and variables. We have a single workflow which sometimes runs in a matter of a few days, but it may run for 5-6 months. WWF takes care of persisting the workflow state (what activity are we currently executing, what are the variable values and so on). So far I think WWF makes sense. Some people will prefer to implement a software representation of a business process using a visual designer over writing all of it in code. So what's the issue then? What I don't really get is the following: WWF is designed to take care of long-running workflows. But at the same time, WWF has no built-in functionality which allows you to modify the running workflows. So if you model a business process using a workflow and run that for 6 months, you better hope that the business process does not change. Because if it do, you'll have to have multiple versions of the workflow executing at the same time. This seems like a fundamental design mistake to me, but at the same time it seems more likely that I've misunderstood something. For us, this has had some real-world effects: We release new versions every month, but some workflows may run for a year. This means that we have several versions of the workflow running in parallell, in other words several versions of the business logics. This is the same as having many differnt versions of your code running in production in the same system at the same time, which becomes a bit hard to understand for users. (depending on on whether they clicked a 'Start' button 9 or 10 months ago, the software will behave differently) Our workflow refers to different types of entities and since WWF now has persisted and serialized these we can't really refactor the entities since then existing workflows can't be resumed (deserialization will fail We've received some suggestions on how to handle this When we create a new version of the workflow, cancel all running workflows and create new ones. But in our workflows there's a lot of manual work involved and if we start from scratch a lot of people has to re-do their work. Track what has been done in the workflow and when you create a new one skip activites which have already been executed. I feel that this alternative may work for simple workflows, but it becomes hairy to automatically figure out what activities to skip if there's major refactoring done to a workflow. When we create a new version of the workflow, upgrade old versions using the new WWF 4.5 functionality for upgrading workflows. But then we would have to skip using the visual designer and write code to inject activities in the right places in the workflow. According to MSDN, this upgrade functionality is only intended for minor bug fixes and not larger changes. What am I missing?

  Read the article

• Design pattern for client/server sessions?

  - by nonot1

  Are there any common patterns or general guidance I can learn from for how to design a client/server system where the both the client and server must maintain some kind per-client session state? I've found any number of libraries that can help with some of the plumbing, but it's the overall design I'm wondering about. Open issues in my mind: How to structure the client/server communication so that bidirectional synchronous and asynchronous requests are possible? The server side needs to spawn a couple of per-connected-client session-long helper process. How to manage that? How to manage the mapping from a given client (and any of it's requests) to server state and helper process instances in the face of multiple clients and intermittent network connectivity. Most communication can be simple blocking request/reply, but some will be long running processing tasks that the client will want to keep tabs on. To the extent that it matters, the platform is Linux/C/C++. Not web based. Just an existing thick-client software app being modified to talk to backend servers for some tasks.

  Read the article

• How to Mentor a Junior Developer

  - by Josh Johnson

  This title is a little broad but I may need to give a little background before I can ask my question properly. I know that similar questions have been asked here already. But in my case I'm not asking if I should be mentoring someone or if the person is a good fit for being a software developer. That is not my place to judge. I have not been asked outright, but it is apparent that myself and other fellow senior developers are to mentor the new developers that start here. I have no problem with this whatsoever and, in many cases, it lends me a fresh perspective on things and I end up learning in the process. Also, I remember how beneficial it was in the beginning of my career when someone would take some time to teach me something. When I say "new developer" they could be anywhere from fresh out of college to having a year or two of experience. Recently and in the past we've had people start here who seem to have an attitude toward development/programming which is different from mine and hard for me to reconcile; they seem to extract just enough information to get the task done but not really learn from it. I find myself going over and over the same issues with them. I understand that part of this could be a personality thing, but I feel it's my job to do my best and sort of push them out of the nest while they're under my wing, so to speak. How can I impart just enough information so that they will learn but not give so much as to solve the problem for them? Or perhaps: What's the proper response to questions that are designed to take the path of least resistance and, in essence, force them to learn instead of take the easy way out? These questions are probably more general teaching questions and don't have that much to do specifically with software development. Note: I do not get a say in what tasks they are working on. Management doles the task out and it could be anything from a very simple bug fix to starting an entire application by themselves. While this is not ideal by any means and obviously presents its own gauntlet of challenges, I feel it's a topic best left for another question. So the best I can do is help them with the problem at hand and try to help them break it down into simpler problems and also check their commit logs and point out mistakes that they made. My main objectives are to: Help them out and give them the tools they need to start becoming more self-reliant. Steer them in the right direction and break bad development habits early on. Lessen the amount of time I spend with them (the personality type described above seems to need much more one-on-one time and does not do well over IM or email. While that's generally fine, I can't always stop what I'm working on, break my stride, and help them debug an error on a moments notice; I have my own projects that need to get done).

  Read the article

• Storing Attendance Data in database

  - by Ali Abbas

  So i have to store daily attendance of employees of my organisation from my application . The part where I need some help is, the efficient way to store attendance data. After some research and brain storming I came up with some approaches . Could you point me out which one is the best and any unobvious ill effects of the mentioned approaches. The approaches are as follows Create a single table for whole organisation and store empid,date,presentstatus as a row for every employee everyday. Create a single table for whole organisation and store a single row for each day with a comma delimited string of empids which are absent. I will generate the string on my application. Create different tables for each department and follow the 1 method. Please share your views and do mention any other good methods

  Read the article

• Why don't research papers that mention custom software release the source code?

  - by Antoine

  Is there a reason why the source code of softwares mentioned in research papers is not released ? I understand that research papers are more about the general idea of accomplishing something than implementation details, but I don't get why they don't release the code. For example, in this paper ends with: Results The human line drawing system is implemented through the Qt framework in C++ using OpenGL, and runs on a 2.00 GHz Intel dual core processor workstation without any additional hardware assistance. We can interactively draw lines while the system synthesizes the new path and texture. Do they keep the source code closed intentionally because of a monetization they intend to make with it, or because of copyright ?

  Read the article

• 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.

  Read the article

• Is there a more intelligent way to do this besides a long chain of if statements or switch?

  - by Harrison Nguyen

  I'm implementing an IRC bot that receives a message and I'm checking that message to determine which functions to call. Is there a more clever way of doing this? It seems like it'd quickly get out of hand after I got up to like 20 commands. Perhaps there's a better way to abstract this? public void onMessage(String channel, String sender, String login, String hostname, String message){ if (message.equalsIgnoreCase(".np")){ // TODO: Use Last.fm API to find the now playing } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith(".register")) { cmd.registerLastNick(channel, sender, message); } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith("give us a countdown")) { cmd.countdown(channel, message); } else if (message.toLowerCase().startsWith("remember am routine")) { cmd.updateAmRoutine(channel, message, sender); } }

  Read the article

• 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?

  Read the article

• How do people charge friends for development projects?

  - by Crashalot

  A friend has begged our consulting firm several times to build an iPhone app. We are reluctant to jeopardize the friendship and charge market rates. At the same time, we're so busy it would be imprudent not to charge fairly. We tried referring her to other shops, but she doesn't feel comfortable with anyone but us. How do people charge friends? Since I'm asking about fees, I'm also curious to know if people charge on a fixed-price basis or hourly basis? Thanks!

  Read the article

• How to visualize timer functionality in sequence diagram?

  - by truthseeker

  I am developing software for communication with external device through serial port. To better understand the new functionality I am trying to display it in sequence diagram. Flow of events is as follows. I send to the device command to reset it. This is asynchronous operation so there is some delay between request and response (typically 100 ms). There can be case when the answer never comes (for example device is not connected to the specified port or is currently turned off). For this purpose I create a timer with period twice the maximum answer time. In my case it is 2 * 125 ms = 250 ms. If the answer comes in predefined time interval, I destroy already running timer. If the answer doesnt come in predefined interval, timer initiates some action. After this action we can destroy it. How to effectively model this situation in sequence diagram? Addendum 1: Based on advices made by scarfridge i drew following UML diagram. Comment by Ozair is also helpful for simplifying the diagram even more.

  Read the article

• Which is more maintainable -- boolean assignment via if/else or boolean expression?

  - by Bret Walker

  Which would be considered more maintainable? if (a == b) c = true; else c = false; or c = (a == b); I've tried looking in Code Complete, but can't find an answer. I think the first is more readable (you can literally read it out loud), which I also think makes it more maintainable. The second one certainly makes more sense and reduces code, but I'm not sure it's as maintainable for C# developers (I'd expect to see this idiom more in, for example, Python).

  Read the article

• Reasons NOT to open source not-for-profit code?

  - by naught101

  I am a big fan of open source code. I think I understand most of the advantages of going open source. I'm a science student researcher, and I have to work with quite a surprising amount of software and code that is not open source (either it's proprietary, or it's not public). I can't really see a good reason for this, and I can see that the code, and people using it, would definitely benefit from being more public (if nothing else, in science it's vital that your results can be replicated if necessary, and that's much harder if others don't have access to your code). Before I go out and start proselytising, I want to know: are there any good arguments for not releasing not-for-profit code publicly, and with an OSI-compliant license? (I realise there are a few similar questions on SE, but most focus on situations where the code is primarily used for making money, and I couldn't much relevant in the answers.) Clarification: By "not-for-profit", I am including downstream profit motives, such as parent-company brand-recognition and investor profit expectations. In other words, the question relates only to software for which there is NO profit motive tied to the software what so ever.

  Read the article

• Save match details to SQLite or XML?

  - by trizz

  I'm making a (conceptual) system to simulate any kind of sports match (like soccer,basketball,etc) with actions (for example pass,pass,out,pass,score) so it will be like a real report. The main statistics (play time, number of actions etc.) I'm saving to a MySQL database, but the report itself, can contain more than 1000 actions per match. To avoid millions of records in my database I'm thinking of saving the detailled report in a SQLite database or a XML file. For every match played, a file will be created. When a user request the match details, I read the file for details. What is the best choice for this purpose? SQLite or XML?

  Read the article

• How to explain OOP to a matlab programmer?

  - by Oak

  I have a lot of friends who come from electrical / physical / mechanical engineering background, and are curious about what is "OOP" all about. They all know Matlab quite well, so they do have basic programming background; but they have a very hard time grasping a complex type system which can benefit from the concepts OOP introduces. Can anyone propose a way I can try to explain it to them? I'm just not familiar with Matlab myself, so I'm having troubles finding parallels. I think using simple examples like shapes or animals is a bit too abstract for those engineers. So far I've tried using a Matrix interface vs array-based / sparse / whatever implementations, but that didn't work so well, probably because different matrix types are already well-supported in Matlab.

  Read the article

• Are there good resources for leading documentation for an existing software product having none?

  - by Ben Rose

  Hello. I'm a software developer at a technology company. I have been tasked with leading the documentation effort for the product I work on, both internal to developers as well as spilling over into facilitating the business side of requirements documentation. This internal product has been around for at least 6 years. One challenge is that this software application has no form of documentation other than some small, outdated pieces here and there. There are comments in the code, but they are technical and do not convey any over-arching behavior (even on technical side). As a consequence of having little to no documentation, this product is often unnecessarily complex under the covers adding to the challenge. We are very limited on time that will be given to us to work on documentation. Another thing about me is that I've displayed some ability in writing/communication around the office, but I'm not coming from any sort of documentation or formal writing background (beyond my academic career). Please share your advise or recommend resources, book/website/forum/whatever, for helping me come up with a plan with milestones, best practices, task delegation, templates, buy-in, etc. I'm hoping for a resource targeting or giving special mention of introducing good documentation on existing projects where there previously was none. I would be very grateful for your responses. Ben

  Read the article

• Integration of advertisement into WP7 apps: Any experiences?

  - by OneWorld

  Has anyone of you guys integrated or is thinking about integrating either admob, MS pubCenter, adwhirl or any other advertising provider into your apps? Please share your experience... Who pays best? Any regulations? Any problems with getting the app approved by Microsoft Market? If you chose Admob: Which plugin do you suggest? This or that or another one? Any experiences in Europe or Germany? (MS pubCenter is US only so far) Edit: I think we discussed enough about acceptance of mobile advertisement. Let's focus now on the questions I asked. Edit 2: Hmm, maybe Stackoverlfow is a better place to discuss question 2-5. Could somebody migrate this one?

  Read the article

• Using an AGPL 3.0-licensed library for extra functionality in an iOS app

  - by Arnold Sakhnov

  I am building an iOS application, and I am planning to incorporate an AGPL 3.0-licensed library to it to provide some extra (non-essential) functionality. I’ve got a couple of questions regarding this: Do I understand it right that this still obliges me to publish the source of my app open? If yes, does it have to be open to the general public, or only to those who have downloaded the app? Does this allow me to distribute the app for a fee?

  Read the article

• Functional or non-functional requirement?

  - by killer_PL

  I'm wondering about functional or non-functional requirements. I have found lot of different definitions for those terms and I can't assign some of my requirement to proper category. I'm wondering about requirements that aren't connected with some action or have some additional conditions, for example: On the list of selected devices, device can be repeated. Database must contain at least 100 items Currency of some value must be in USD dollar. Device must have a name and power consumption value in Watts. are those requirements functional or non-functional ?

  Read the article

• Architecture for a template-building, WYSIWIG application

  - by Sam Selikoff

  I'm building a WYSIWYG designer in Ember.js. The designer will allow users to create campaigns - think MailChimp. To build a campaign, users will choose an existing template. The template will have a defined layout. The user will then be taken to the designer, where he will be able to edit the text and style, and additionally change some layout options. I've been thinking about how best to go about structuring this app, and there are a few hurdles. Specifically, the output of the campaign will be dynamic: eventually, it will be published somewhere, and when the consumers (not my users, but the people clicking on the campaign that my user created) visit the campaign, certain pieces of data will change, depending on the type of consumer viewing the campaign. That means the ultimate output of the designer will be a dynamic site. The data that is dynamic for this site - the end product - will not be manipulated by the user in the designer. However, the data that will be manipulated by the user in the designer are things like copy, styles, layout options, etc. I'll call the first set of variables server-side data, and the second client-side data. It seems, then, that the process will go something like this: I'll need to create templates for this designer that have two dynamic segments. For instance, the server-side data could be Liquid expressions, and the client-side data Handlebars expressions. When the user creates a campaign, I would compile the template on the back end using some dummy data for the server-side variables, and serve up a handlebars template to the Ember app. The user would then edit the template, and the Ember app would save all his edits to the JS variables that were powering the template. This way he'd be able to preview the template. When he saves, he'll send back the selected template, along with all the data and options he's made. When it comes time to publish, the back-end system will have to do two things: compile the template with Handlebars using the campaign data, and then compile the template with Liquid using the server-side data Is my thinking roughly accurate about this, or is there a simpler way?

  Read the article

• Audio Panning using RtAudio

  - by user1801724

  I use the RtAudio library. I would like to implement an audio program where I can control the panning (e.g. shifting the sound from the left channel to the right channel). In my specific case, I use RtAudio in duplex mode (you can find an example here: duplex mode). It means that I link the microphone input to the speaker output. I have searched on the web, but I did not find anything useful. Should I apply a filter on the output buffer? What kind of filter?

  Read the article

• Best practices for caching search queries

  - by David Esteves

  I am trying to improve performance of my ASP.net Web Api by adding a data cache but I am not sure how exactly to go about it as it seems to be more complex than most caching scenarios. An example is I have a table of Locations and an api to retrieve locations via search, for an autocomplete. /api/location/Londo and the query would be something like SELECT * FROM Locations WHERE Name like 'Londo%' These locations change very infrequently so I would like to cache them to prevent trips to the database for no real reason and improve the response time. Looking at caching options I am using the Windows Azure Appfabric system, the problem is it's just a key/value cache. Since I can only retrieve items based on keys I couldn't actually use it for this scenario as far as Im aware. Is what I am trying to do bad use of a caching system? Should I try looking into NoSql DB which could possibly run as a cache for something like this to improve performance? Should I just cache the entire table/collection in a single key with a specific data structure which could assist with the searching and then do the search upon retrieval of the data?

  Read the article

• C# String.format extension method

  - by Paul Roe

  With the addtion of Extension methods to C# we've seen a lot of them crop up in our group. One debate revolves around extension methods like this one: public static class StringExt { /// <summary> /// Shortcut for string.Format. /// </summary> /// <param name="str"></param> /// <param name="args"></param> /// <returns></returns> public static string Format(this string str, params object[] args) { if (str == null) return null; return string.Format(str, args); } } Does this extension method break any programming best practices that you can name? Would you use it anyway, if not why? If I renamed the function to "F" but left the xml comments would that be epic fail or just a wonderful savings of keystrokes?

  Read the article

< Previous Page | 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186  | Next Page >