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• Is it OK to use dynamic typing to reduce the amount of variables in scope?

  - by missingno

  Often, when I am initializing something I have to use a temporary variable, for example: file_str = "path/to/file" file_file = open(file) or regexp_parts = ['foo', 'bar'] regexp = new RegExp( regexp_parts.join('|') ) However, I like to reduce the scope my variables to the smallest scope possible so there is less places where they can be (mis-)used. For example, I try to use for(var i ...) in C++ so the loop variable is confined to the loop body. In these initialization cases, if I am using a dynamic language, I am then often tempted to reuse the same variable in order to prevent the initial (and now useless) value from being used latter in the function. file = "path/to/file" file = open(file) regexp = ['...', '...'] regexp = new RegExp( regexp.join('|') ) The idea is that by reducing the number of variables in scope I reduce the chances to misuse them. However this sometimes makes the variable names look a little weird, as in the first example, where "file" refers to a "filename". I think perhaps this would be a non issue if I could use non-nested scopes begin scope1 filename = ... begin scope2 file = open(filename) end scope1 //use file here //can't use filename on accident end scope2 but I can't think of any programming language that supports this. What rules of thumb should I use in this situation? When is it best to reuse the variable? When is it best to create an extra variable? What other ways do we solve this scope problem?

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• Solved: Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object

  - by ChrisD

  We use public static methods decorated with [WebMethod] to support our Ajax Postbacks.   Recently, I received an error from a UI developing stating he was receiving the following error when attempting his post back: {   "Message": "Operation is not valid due to the current state of the object.",   "StackTrace": "   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.ObjectConverter.ConvertDictionaryToObject(IDictionary`2 dictionary, Type type, JavaScriptSerializer serializer, Boolean throwOnError, Object& convertedObject)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.ObjectConverter.ConvertObjectToTypeInternal(Object o, Type type, JavaScriptSerializer serializer, Boolean throwOnError, Object& convertedObject)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.ObjectConverter.ConvertObjectToTypeMain(Object o, Type type, JavaScriptSerializer serializer, Boolean throwOnError, Object& convertedObject)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptObjectDeserializer.DeserializeInternal(Int32 depth)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptObjectDeserializer.DeserializeDictionary(Int32 depth)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptObjectDeserializer.DeserializeInternal(Int32 depth)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptObjectDeserializer.DeserializeDictionary(Int32 depth)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptObjectDeserializer.DeserializeInternal(Int32 depth)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptObjectDeserializer.BasicDeserialize(String input, Int32 depthLimit, JavaScriptSerializer serializer)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer.Deserialize(JavaScriptSerializer serializer, String input, Type type, Int32 depthLimit)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer.Deserialize[T](String input)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Services.RestHandler.GetRawParamsFromPostRequest(HttpContext context, JavaScriptSerializer serializer)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Services.RestHandler.GetRawParams(WebServiceMethodData methodData, HttpContext context)\r\n   at System.Web.Script.Services.RestHandler.ExecuteWebServiceCall(HttpContext context, WebServiceMethodData methodData)",   "ExceptionType": "System.InvalidOperationException" }   Goggling this error brought me little support.  All the results talked about increasing the aspnet:MaxJsonDeserializerMembers value to handle larger payloads.  Since 1) I’m not using the asp.net ajax model and 2) the payload is very small, this clearly was not the cause of my issue. Here’s the payload the UI developer was sending to the endpoint: {   "FundingSource": {     "__type": "XX.YY.Engine.Contract.Funding.EvidenceBasedFundingSource,  XX.YY.Engine.Contract",     "MeansType": 13,     "FundingMethodName": "LegalTender",   },   "AddToProfile": false,   "ProfileNickName": "",   "FundingAmount": 0 } By tweaking the JSON I’ve found the culprit. Apparently the default JSS Serializer used doesn’t like the assembly name in the __type value.  Removing the assembly portion of the type name resolved my issue. { "FundingSource": { "__type": "XX.YY.Engine.Contract.Funding.EvidenceBasedFundingSource", "MeansType": 13, "FundingMethodName": "LegalTender", }, "AddToProfile": false, "ProfileNickName": "", "FundingAmount": 0 }

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• What relationship do software Scrum or Lean have to industrial engineering concepts like theory of constraints?

  - by DeveloperDon

  In Scrum, work is delivered to customers through a series of sprints in which project work is time boxed to a fixed number of days or weeks, usually 30 days. In lean software development, the goal is to deliver as soon as possible, permitting early feedback for the next iteration. Both techniques stress the importance of workflow in which software work product does not accumulate in development awaiting release at some future date. Both permit new or refined requirements and feedback from QA and customers to be acted on with as little delay as possible based on priority. A few years ago I heard a lecture where the speaker talked briefly about a family of concepts from industrial engineering called theory of constraints. In the factory, they use an operations model based on three components: drum, buffer, and rope. The drum synchronizes work product as it flows through the system. Buffers that protect the system by holding output from one stage as it waits to be consumed by the next. The rope pulls product from one work station to the next. Historically, are these ideas part of the heritage of Scrum and Lean, or are they on a separate track? It we wanted to think about Scrum and Lean in terms of drum-buffer-rope, what are the parts? Drum = {daily scrum meeting, monthly release)? Buffer = {burn down list, source control system)? Rope = { daily meeting, constant integration server, monthly releases}? Industrial engineers define work flow in terms of different kinds of factories. I-Factories: straight pipeline. One input, one output. A-Factories: many inputs and one output. V-Factories: one input, many output products. T-Plants: many inputs, many outputs. If it applies, what kind of factory is most like Scrum or Lean and why?

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• What is the advantage to using a factor of 1024 instead of 1000 for disk size units?

  - by Joe Z.

  When considering the disk space of a storage medium, normally the computer or operating system will represent it in terms of powers of 1024 - a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, a megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes, a gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes, and so on. But I don't see any practical reason why this convention was adopted. Usually when disk size is represented in kilo-, mega-, or giga-bytes, it has to be converted into decimal first. In places where a power-of-two byte count actually matters (like the block size on a file system), the size is given in bytes anyway (e.g. 4096 bytes). Was it just a little aesthetic novelty that computer makers decided to adopt, but storage medium vendors decided to disregard? Whenever you buy a hard drive, there's always a disclaimer nowadays that says "One gigabyte means one billion bytes". It would feel like using the binary definition of "gigabyte" would artificially inflate the byte count of a device, making drive-makers have to pack 1.1 terabytes into a drive in order to have it show up as "1 TB", or to simply pack 1 terabyte in and have it show up as "931 GB" (and most of them do the latter). Some people have decided to use units like "KiB" or "MiB" in favour of "KB" and "MB" in order to distinguish the two. But is there any merit to the binary prefixes in the first place? There's probably a bit of old history I'm not aware of on this topic, and if there is, I'm looking for somebody to explain it. (Apologies if this is in the wrong place. I felt that a question on best practice might belong here, but I have faith that it will be migrated to the right place if it's incorrect.)

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• Displaying possible movement tiles

  - by Ash Blue

  What's the fastest way to highlight all possible movement tiles for a player on a square grid? Players can only move up, down, left, right. Tiles can cost more than one movement, multiple levels are available to move, and players can be larger than one tile. Think of games like Fire Emblem, Front Mission, and XCOM. My first thought was to recursively search for connecting tiles. This quickly demonstrated many shortcomings when blockers, movement costs, and other features were added into the mix. My second thought was to use an A* pathfinding algorithm to check all tiles presumed valid. Presumed valid tiles would come from an algorithm that generates a diamond of tiles from the player's speed (see example here http://jsfiddle.net/truefreestyle/Suww8/9/). Problem is this seems a little slow and expensive. Is there a faster way? Edit: In Lua for Corona SDK, I integrated the following movement generation controller. I've linked to a Gist here because the solution is around 90 lines of code. https://gist.github.com/ashblue/5546009

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• How to loop section from a song correctly?

  - by Teflo

  I'm programming a little Music Engine for my game in C# and XNA, and one aspect from it is the possibility to loop a section from a song. For example, my song has an intropart, and when the song reached the end ( or any other specific point ), it jumps back where the intropart is just over. ( A - B - B - B ... ) Now I'm using IrrKlank, which is working perfectly, without any gaps, but I have a problem: The point where to jump back is a bit inaccurate. Here's some example code: public bool Passed(float time) { if ( PlayPosition >= time ) return true; return false; } //somewhere else if( song.Passed( 10.0f ) ) song.JumpTo( 5.0f ); Now the problem is, the song passes the 10 seconds, but play a few milliseconds until 10.1f or so, and then jumps to 5 seconds. It's not that dramatic, but very incorrect for my needs. I tried to fix it like that: public bool Passed( float time ) { if( PlayPosition + 3 * dt >= time && PlayPosition <= time ) return true; return false; } ( dt is the delta time, the elapsed time since the last frame ) But I don't think, that's a good solution for that. I hope, you can understand my problem ( and my english, yay /o/ ) and help me :)

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• How to rotate html5 canvas as page background?

  - by Sebastian P.R. Gingter

  Hi, I want to achieve the following: Image a white sheet of paper on a black desk. Then rotate the paper a little bit to the left (like, 25 degrees). Now you still have the black desk, and a rotated white box on it. In this rotated white box I want to place non-rotated normal html content like text, tables, div's etc. I already have a problem at the very first step: rotating a rectangle. This is my code so far: <html> <head> <script> function draw() { var canvas=document.getElementById("myCanvas"); var c=canvas.getContext("2d"); c.fillStyle = '#00'; c.fillRect(100, 100, 100, 100); c.rotate(20); c.fillStyle = '#ff0000'; c.fillRect(150, 150, 10, 10); } </script> </head> <body onload="draw()"> <canvas id="myCanvas" width="500" height="500"></canvas> </body> </html> With this, I see only a normal black box. Nothing else. I assume there should be a red, rotated box too, but there's nothing. What is the best approach to reach this and to have it as a (scaling) background for my web page?

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• Sprites, Primitives and logic entity as structs

  - by Jeffrey

  I'm wondering would it be considered acceptable: The window class is responsible for drawing data, so it will have a method: Window::draw(const Sprite&); Window::draw(const Rect&); Window::draw(const Triangle&); Window::draw(const Circle&); and all those primitives + sprites would be just public struct. For example Sprite: struct Sprite { float x, y; // center float origin_x, origin_y; float width, height; float rotation; float scaling; GLuint texture; Sprite(float w, float h); Sprite(float w, float h, float a, float b); void useTexture(std::string file); void setOrigin(float a, float b); void move(float a, float b); // relative move void moveTo(float a, float b); // absolute move void rotate(float a); // relative rotation void rotateTo(float a); // absolute rotation void rotationReset(); void scale(float a); // relative scaling void scaleTo(float a); // absolute scaling void scaleReset(); }; So instead of having each primitive to call their draw() function, which is a little bit off topic for their object, I let the Window class handle all the OpenGL stuff and manipulate them as simple objects that will be drawn later on. Is this pattern used? Does it have any cons against it's primitives-draw-themself pattern? Are there any other related patterns?

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• Algorithm to infer tag hierarchy

  - by Tom

  I'm looking for an algorithm to infer a hierarchy from a set of tagged items. E.g. if the following items have the tags: 1 a 2 a,b 3 a,c 4 a,c,e 5 a,b 6 a,c 7 d 8 d,f Then I can construct an undirected graph (or graphs) by tallying the node weights and edge weights: node weights edge weights a 6 a-b 2 b 2 a-c 3 c 3 c-e 1 d 2 a-e 1 <-- this edge is parallel to a-c and c-e and not wanted e 1 d-f 1 f 1 The first problem is how to drop any redundant edges to get to the simplified graph? Note that it's only appropriate to remove that redundant a-e edge in this case because something is tagged as a-c-e, if that wasn't the case and the tag was a-e, that edge would have to remain. I suspect that means the removal of edges can only happen during the construction of the graph, not after everything has been tallied up. What I'd then like to do is identify the direction of the edges to create a directed graph (or graphs) and pick out root nodes to hopefully create a tree (or trees): trees a d // \\ | b c f \ e It seems like it could be a string algorithm - longest common subsequences/prefixes - or a tree/graph algorithm, but I am a little stuck since I don't know the correct terminology to search for it.

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• SEO Keyword Research Help

  - by user5857

  I'm new at SEO and keyword research. I am using Market Samurai as my research tool, and I was wondering if I could ask for your help to identify the best key word to target for my niche. I do plan on incorporating all of them into my site, but I wanted to start with one. If you could give me your input on these keywords, I would appreciate it. This is all new to me :) I'm too new to post pictures, but here are my keywords (Searches, SEO Traffic, and SEO Value / Day): Searches | SEO Traffic | PBR | SEO Value | Average PR/Backlinks of Current Top 10 1: 730 | 307 | 20% | 2311.33 | 1.9 / 7k-60k 2: 325 | 137 | 24% | 822.94 | 2.3 / 7k-60k 3: 398 | 167 | 82% | 589.79 | 1.6 / 7k-60k I'm wondering if the PBR (Phrase-to-broad) value of #1 is too low. It seems like the best value because the SEOV is crazy high. That is like $70k a month. #3 has the highest PBR, but also the lowest SEOV. #2 doesn't seem worth it because of the PR competetion. Might be a little too hard to get into the top page of Google. I'm wondering which keywords to target, and if I should be looking at any other metric to see if this is a profitable niche to jump into. Thanks.

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• How can I add a custom item to the Sound Indicator (and make it clickable more than once)?

  - by con-f-use

  The original question One of the strength of Unity are the various standardized indicators. I want to customize the sound indicator with an additional menu entry that runs a small shell script. I'm not afraid of a little Python code and I hope someone can point me to the right subroutine in the right file. I suspect that will be fairly easy but all the indicators are just so bloated that I can't look through their code in a reasonable time. Any help is appreciated. I know it is possible as the marvelous Skype-Wrapper does it. Edit 2 - Now a dirty DBus hack The one click problem from one edit before has now turned into a DBus problem. Basically we have to tell the sound indicator that our bogus player has terminated now. A dirty hack navigates around that problem: #!/bin/bash # This is '/home/confus/bin/toggleSpeaker.sh' notify-send "Toggle Speaker" "$(date)" qdbus \ com.canonical.indicator.sound \ /org/ayatana/indicator/service \ org.ayatana.indicator.service.Shutdown exit 0 Help from the community is appreciated as I don't have experience any with DBus whatsoever. Edit 1 - Takkat found a solution but only clickable once? For some reason the solution proposed by Takkat has the drawback that the resulting entry in indicator sound can only be clicked once per session. If someone has a fix for, than please comment or answer, you will be upvoted. Here you can see the result: I strongly suspect the issue is related to the .desktop-file in /home/confus/.local/share/application/toggleSpeaker.desktop, which is this: [Desktop Entry] Type=Application Name=toggleSpeaker GenericName=Toggle Speaker Icon=gstreamer-properties Exec=/home/confus/bin/toggleSpeaker.sh Terminal=false And here is a minimal example of the script in /home/confus/bin/toggleSpeaker.sh for your consideration: #!/bin/bash # This is '/home/confus/bin/toggleSpeaker.sh' notify-send "Toggle Speaker" "$(date)" exit 0

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• How to share code as open source?

  - by Ethel Evans

  I have a little program that I wrote for a local group to handle a somewhat complicated scheduling issue for scheduling multiple meetings in multiple locations that change weekly according to certain criteria. It's a niche need, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are other groups that could use software like this. In fact, we've had requests from others for directions on starting a group like this, and if their groups get as big, they might also want special software to help with scheduling. I plan to continue developing the program and eventually make it an online web app, but a very simple alpha version is completed as a console app. I'd like to make it available as open source, but I have no idea what kind of process I should go through first. Right now, all I have is Java code, not even unit-tested thoroughly. I haven't shown the code to anyone else. There is no documentation. I don't know where I would put the code so others could access it. I don't know anything about licensing it. I don't know what kind of support people will expect from me if I release it as open source. I have no idea what else I should worry about. Can someone outline for me (or post an article(s) that outlines) the process of taking open source software from "coded" to "completed / available"? I really don't want to embarrass myself by doing things weirdly.

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• Is there a language more general than Lisp?

  - by Jon Purdy

  I've been programming for a long time, and writing in Lisp (well, mostly Scheme) for a little less. My experience in these languages (and other functional languages) has informed my ability to write clean code even with less powerful tools. Lisp-family languages have lovely facilities for implementing every abstraction in common use: S-expressions generalise structure. Macros generalise syntax. Continuations generalise flow control. But I'm dissatisfied. Somehow, I want more. Is there a language that's more general? More powerful? As great as Lisp is, I find it hard to believe no one has come up with anything (dare I say) better. I'm well aware that ordinarily a question like this ought to be closed for its argumentative nature. But there seems to be a broad consensus that Lisp represents the theoretical pinnacle of programming language design. I simply refuse to accept that without some kind of proof. Which I guess amounts to questioning whether the lambda calculus is in fact the ideal abstraction of computation.

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• Just installed 13.04 and everything is fine except I cannot connect to the internet. Any thoughts?

  - by razorccatu

  I just installed Ubuntu 13.04 on my HP G62 laptop and the install went smoothly. I did the install off of a USB drive after trying ubuntu. While I was testing it, I connected to my Wireless with out issue and surfed a little. After the install, no wireless. I can still connect to my wireless network (at least it tells me I'm connected at full strength) but No servers can be found. I attempted to ping Google to no avail and I attempted to ping my router to no avail. I tried to then hard wire the machine and once again it told me that I was connected but I was not. When I ran dmesg, I got the following message: Warning: nss-myhostname is not installed. Changing the local hostname might make it unresolvabe. Please install nss-hostname! Is the hostname the issue? if so, how do I resolve it with out internet connection? If it's not the issue, how do I move forward? Thanks for any help. EDIT. I forgot to attach the image of my ifconfig if that might help.

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• Clean Code Development & Flexible work environment - MSCC 26.10.2013

  Finally, some spare time to summarize my impressions and experiences of the recent meetup of Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community. I already posted my comment on the event and on our social media networks: Professional - It's getting better with our meetups and I really appreciated that 'seniors' and 'juniors' were present today. Despite running a little bit out of time it was really great to see more students coming to the gathering. This time we changed location for our Saturday meetup and it worked out very well. A big thank you to Ebene Accelerator, namely Mrs Poonum, for the ability to use their meeting rooms for our community get-together. Already some weeks ago I had a very pleasant conversation with her about the MSCC aims, 'mission' and how we organise things. Additionally, I think that an environment like the Ebene Accelerator is a good choice as it acts as an incubator for young developers and start-ups. Reactions from other craftsmen Before I put my thoughts about our recent meeting down, I'd like to mention and cross-link to some of the other craftsmen that were present: "MSCC meet up is a massive knowledge gaining strategies for students, future entrepreneurs, or for geeks all around. Knowledge sharing becomes a fun. For those who have not been able to made it do subscribe on our MSCC meet up group at meetup.com." -- Nitin on Learning is fun with #MSCC #Ebene Accelerator "We then talked about the IT industry in Mauritius, salary issues in various field like system administration, software development etc. We analysed the reasons why people tend to hop from one company to another. That was a fun debate." -- Ish on MSCC meetup - Gang of Geeks "Flexible Learning Environment was quite interesting since these lines struck cords : "You're not a secretary....9 to 5 shouldn't suit you"....This allowed reflection...deep reflection....especially regarding the local mindset...which should be changed in a way which would promote creativity rather than choking it till death..." -- Yannick on 2nd MSCC Monthly Meet-up And others on Facebook... ;-) Visual impressions are available on our Meetup event page. More first time attendees We great pleasure I noticed that we have once again more first time visitors. A quick overlook showed that we had a majority of UoM students in first, second or last year. Some of them are already participating in the UoM Computer Club or are nominated as members of the Microsoft Student Partner (MSP) programme. Personally, I really appreciate the fact that the MSCC is able to gather such a broad audience. And as I wrote initially, the MSCC is technology-agnostic; we want IT people from any segment of this business. Of course, students which are about to delve into the 'real world' of working are highly welcome, and I hope that they might get one or other glimpse of experience or advice from employees. Sticking to the schedule? No, not really... And honestly, it was a good choice to go a little bit of the beaten tracks. I mean, yes we have a 'rough' agenda of topics that we would like to talk about or having a presentation about. But we keep it 'agile'. Due to the high number of new faces, we initiated another quick round of introductions and I gave a really brief overview of the MSCC. Next, we started to reflect on the Clean Code Developer (CCD) - Red Grade which we introduced on the last meetup. Nirvan was the lucky one and he did a good job on summarizing the various abbreviations of the first level of being a CCD. Actually, more interesting, we exchanged experience about the principles and practices of Red Grade, and it was very informative to get to know that Yann actually 'interviewed' a couple of friends, other students, local guys working in IT companies as well as some IT friends from India in order to counter-check on what he learned first-hand about Clean Code. Currently, he is reading the book of Robert C. Martin on that topic and I'm looking forward to his review soon. More output generates more input What seems to be like a personal mantra is working out pretty well for me since the beginning of this year. Being more active on social media networks, writing more article on my blog, starting the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community, and contributing more to other online communities has helped me to receive more project requests, job offers and possibilities to expand my business at IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. Actually, it is not a coincidence that one of the questions new craftsmen should answer during registration asks about having a personal blog. Whether you are just curious about IT, right in the middle of your Computer Studies, or already working in software development or system administration since a while you should consider to advertise and market yourself online. Easiest way to resolve this are to have online profiles on professional social media networks like LinkedIn, Xing, Twitter, and Google+ (no Facebook should be considered for private only), and considering to have a personal blog. Why? -- Be yourself, be proud of your work, and let other people know that you're passionate about your profession. Trust me, this is going to open up opportunities you might not have dreamt about... Exchanging ideas about having a professional online presence - MSCC meetup on the 26th October 2013 Furthermore, consider to put your Curriculum Vitae online, too. There are quite a number of service providers like 1ClickCV, Stack Overflow Careers 2.0, etc. which give you the ability to have an up to date CV online. At least put it on your site, next to your personal blog. Similar to what you would be able to see on my site here. Cyber Island Mauritius - are we there? A couple of weeks ago I got a 'cold' message on LinkedIn from someone living in the U.S. asking about the circumstances and conditions of the IT world of Mauritius. He has a great business idea, venture capital and is currently looking for a team of software developers (mainly mobile - iOS) for a new startup here in Mauritius. Since then we exchanged quite some details through private messages and Skype conversations, and I suggested that it might be a good chance to join our meetup through a conference call and see for yourself about potential candidates. During approximately 30 to 40 minutes the brief idea of the new startup was presented - very promising state-of-the-art technology aspects and integration of various public APIs -, and we had a good Q&A session about it. Also thanks to the excellent bandwidth provided by the Ebene Accelerator the video conference between three parties went absolutely well. Clean Code Developer - Orange Grade Hahaha - nice one... Being at the Orange Tower at Ebene and then talking about an Orange Grade as CCD. Well, once again I provided an overview of the principles and practices in that rank of Clean Code, and similar to our last meetup we discussed on the various aspect of each principle, whether someone already got in touch with it during studies or work, and how it could affect their future view on their source code. Following are the principles and practices of Clean Code Developer - Orange Grade: CCD Orange Grade - Principles Single Level of Abstraction (SLA) Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) Separation of Concerns (SoC) Source Code conventions CCD Orange Grade - Practices Issue Tracking Automated Integration Tests Reading, Reading, Reading Reviews Especially the part on reading technical books got some extra attention. We quickly gathered our views on that and came up with a result that ranges between Zero (0) and up to Fifteen (15) book titles per year. Personally, I'm keeping my progress between Six (6) and Eight (8) titles per year, but at least One (1) per quarter of a year. Which is also connected to the fact that I'm participating in the O'Reilly Reader Review Program and have a another benefit to get access to free books only by writing and publishing a review afterwards. We also had a good exchange on the extended topic of 'Reviews' - which to my opinion is abnormal difficult here in Mauritius for various reasons. As far as I can tell from my experience working with Mauritian software developers, either as colleagues, employees or during consulting services there are unfortunately two dominant pattern on that topic: Keeping quiet Running away Honestly, I have no evidence about why these are the two 'solutions' on reviews but that's the situation that I had to face over the last couple of years. Sitting together and talking about problematic issues, tackling down root causes of de-motivational activities and working on general improvements doesn't seem to have a ground within the IT world of Mauritius. Are you a typist or a creative software craftsman? - MSCC meetup on the 26th October 2013 One very good example that we talked about was the fact of 'job hoppers' as you can easily observe it on someone's CV - those people change job every single year; for no obvious reason! Frankly speaking, I wouldn't even consider an IT person like to for an interview. As a company you're investing money and effort into the abilities of your employees. Hiring someone that won't stay for a longer period is out of question. And sorry to say, these kind of IT guys smell fishy about their capabilities and more likely to cause problems than actually produce productive results. One of the reasons why there is a probation period on an employment contract is to give you the liberty to leave as early as possible in case that you don't like your new position. Don't fool yourself or waste other people's time and money by hanging around a full year only to snatch off the bonus payment... Future outlook: Developer's Conference Even though it is not official yet I already mentioned it several times during our weekly Code & Coffee sessions. The MSCC is looking forward to be able to organise or to contribute to an upcoming IT event. Currently, the rough schedule is set for April 2014 but this mainly depends on availability of location(s), a decent time frame for preparations, and the underlying procedures with public bodies to have it approved and so on. As soon as the information about date and location has been fixed there will be a 'Call for Papers' period in order to attract local IT enthusiasts to apply for a session slot and talk about their field of work and their passion in IT. More to come for sure... My resume of the day It was a great gathering and I am very pleased about the fact that we had another 15 craftsmen (plus 2 businessmen on conference call plus 2 young apprentices) in the same room, talking about IT related topics and sharing their experience as employees and students. Personally, I really appreciated the feedback from the students about their current view on their future career, and I really hope that some of them are going to pursue their dreams. Start promoting yourself and it will happen... Looking forward to your blogs! And last but not least our numbers on Meetup and Facebook have been increased as a direct consequence of this meetup. Please, spread the word about the MSCC and get your friends and colleagues to join our official site. The higher the number of craftsmen we have the better chances we have t achieve something great! Thanks!

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• How to manage long running background threads and report progress with DDD

  - by Mr Happy

  Title says most of it. I have found surprising little information about this. I have a long running operation of which the user wants to see the progress (as in, item x of y processed). I also need to be able to pause and stop the operation. (Stopping doesn't rollback the items already processed.) The thing is, it's not that each item takes a long time to get processed, it's that that there are usually a lot of items. And what I've read about so far is that it's somewhat of an anti-pattern to put something like a queue in the DB. I currently don't have any messaging system in place, and I've never worked with one either. Another thing I read somewhere is that progress reporting is something that belongs in the application layer, but it didn't go into the details. So having said all this, what I have in mind is the following. User request with list of items enters the application layer. Application layer gets some information from the domain needed to process the items. Application layer passes the items and the information off to some domain service (should the implementation of this service belong in the infrastructure layer?) This service spins up a worker thread with callbacks for both progress reporting and pausing/stopping it. This worker thread will process each item in it's own UoW. This means the domain information from earlier needs to be stored in some DTO. Since nothing is really persisted, the service should be singleton and thread safe Whenever a user requests a progress report or wants to pause/stop the operation, the application layer will ask the service. Would this be a correct solution? Or am I at least on the right track with this? Especially the singleton and thread safe part makes the whole thing feel icky.

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• What's your most controversial programming opinion?

  - by Jon Skeet

  This is definitely subjective, but I'd like to try to avoid it becoming argumentative. I think it could be an interesting question if people treat it appropriately. The idea for this question came from the comment thread from my answer to the "What are five things you hate about your favorite language?" question. I contended that classes in C# should be sealed by default - I won't put my reasoning in the question, but I might write a fuller explanation as an answer to this question. I was surprised at the heat of the discussion in the comments (25 comments currently). So, what contentious opinions do you hold? I'd rather avoid the kind of thing which ends up being pretty religious with relatively little basis (e.g. brace placing) but examples might include things like "unit testing isn't actually terribly helpful" or "public fields are okay really". The important thing (to me, anyway) is that you've got reasons behind your opinions. Please present your opinion and reasoning - I would encourage people to vote for opinions which are well-argued and interesting, whether or not you happen to agree with them.

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• Kids and programming: ScratchKara

  - by Mike Pagel

  Ever now and then I kept wondering how to share with my kids the excitement of creating something with your computer. Of course, today this is a bit more difficult, as they have seen 3D animation games and well-edited websites. I guess that's why they weren't all that hyped when I found my first computer model at our local recycling facilities (an 8-bit Laser VZ-200 with rubber keys). When I finally got it up and running with an old analog TV set they finally asked whether we could play soccer on it. Needless to say that my showing them how it remembers some BASIC commands and lists and executes them did not make any impression. So the question is for real: How do you get today's kids excited about programming? And just recently I looked again for environments that allow even young kids (mine are 7 and 9 years old now) to do something and have fun. Obviously any real, text-oriented programming language wouldn't work well. To cut it short: Something really nice was built by University of Oldenburg: ScratchKara. It is the perfect mixture of Kara, a simulation of a little ladybug and Scratch, an authoring environment from MIT. ScratchKara allows kids to initially simply explore how the bug moves and turns by pressing the action buttons, then move towards sequencing commands through drag & drop, and eventually end up building algorithms with procedures and functions. Even through it is built for kids and beginners, the environment comes with debugging and refactoring, which I found more than amazing. My kids love it and I have to admit I keep thinking about how to solve a bit more advanced problems with this language, which does not allow you to store any state information (other than your call stack). Yes, I am hooked, too... Once the language is understood you can then move to one of the original Kara versions, where you can define the bug's behavior through finite statemachines, Turing tables, Java and other textual languages. And from there, anything is possible.

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• What benefits can I get upgrading my ASP.NET (Webform) + DAL(EF) + Repository + BLL structure to MVC?

  - by Etienne

  I'm in the process of defining an approach that may best fit our needs for a big web application development. For now, I'm thinking going with an ASP.NET Architecture with a DAL using Entity Framework, a Repository concept to not access DAL directly from BLL and a BLL that call the repository and make every manipulations necessary to prepare data to push in a presentation layer (.aspx files). I don't plan to use ASP.Net controls and prefer to keep things simple and lightweight using plain html, jQuery UI controls and do most of the server calls with jQuery Ajax. Sometimes, when needed, I plan to use handlers (.ashx) to call BLL methods that will return JSON or HTML to client for dynamic stuff. My solution also has a test project that Mock the Repository with in-memory data to not repose on database for testing BLL methods... It may be usefull to add that we will build a big application over this architecture with hundreds of tables and store procedures with a lot of reading and writing to database. My question is, having this architecture in mind, Is there any evident advantages that I can obtain by using an MVC3 project instead of the described architecture base on Webform? Do you see any problem in this architecture that may cause us problem during the next steps of development? I know the MVC pattern for using it in others projects with Django... but the Microsoft MVC implementation look so much more complex and verbose than Django MVC and it's why I'm hesitating (or waiting for a little push?) right now before jumping into it... We are in a real project with deadlines and don't want to slow the development process without any real benefits.

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• Introducing a (new) test method to a team

  - by Jon List

  A couple of months ago i was hired in a new job. (I'm fresh out of my Masters in software engineering) The company mainly consists of ERP consultants, but I was hired in their fairly small web department (6 developers), our main task is ERP/ecom integration (ERP-integrated web shops). The department is growing, and recently my manager asked me to start thinking about introducing tests to the team, i love a challenge, but frankly I'm a bit scared (I'm the least experience member of the team). Currently the method of testing is clicking around in the web shop and asking the customer if the products are there, if they look okay, and if orders are posted correctly to the ERP. We are getting a lot of support cases on previous projects, where a customer or a customer's customer have run into errors, which - i suppose - is why my manager wants more structured testing. Off the top of my head, I though of some (obvious?) improvements, like looking at the requirement specification, having an issue tracker, enabling team members to register their time on a "tests"-line on the budget, and to circulate tasks amongst members of the team. But as i see it we have three main challenges: general website testing. (javascript, C#, ASP.NET and CMS integration tests) (live) ERP integration testing (customers rarely want to pay for test environments). adopting a method in the team I like the responsibility, but I am afraid that I'm in a little bit over my head. I expect that my manager expects me to set up some kind of workshop for the team where I present some techniques and ideas and where we(the team) can find some solutions together. What I learned in school was mostly unit testing and program verification, not so much testing across multiple systems and applications. What I'm looking for here, is references/advice/pointers/anecdotes; anything that might help me to get smarter and to improve the current method of my team. Thanks!! (TL;DR: read the bold parts)

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• Teaching OO to VBA developers [closed]

  - by Eugene

  I work with several developers that come from less object oriented background like (VB6, VBA) and are mostly self-taught. As part of moving away from those technologies we recently we started having weekly workshops to go over the features of C#.NET and OO practices and design principles. After a couple of weeks of basic introduction I noticed that they had a lot of problems implementing even basic code. For instance it took probably 15 minutes to implement a Stack.push() and a full hour to implement a simple Stack fully. These developers were trying to do things like passing top index as a parameter to the method, not creating an private array, using variables out of scope. But most of all not going through the "design (dia/mono)log" (I need something to do X, so maybe I'll make an array, or put it here). I am a little confused because they are smart people and are able to produce functional code in their traditional environments. I'm curious if anybody else has encountered a similar thing and if there are any particular resources, exercises, books, ideas that would be helpful in this circumstance.

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• Windows Store now open to ALL developers

  - by CSharpZealot

  A little late, but it should be announced here too... Today’s an especially great day to be a developer. We’re very excited to announce the last significant milestone in the rollout of the Windows Store before the general availability of Windows 8 on October 26. The Store is now open for app submissions from all developers – individuals and companies – in our supported markets, and we’ve added 82 more app submission markets! Now, developers from 120 markets can publish Windows Store apps. Ted Dworkin, Partner Program Manager for the Store, authored this post. --Antoine Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsstore/archive/2012/09/11/windows-store-now-open-to-all-developers.aspx About two weeks ago the Windows Store was opened and with the upcoming general availability of Windows 8 in October, it seems that it was good timing. In addition to the store being opened, Microsoft also announced that the MSDN, BizSpark and DreamSpark will get a 1-year Windows Store developer account. That's a different tact than what we saw for the Windows Phone 7, where we didn't get that subscription included. We're already seeing new apps showing up faster and faster, so with the addition of 86 more markets we're only going to see more apps than ever available. Since i'm now back on a Windows 8 platform (was out for about a month) I'm going to start blogging more content around the Windows 8 developer experience. Next stop for me...get my hands on a Windows 8 surface device as quickly as possible :) Keep coding!

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• Laptop Charger Not Recognised Properly on Samsung NP900X3F

  - by user193732

  Firstly thanks for your time. Secondly, having an issue with my power charger on my Samsung Series 9 NP900X3F. When I boot into Ubuntu with the charger plugged in it recognises it as charging. When I unplug the charger after this it is still says it is charging. If I suspend in Ubuntu then plug/unplug during this suspended state it recognises it, but not during normal running. If I knew a little more I'm sure I could grab logs and find out what the difference between wake on suspend and normal running is, but alas I need help! I also am having issues with my keyboard backlight via the fn keys, but that I care about far less. Thank you very much. Linux mikey-900X3F 3.12.0-031200rc1-generic #201309161735 SMP Mon Sep 16 21:38:21 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux (I upgraded my kernel version to remove heinous horizontal artefacts I was getting) Happy to list more info about my system, ima bit of a noob. I did try searching however I can't find any questions at all about my system or related models with the same issue.

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• Can non-IT people handle a wiki?

  - by Andrew Heath

  (I'm hoping that some of you will have encountered this issue before and can offer some insights...) My company is looking to improve their market research data management. Current data management style: "Hey Jimbo, where's that picture of our WhatZit 2.0? "yeah I remember that email about that company from that guy, gimme a few minutes to search my Outlook" "who has the newest copy of the Important Competitor's product catalogue? Mine is from '09." ... "Colleen does, and she's on maternity leave. You'll have to call her to get her workstation password..." Desired data management style: data organized neatly by topic (legal, economic, industrial, competitor) for each topic, multiple media types stored together (company product images, press releases, contact info) but still neatly sorted by type data editing histories communal access (no data silos) I was thinking about setting up a department wiki for all users to access. It seems to satisfy the four criteria above, but I'm a little concerned about how user-friendly (read: decipherable to non-technical people) it is for the more advanced features like image galleries, article formatting, and the like. Has anyone here setup a wiki for non-IT people and had it not catch on fire//become a ghost town//look like Geocities? Bonus question: can you see any obvious drawbacks to my choice of MediaWiki (or any other wiki) for solving this problem? Thank you.

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• Documenting your database with Visual Studio 2012 SSDT tools

  - by krislankford

  The title of this post is interesting and something I am wishing you and your colleagues had a better way to do. I understand as I am asked this question frequently. I couple of weeks ago I was asked the same question by a customer who documents their database using the ApexSQL Doc tools which uses the extended properties on objects to create automated documentation. I thought that was super interesting and went down the path to see how we could could support the creation of this documentation while leveraging the Visual Studio 2012 SSDT Tools. What I found is was rather intriguing. There is a property called “Description” on all objects in the SSDT tools. This property is rather subtle and I am betting overlooked. To be honest, this property has probably been there for a while and I just never discovered it. Adding text to this '”Description” property it allows Visual Studio to create the commands for the extended properties directly to your schema which should be version controlled. As I did more digging there seemed to be extended properties at every level in the SQL database objects. This fills some rather challenging gaps and allows organizations to manage SQL Schema using the Visual Studio SQL database tools while allowing a way to automatically document the database. This will also work in the automation of the creation and alter scripts that can be generated as part f an automated build system. Now we essentially get a way to store, build and document the database in a nice little ALM package. Happy Coding!

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