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• The cost of longer delay between development and QA

  - by Neil N

  At my current position, QA has become a bottleneck. We have had the unfortunate occurence of features being held out of the current build so that QA could finish testing. This means features that are done being developed may not get tested for 2-3 weeks after the developer has already moved on. With dev moving faster thean QA, this time gap is only going to get bigger. I keep flipping through my copy of Code Compelte, looking for a "Hard Data" snippet that shows the cost of fixing defects grows exponentially the longer it exists. Can someone point me to some studies that back up this concept? I am trying to convince the powers that be that the QA bottleneck is a lot more costly than they think.

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• Why fork a library for your own application?

  - by Mr. Shickadance

  Why should a programmer ever fork a library for inclusion in a widely used application? I ask this question because I was reading an article about why Chromium isn't packaged for many Linux distros like Fedora. Apparently its largely due to the fact that Google has forked a number of libraries, modified them, and included them in Chromium. This has driven up the complexity of packaging releases. There are a number of reasons why this can be a bad thing, but how strong a case can you actually make for doing so in a large widely used application such as Chromium? The original article: http://ostatic.com/blog/making-projects-easier-to-package-why-chromium-isnt-in-fedora Isn't it usually worth the effort to make slight modifications to your own program in order to use a popular and well developed library?

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• How important are unit tests in software development?

  - by Lo Wai Lun

  We are doing software testing by testing a lot of I/O cases, so developers and system analysts can open reviews and test for their committed code within a given time period (e.g. 1 week). But when it come across with extracting information from a database, how to consider the cases and the corresponding methodology to start with? Although that is more likely to be a case studies because the unit-testing depends on the project we have involved which is too specific and particular most of the time. What is the general overview of the steps and precautions for unit-testing?

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• How do you overcome your own coding biases when handed legacy code?

  - by Bryan M.

  As programmers, we often take incredible pride in our skills and hold very strong opinions about what is 'good' code and 'bad' code. At any given point in our careers, we've probably had some legacy system dropped in our laps, and thought 'My god, this code sucks!' because it didn't fit into our notion of what good code should be, despite the fact that it may have well been perfectly functional, maintainable code. How do you prepare yourself mentally when trying to get your head around another programmer's work?

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• How to chose a develop method?

  - by Martin

  There are many academic/industrial researchs about various development methods (Scrum, XP, waterfall, ect.), telling us how to do it right and stuff. But I never saw something that suggest how to choose a method, what will be better for a given project. I know that what the developers are used to is an very important aspect. But lets say that I am assembling a new group from scratch, and that every programmer in the world is willing to work with me. :) What aspects of the project should I consider to decide between Scrum, XP, TDD, ect.? Or is that an entirely human thing, regardless of what is being developed? I said that all programmers are available, but you may comment they're knowledge about the domain, or other characteristics in the answers. E.g. "If you chose to hire people with no domain knowledge, MethodX is better than MathodY, beacause ...." is a completely welcomed answer.

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• Webcast: Introduction To Causal Factors

  - by ChristineS-Oracle

  Webcast: Introduction To Causal Factors Date: June 11, 2014 at 11:00 am ET, 10:00 am CT, 9:00 am MT, 8:00 am PT, 8:30 pm, India Time (Mumbai, GMT+05:30) This one hour advisor webcast will provide an introduction to causal factors for Demand Management and AFDM. Pre-seeded causal factors will be discussed as well as when they are not appropriate. Scenarios of when to add causal factors will be covered and best practice method of adding and using. Topics will include: Causal factors in DM and AFDM Pre-seeded causal factors When to modify causal factor settings Best practice when working with causal factors Details & Registration: Doc ID 1664606.1

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• How do I make the jump from developing for Android to Windows Phone 7?

  - by Rob S.

  I'm planning on making the jump over from developing apps for Android to developing apps for Windows Phone 7 as well. For starters, I figured I would port over my simplest app. The code itself isn't much of a problem as the transition from Java to C# isn't that bad. If anything, this transition is actually easier than I expected. What is troublesome is switching SDKs. I've already compiled some basic Windows Phone 7 apps and ran through some tutorials but I'm still feeling a bit lost. For example, I'm not sure what the equivalent of a ScrollView on Android would be on Windows Phone 7. So does anyone have any advice or any resources they can offer me to help me make this transition? Additionally, any comments on the Windows Phone 7 app market (especially in comparison to the Android market) would also be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much in advance for your time.

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• What is your strategy for converting RC builds into retail?

  - by Matthew PK

  We're trying to implement a strategy for how we transition our builds from RC to released retail code. When we label a build as a release candidate, we send it to QA for regression. If they approve it, that RC then becomes our released retail code. I liked the idea of "obvious" labeling of versions so that a user knows whether they have a beta or an RC or retail code... where you would have some obvious watermark in non-retail code (think Windows 7 where the RC or non-genuine builds watermark in the bottom right). ... but it seemed strange to us to manipulate the project (to remove the watermark) once it passed regression. If QA certified version a.b.c.d then our retail code should be that same version, not a.b.c.d+1 what strategies have you employed to clearly label non-release software versions without incrementing your build to disable the watermarks in your retail code? One idea I've considered is writing your build to look for a signed file in the installer archive... non-release code wouldn't include this file and so the app would know to display a watermark. But even this seems like QA is then working with non-release code. Ideas?

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• What does mathematics have to do with programming?

  - by Rory

  I just started a diploma in software development. Right now we're starting out with basic Java and such (so right from the bottom you might say) - which is fine, I have no programming experience apart from knowing how to do "Hello World" in Java. I keep hearing that mathematics is pertinent to coding, but how is it so? What general examples would show how mathematics and programming go together, or are reliant on one another? I apologize of my question is vague, I'm barely starting to get a rough idea of the kind of world I'm stepping into as a code monkey student...

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• Do we need to adopt a black-box asset our project is inheriting from its predecessor?

  - by Tom Anderson

  Our client has an eCommerce site which was developed by an in-house team, and is now showing its age. I work for a firm brought in as external contractors to build a replacement. Part of the current site is a Flash viewer applet which displays media about the product - zoom-able images, 360-degree views, movies, and so on. We need to show the same media the current site does, so we are simply reusing the viewer. The viewer is embedded on a page in the usual way, and told what media to show by means of an XML file it loads from our server, which is pretty simple for us to generate. We've got this working; it was pretty straightforward. But what else do we need to do? The thing is, as far as we're concerned, the viewer is a binary blob which is served from the client's content-distribution network. We embed it, feed it some XML, and it does its job, but we have no power over its internals. It's completely opaque to us - a black box. We can use it to do what it does, but we can't change it, so if we ever need to do something different, we're stuffed. We're building this site for the client, and when we're done, we'll hand it over for them to maintain. We won't be doing the maintenance ourselves. There's a small team within the client who are working as part of our team, and who will be the ones doing the maintenance. That team only includes one person from the team that built the old site, and it's not someone who knows the image viewer. The people who do know the image viewer are not slated to join our team when our system replaces theirs - they'll be moved to other projects. The documentation on the viewer is extremely thin, and as far as i know doesn't cover the internals at all. My worry is that if someone doesn't take some positive action, all knowledge of the internal workings of the viewer - even down to where the source code for it is - will be lost. It's possible it already has been. Is this something to worry about? If so, whose job is it to worry about it? What should they do about it once they've got worried?

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• Expanding existing DVCS Wiki

  - by A Lion

  A portion of my job is to maintain technical documentation for a rapidly expanding manufacturing company. Because it is only a portion of my job and the company's product line is expanding so quickly, I can't stay on top of the documentation. As a result, I've been yearning for an information management system with a handful of specific features. I've found many products that have a subset, but none that have all the features I'm looking for. I'm at the point of picking an existing product and expanding it to cover my desired feature set, however, this will be a pet project and I will be learning the underlying language as I go. So, the main question is which existing product will be the easiest to expand to cover the full feature set and has a relatively easy to learn language? Alternatively, have I missed another existing program that will cover the feature set or should be in my list of "close, but not quite there"? Feature Set web interface based on a distributed version control system (e.g., git) easy to edit by logged in novices (e.g. wiki, multimarkdown) outputs in more traditional formats (e.g., doc, odt, pdf) edits held in queue until editor/engineer/manager approves them (e.g., MS Word editing) [this is the really big elephant in list - suggestions on where to start appreciated] edits held in queue specifically for engineer approval [extra limb of the elephant in the list] well-supported in the open source community Closest, but not quite there ikiwiki - http://ikiwiki.info (php) lots of awesome functionality and extensions, including easy to edit and based on DVCS lacks a review/forward for review queue appears to be well-supported within the OSS community gitit - http://gitit.net/ (haskell) easy to edit and based on DVCS lots of outputs in traditional formats a great web-based gui diff interface lacks a review/forward for review queue appears to be primarily maintained by one individual

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• How can a solo programmer become a good team player?

  - by Nick

  I've been programming (obsessively) since I was 12. I am fairly knowledgeable across the spectrum of languages out there, from assembly, to C++, to Javascript, to Haskell, Lisp, and Qi. But all of my projects have been by myself. I got my degree in chemical engineering, not CS or computer engineering, but for the first time this fall I'll be working on a large programming project with other people, and I have no clue how to prepare. I've been using Windows all of my life, but this project is going to be very unix-y, so I purchased a Mac recently in the hopes of familiarizing myself with the environment. I was fortunate to participate in a hackathon with some friends this past year -- both CS majors -- and excitingly enough, we won. But I realized as I worked with them that their workflow was very different from mine. They used Git for version control. I had never used it at the time, but I've since learned all that I can about it. They also used a lot of frameworks and libraries. I had to learn what Rails was pretty much overnight for the hackathon (on the other hand, they didn't know what lexical scoping or closures were). All of our code worked well, but they didn't understand mine, and I didn't understand theirs. I hear references to things that real programmers do on a daily basis -- unit testing, code reviews, but I only have the vaguest sense of what these are. I normally don't have many bugs in my little projects, so I have never needed a bug tracking system or tests for them. And the last thing is that it takes me a long time to understand other people's code. Variable naming conventions (that vary with each new language) are difficult (__mzkwpSomRidicAbbrev), and I find the loose coupling difficult. That's not to say I don't loosely couple things -- I think I'm quite good at it for my own work, but when I download something like the Linux kernel or the Chromium source code to look at it, I spend hours trying to figure out how all of these oddly named directories and files connect. It's a programming sin to reinvent the wheel, but I often find it's just quicker to write up the functionality myself than to spend hours dissecting some library. Obviously, people who do this for a living don't have these problems, and I'll need to get to that point myself. Question: What are some steps that I can take to begin "integrating" with everyone else? Thanks!

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• Are XML Comments Necessary Documentation?

  - by Bob Horn

  I used to be a fan of requiring XML comments for documentation. I've since changed my mind for two main reasons: Like good code, methods should be self-explanatory. In practice, most XML comments are useless noise that provide no additional value. Many times we simply use GhostDoc to generate generic comments, and this is what I mean by useless noise: /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the unit of measure. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The unit of measure. /// </value> public string UnitOfMeasure { get; set; } To me, that's obvious. Having said that, if there were special instructions to include, then we should absolutely use XML comments. I like this excerpt from this article: Sometimes, you will need to write comments. But, it should be the exception not the rule. Comments should only be used when they are expressing something that cannot be expressed in code. If you want to write elegant code, strive to eliminate comments and instead write self-documenting code. Am I wrong to think we should only be using XML comments when the code isn't enough to explain itself on its own? I believe this is a good example where XML comments make pretty code look ugly. It takes a class like this... public class RawMaterialLabel : EntityBase { public long Id { get; set; } public string ManufacturerId { get; set; } public string PartNumber { get; set; } public string Quantity { get; set; } public string UnitOfMeasure { get; set; } public string LotNumber { get; set; } public string SublotNumber { get; set; } public int LabelSerialNumber { get; set; } public string PurchaseOrderNumber { get; set; } public string PurchaseOrderLineNumber { get; set; } public DateTime ManufacturingDate { get; set; } public string LastModifiedUser { get; set; } public DateTime LastModifiedTime { get; set; } public Binary VersionNumber { get; set; } public ICollection<LotEquipmentScan> LotEquipmentScans { get; private set; } } ... And turns it into this: /// <summary> /// Container for properties of a raw material label /// </summary> public class RawMaterialLabel : EntityBase { /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the id. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The id. /// </value> public long Id { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the manufacturer id. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The manufacturer id. /// </value> public string ManufacturerId { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the part number. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The part number. /// </value> public string PartNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the quantity. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The quantity. /// </value> public string Quantity { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the unit of measure. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The unit of measure. /// </value> public string UnitOfMeasure { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the lot number. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The lot number. /// </value> public string LotNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the sublot number. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The sublot number. /// </value> public string SublotNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the label serial number. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The label serial number. /// </value> public int LabelSerialNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the purchase order number. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The purchase order number. /// </value> public string PurchaseOrderNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the purchase order line number. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The purchase order line number. /// </value> public string PurchaseOrderLineNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the manufacturing date. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The manufacturing date. /// </value> public DateTime ManufacturingDate { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the last modified user. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The last modified user. /// </value> public string LastModifiedUser { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the last modified time. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The last modified time. /// </value> public DateTime LastModifiedTime { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the version number. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The version number. /// </value> public Binary VersionNumber { get; set; } /// <summary> /// Gets the lot equipment scans. /// </summary> /// <value> /// The lot equipment scans. /// </value> public ICollection<LotEquipmentScan> LotEquipmentScans { get; private set; } }

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• How to choose a development method?

  - by Martin

  There are many academic/industrial researchs about various development methods (Scrum, XP, waterfall, ect.), telling us how to do it right and stuff. But I never saw something that suggest how to choose a method, what will be better for a given project. I know that what the developers are used to is an very important aspect. But lets say that I am assembling a new group from scratch, and that every programmer in the world is willing to work with me. :) What aspects of the project should I consider to decide between Scrum, XP, TDD, ect.? Or is that an entirely human thing, regardless of what is being developed? I said that all programmers are available, but you may comment they're knowledge about the domain, or other characteristics in the answers. E.g. "If you chose to hire people with no domain knowledge, MethodX is better than MathodY, beacause ...." is a completely welcomed answer.

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• What are approaches for analyzing the cost-benefits of a development methodology?

  - by Garrett Hall

  There are many development practices (TDD, continuous integration, cowboy-coding), principles (SOLID, layers of abstraction, KISS), and processes (RUP, Scrum, XP, Waterfall). I have learned you can't follow any of these blindly, but have to consider context and ROI (return on investment). My question is: How do you know whether you are getting a good ROI by following a particular methodology? Metrics, guesstimation, experience? Do analytical methods exist? Or is this just the million-dollar question in software engineering that has no answer?

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• Does 3d modeling software *choice used during asset creation affect performance at runtime

  - by user134143

  Does software used to create 3d assets (for game development specifically) have an impact on the efficiency of the program. In other words. Is it possible to reduce the operating footprint of an application merely by utilizing alternative development software during production of 3d assets. If you use two different applications to create a 3 dimensional image of a box, can one of them result in better performance if aspects of the image are identical? Sorry if this question seems vague, I am attempting to get the information I need without causing unnecessary debate over specific software choice. Thank you.

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• Time tracking and payment registration architecture

  - by egis

  ?itle might be a little bit incorrect. :) Anyway, I'm building a software where employees input time they worked per day (work hours) and employer "pays" for this time. "Payment" is done outside this system, so employer just "confirms" (checkbox or something like this) which work hours are paid. So the question is - what is the best way (both UI and data storage wise) to implement this? At the moment I have this idea: Employee selects week and manually (with some Javascript helpers, like "fill the same time for all days") inputs work hours in every day of the week. Employer confirms payment the same way employee inputs data (selects week, confirms each day). Data is saved in DB as unix timestamp (one day per table row). Problem is 14 inputs (7 days * ("hours from" + "hours to" input), yet this approach seems kinda easy to implement. Maybe I'm overlooking something and this can be done differently and better? Maybe someone has any example of already working software?

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• Tracking feature requests for small-scale components

  - by DXM

  I'm curious how other development teams (especially those that work in moderate to large development groups) track "future" features/wishlists for functionality for internally developed frameworks or components. I know the standard advice is that a development team should find one good tool for tracking bugs/features and use that for everything and I agree with that if the future requests are for the product itself. In my company we have an engineering department, which is broken up into multiple groups and within each there can be one to several agile teams. The bug tracking product we use has been "a leader since 1997" (their UI/usability seems to also be evaluated against that year even today) but my agile team or even group doesn't really control what is being used by the whole department. What we are looking to track is not necessarily product features but expansion/nice to have functionality for internal components that go into our product. So to name a few for example... framework/utility library on top of CppUnit which our developers share low-level IPC communications framework Common development SDK that myself and several other team leads started to help share some common code/tools at the department-wide level (this SDK is released as internal "product" to each of the groups). Is the standard practice to use the one bug tracking tool? Or would it make more sense to setup something more localized specifically for our needs and maintain it ourselves? It's also unclear how management will feel if developers start performing "IT" roles of maintaining software and servers. At the same time, right now, we use excel files, internal wiki and MS OneNote for this kind of stuff and that just doesn't feel right. (I'm afraid to ask for actual software recommendations, since that might make this question more localized or something. Also developers needs this way more than management, so it would be nice to find something either free or no more than the cost of a happy hour).

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• Data Movement and the Decision Matrix

  - by BuckWoody

  Maybe it’s my military background, or maybe I’ve always had this predilection, but I like to use two devices when I need to make a complex decision: A checklist and a decision matrix. I like to use a checklist because it ensures that I remember the big bits of what I need to do, and brings up questions or areas that I didn’t think about when evaluating options for the decision. And the decision matrix – that’s the thing I use to actually lay out those options. It’s simply a spreadsheet-like grid (I use Excel, but paper and pencil works as well) that lays out the requirements or advantages for the decision across the top, and the options I have on the left-hand side. Then in the “cells” I put whether or not that option on the left will meet the requirement in that column. I then simply “weight” each cell to organize the choices by best-fit. The right answer (or answers) will float right to the top. I was asked yesterday about options for moving data in SQL Server to another system. There are just dozens of ways to do this, from bcp to Replication, each with certain advantages and costs. But asking the questions for the top row first helped me show the person that it isn’t a particular technology that is important, it’s laying out those requirements and thinking about which elements are more important than the other. For instance, is it more important to have the data moved all the time, or is it OK if that happens once in a while? Does the data have to move in two directions or just one? All of these will help that answer jump right out. Try it sometime – it’s a great learning exercise, since it will force you to focus on filling out the matrix. The answer is out there, Neo. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• Where should you put constants and why?

  - by Tim Meyer

  In our mostly large applications, we usually have a only few locations for constants: One class for GUI and internal contstants (Tab Page titles, Group Box titles, calculation factors, enumerations) One class for database tables and columns (this part is generated code) plus readable names for them (manually assigned) One class for application messages (logging, message boxes etc) The constants are usually separated into different structs in those classes. In our C++ applications, the constants are only defined in the .h file and the values are assigned in the .cpp file. One of the advantages is that all strings etc are in one central place and everybody knows where to find them when something must be changed. This is especially something project managers seem to like as people come and go and this way everybody can change such trivial things without having to dig into the application's structure. Also, you can easily change the title of similar Group Boxes / Tab Pages etc at once. Another aspect is that you can just print that class and give it to a non-programmer who can check if the captions are intuitive, and if messages to the user are too detailed or too confusing etc. However, I see certain disadvantages: Every single class is tightly coupled to the constants classes Adding/Removing/Renaming/Moving a constant requires recompilation of at least 90% of the application (Note: Changing the value doesn't, at least for C++). In one of our C++ projects with 1500 classes, this means around 7 minutes of compilation time (using precompiled headers; without them it's around 50 minutes) plus around 10 minutes of linking against certain static libraries. Building a speed optimized release through the Visual Studio Compiler takes up to 3 hours. I don't know if the huge amount of class relations is the source but it might as well be. You get driven into temporarily hard-coding strings straight into code because you want to test something very quickly and don't want to wait 15 minutes just for that test (and probably every subsequent one). Everybody knows what happens to the "I will fix that later"-thoughts. Reusing a class in another project isn't always that easy (mainly due to other tight couplings, but the constants handling doesn't make it easier.) Where would you store constants like that? Also what arguments would you bring in order to convince your project manager that there are better concepts which also comply with the advantages listed above? Feel free to give a C++-specific or independent answer. PS: I know this question is kind of subjective but I honestly don't know of any better place than this site for this kind of question. Update on this project I have news on the compile time thing: Following Caleb's and gbjbaanb's posts, I split my constants file into several other files when I had time. I also eventually split my project into several libraries which was now possible much easier. Compiling this in release mode showed that the auto-generated file which contains the database definitions (table, column names and more - more than 8000 symbols) and builds up certain hashes caused the huge compile times in release mode. Deactivating MSVC's optimizer for the library which contains the DB constants now allowed us to reduce the total compile time of your Project (several applications) in release mode from up to 8 hours to less than one hour! We have yet to find out why MSVC has such a hard time optimizing these files, but for now this change relieves a lot of pressure as we no longer have to rely on nightly builds only. That fact - and other benefits, such as less tight coupling, better reuseability etc - also showed that spending time splitting up the "constants" wasn't such a bad idea after all ;-)

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• How to shift development culture from tech fetish to focusing on simplicity and getting things done?

  - by Serge

  Looking for ways to switch team/individual culture from chasing latest fads, patterns, and all kinds of best practices to focusing on finding quickest and simplest solutions and shipping features. My definition of "tech fetish": Chasing latest fads, applying new technologies and best practices without considering product/project impact, focusing on micro optimization, creating platforms and frameworks instead of finding simple and quick ways to ship product features. Few examples of culture differences: From "Spent a day on trying to map database query with five complex joins in NHibernate" to "Wrote a SQL query and used DataReader to pull data in" From "Wrote super-fast JSON parser in C++" to "Used Python to parse JSON response and call C++ code" From "Let's use WCF because it supports all possible communication standards" to "REST is simple text-based format, let's stick with it and use simple HTTP handlers"

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• Should a project start with the client or the server?

  - by MadBurn

  Pretty simple question with a complex answer. Should a project start with the client or the server, and why? Where should a single programmer start a client/server project? What are the best practices and what are the reasons behind them? If you can't think of any, what reasons do you use to justify why you would choose to start one before the other? Personally, I'm asking this question because I'm finishing up specs for a project I will be doing for myself on the side for fun. But now that I'm finishing this phase, I'm wondering "ok, now where do I begin?" Since I've never done a project like this by myself, I'm not sure where I should start. In this project, my server will be doing all the heavy lifting and the client will just be sending updates, getting information from the server, and displaying it. But, I don't want that to sway the answer as I'm looking for more of an in depth and less specific answer that would apply to any project I begin in the future.

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• Do support sites like stackoverflow upset the paid-support open source model?

  - by ajax81

  In order to stay relevant in the marketplace, I'm researching new business models for my software company. The open source model with paid support seems like a good fit for our product, but I have concerns about whether or not a paid support model is viable in an era where top-notch help is readily available for free on sites like those in the StackExchange network. Case in point -- I moved my employees to Ubuntu last year because I didn't want to pay for Win 7 licenses and new hardware (plus, the mono platform was highly attractive). My staff had no Linux experience, but were able to achieve relative competency in about 120 days with the help of AskUbuntu, StackOverflow, and a few "For Dummies" books. We did employ an Ubuntu consultant for 7 days to provide training and support, but beyond that spent $0.00 on any kind of paid expertise. In regards to my due diligence, I ran a 3 month beta of the freemium-paid-support model with one of our smaller customers, and achieved mediocre results. I'd like to think its because our software is so stable and easy to use that the customer didn't need much paid support, but I suspect that they circumvented the terms of our SLA in the same manner that we did with the move to Ubuntu. Does anyone out there has any thoughts, advice, or experience relevant to the move I'm considering? What worked, what didn't, etc? Thanks in advance!

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• How do I make the jump from Android to Windows Phone 7?

  - by Rob S.

  I'm planning on making the jump over from developing apps for Android to developing apps for Windows Phone 7 as well. For starters, I figured I would port over my simplest app. The code itself isn't much of a problem. The transition from Java to C# isn't that bad. It's actually easier than I expected. What is troublesome is switching SDKs. I've already compiled some basic Windows Phone 7 apps and ran through some tutorials but I'm still feeling a bit lost. For example, I'm not sure what the equivalent of a ScrollView on Android would be on Windows Phone 7. So does anyone have any advice or any resources they can offer me to help me make this transition? Additionally, any comments on the Windows Phone 7 app market (especially in comparison to the Android market) would be greatly appreciated as well. Thank you very much in advance for your time.

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• Plug-in based software design

  - by gekod

  I'm a software developer who is willing to improve his software design skills. I think software should not only work but have a solid and elegant design too to be reusable and extensive to later purposes. Now I'm in search of some help figuring out good practices for specific problems. Actually, I'm trying to find out how to design a piece of software that would be extensible via plug-ins. The questions I have are the following: Should plug-ins be able to access each others functionality? This would bring dependencies I guess. What should the main application offer to the plug-ins if I want to let's say develop a multimedia software which would play videos and music but which could later on get functionality added over plug-ins that would let's say be able to read video status (time, bps, ...) and display it. Would this mean that the player itself would have to be part of the main program and offer services to plug-ins to get such information or would there be a way to develop the player as a plug-in also but offer in some way the possibility to other plug-ins to interact with it? As you see, my questions are mainly for learning purposes as I strive to improve my software development skills. I hope to find help here and apologize if something is wrong with my question.

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