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• Not getting paid for hours you've worked?

  - by Sauron

  So I was reading from a previous thread about App vs Game Development: If it was for you to chose Game Development vs Application Development, which will you chose? Which brought me to this site: EA: The Human Story A lot of it talked about developers working something like 85 hours a week, and not getting paid overtime, or anything. Just getting paid for the 40 hours. Is this normal for most software companies? I mean where I work I'm only an entry level guy but I get overtime, and anything over 40 hours is considered this. But it got me thinking "Holy crap" I could never do that. My FREE time is important to me. But is this commonplace in most software companies? Or is more a rarity to certain types (game development, etc)? Because it got me scared! Like I understand having to put some extra hours in for a project... but like 80! that's ridiculous.

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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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• Autoloading Development or Production configs (best practices)

  - by Xeoncross

  When programming sites you usually have one set of config files for the development environment and another set for the production server (or one file with both settings). I am assuming all projects should be handled by version control like git or svn. Manual file transfers (like FTP) is wrong on so many levels. How you enable/disable the correct settings (so that your system knows which ones to use) is a problem for me. Each system I work on just kind of jimmy-rigs a solution. Below are the 3 methods I know of and I am hoping that someone can submit a more elegant solutions. 1) File Based The system loads a folder structure based on the URL requested. /site.com /site.fakeTLD /lib index.php For example, if the url is http://site.com then the system loads the production config files located in the site.com folder. However, if I'm working on the site locally I visit http://site.fakeTLD to work on the local copy of the site. To setup this I edit my hosts file and add site.fakeTLD to point to my own computer (127.0.0.1/localhost) and then create a vhost in apache. So now I can work on the codebase locally and then push to the server without any trouble. The problem is that this is susceptible to a "host" injection attack. So someone loading site.com could set the host to site.fakeTLD and then the system would load my development config files instead of production. 2) Config Based The config files contain on section for development - and one for production. The problem is that each time you go to push your changes to the repo you have to edit the file to specify which set of config options should be used. $use = 'production'; //'development'; This leaves the repo open to human error should one of the developers forget to enable the right setting. 3) File System Check Based All the development machines have an extra empty file called "development.txt" or something. Each time the system loads it checks for this file - if found then it knows it is in development mode - if missing then it knows it is in production mode. Since the file is NEVER ADDED to the repo then it will never be pushed (and checked out) on the production machine. However, this just doesn't feel right and causes a slight slow down since all filesystem checks are slow.

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• SQLAuthority News – Professional Development and Community

  - by pinaldave

  I was recently invited by Hyderabad Techies to deliver a keynote for their 16-day online session called TECH THUNDERS. This event has been running from May 15 and will continue up to the end of the month May 30). There would be a total of 30 sessions. In every evening of those 16 day, there will be either one or two sessions from several noted industry experts. It is the same group which has received the Microsoft Community Impact Award as the Best User Group in India as for developers. I have never talked about Professional Development before. Even if this was my first time to do so, I still accepted the wonderful challenge for the sake of the thousands of audience who were expected to attend this online event. Time is of the essence; I had 15 minutes to deliver the keynote and open the event. The reason why I was nervous was because I had to cover precisely only 15 minutes- no more, no less. If I had an hour, I would have been very confident because I knew I could do a good job for sure. However, I still needed to open the event as great as it can be even if the time was short. I finally created a 6-slide small presentation. In reality, there were only two pages which had the main contents of my keynote, and the remaining slides were just wrappers and decors. You can download the complete slide deck from here. The image used in the slide deck is a curtsy of blog reader Roger Smith who sent it to me. The slide in which I spent a good amount of time is the slide which talks about Professional Development. The content of the slide is as follows: Today, Technology and You Keep your eyes, ears and senses open – Stay Active! You are not the first one who faced the problem – Search Online! Learn the web – Blogs, Forums and Friends! Trust the Technology, Not Print – Test Everything! Community and You! I had a very little time creating the slide deck as I was busy the whole day doing the Advanced SQL Server Training. I had put together these slides during the tea/coffee break of my session. Though it was just a six-bullet point, I had received quite a few emails right after keynote requesting me to talk more about this subject and share the details of my slide deck. I have talked with the event organizer and he will put the keynote online very soon. The subject of the talk is very simple; it revolves around the community. Time has changed, and Internet has come a long way from where it was many years ago. Now that we are all connected, help via the Internet and useful software is easily available around us. In fact, RSS, Newletters and few other technologies have progressed so much that the help through news is now being delivered to our door steps, instead of going out and seeking them. Sometimes, a simple search online solves a lot of problems of many developers. The community is now the first stop for any developer when he or she needs help or just wants to hang around and share some thoughts. I strongly suggest everybody to be a part of the Tech Community. Be it online, offline community or just a local user group, I strongly advise all of you to get involved. I am active in the Community, and I must say I recommend getting drawn into it. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, Pinal Dave, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL User Group, SQLAuthority News, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Community

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• Book Review: Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide

  - by Grant Ronald

  Packt Publishing asked me to review Oracle ADF 11gR2 Development Beginner's Guide by Vinod Krishnan, so on a couple of long flights I managed to get through the book in a couple of sittings. One point to make clear before I go into the review.  Having authored "The Quick Start Guide to Fusion Development: JDeveloper and Oracle ADF", I've written a book which covers the same topic/beginner level.  I also think that its worth stating up front that I applaud anyone who has gone  through the effort of writing a technical book. So well done Vinod.  But on to the review: The book itself is a good break down of topic areas.  Vinod starts with a quick tour around the IDE, which is an important step given all the work you do will be through the IDE.  The book then goes through the general path that I tend to always teach: a quick overview demo, ADF BC, validation, binding, UI, task flows and then the various "add on" topics like security, MDS and advanced topics.  So it covers the right topics in, IMO, the right order.  I also think the writing style flows nicely as well - Its a relatively easy book to read, it doesn't get too formal and the "Have a go hero" hands on sections will be useful for many. That said, I did pick out a number of styles/themes to the writing that I found went against the idea of a beginners guide.  For example, in writing my book, I tried to carefully avoid talking about topics not yet covered or not yet relevant at that point in someone's learning.  So, if I was a new ADF developer reading this book, did I really need to know about ADFBindingFilter and DataBindings.cpx file on page 58 - I've only just learned how to do a drag and drop simple application so showing me XML configuration files relevant to JSF/ADF lifecycle is probably going to scare me off! I found this in a couple of places, for example, the security chapter starts on page 219 but by page 222 (and most of the preceding pages are hands-on steps) we're diving into the web.xml, weblogic.xml, adf-config.xml, jsp-config.xml and jazn-data.xml.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't know this, but I feel you have to get people on a strong grounding of the concepts before showing them implementation files.  If having just learned what ADF Security is will "The initialization parameter remove.anonymous.role is set to false for the JpsFilter filter as this filter is the first filter defined in the file" really going to help me? The other theme I found which I felt didn't work was that a couple of the chapters descended into a reference guide.  For example page 159 onwards basically lists UI components and their properties.  And page 87 onwards list the attributes of ADF BC in pretty much the same way as the on line help or developer guide, and I've a personal aversion to any sort of help that says pretty much what the attribute name is e.g. "Precision Rule: this option is used to set a strict precision rule", or "Property Set: this is the property set that has to be applied to the attribute". Hmmm, I think I could have worked that out myself, what I would want to know in a beginners guide are what are these for, what might I use them for...and if I don't need to use them to create an emp/dept example them maybe it’s better to leave them out. All that said, would the book help me - yes it would.  It’s obvious that Vinod knows ADF and his style is relatively easy going and the book covers all that it has to, but I think the book could have done a better job in the educational side of guiding beginners.

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• Minimum team development sizes

  - by MarkPearl

  Disclaimer - these are observations that I have had, I am not sure if this follows the philosophy of scrum, agile or whatever, but most of these insights were gained while implementing a scrum scenario. Two is a partnership, three starts a team For a while I thought that a team was anything more than one and that scrum could be effective methodology with even two people. I have recently adjusted my thinking to a scrum team being a minimum of three, so what happened to two and what do you call it? For me I consider a group of two people working together a partnership - there is value in having a partnership, but some of the dynamics and value that you get from having a team is lost with a partnership. Avoidance of a one on one confrontation The first dynamic I see missing in a partnership is the team motivation to do better and how this is delivered to individuals that are not performing. Take two highly motivated individuals and put them together and you will typically see them continue to perform. Now take a situation where you have two individuals, one performing and one not and the behaviour is totally different compared to a team of three or more individuals. With two people, if one feels the other is not performing it becomes a one on one confrontation. Most people avoid confrontations and so nothing changes. Compare this to a situation where you have three people in a team, 2 performing and 1 not the dynamic is totally different, it is no longer a personal one on one confrontation but a team concern and people seem more willing to encourage the individual not performing and express their dissatisfaction as a team if they do not improve. Avoiding the effects of Tuckman’s Group Development Theory If you are not familiar with Tuckman’s group development theory give it a read (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuckman's_stages_of_group_development) In a nutshell with Tuckman’s theory teams go through these stages of Forming, Storming, Norming & Performing. You want your team to reach and remain in the Performing stage for as long as possible - this is where you get the most value. When you have a partnership of two and you change the individuals in the partnership you basically do a hard reset on the partnership and go back to the beginning of Tuckman’s model each time. This has a major effect on the performance of a team and what they can deliver. What I have seen is that you reduce the effects of Tuckman's theory the more individuals you have in the team (until you hit the maximum team size in which other problems kick in). While you will still experience Tuckman's theory with a team of three, the impact will be greatly reduced compared to two where it is guaranteed every time a change occurs. It's not just in the numbers, it's in the people One final comment - while the actual numbers of a team do play a role, the individuals in the team are even more important - ideally you want to keep individuals working together for an extended period. That doesn't mean that you never change the individuals in a team, or that once someone joins a team they are stuck there - there is value in an individual moving from team to team and getting cross pollination, but the period of time that an individual moves should be in month's or years, not days or weeks. Why? So why is it important to know this? Why is it important to know how a team works and what motivates them? I have been asking myself this question for a while and where I am at right now is this… the aim is to achieve the stage where the sum of the total (team) is greater than the sum of the parts (team members). This is why we form teams and why understanding how they work is a challenge and also extremely stimulating.

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• Incentivizing Work with Development Teams

  - by MarkPearl

  Recently I saw someone on twitter asking about incentives and if anyone had past experience with incentivizing work. I promised to respond with some of the experiences I have had in the past so here goes... **Disclaimer** - these are my experiences with incentives, generally in software development - in some other industries this may not be applicable – this is also my thinking at this point in time, with more experience my opinion may change. Incentivize at the level that you want people to group at If you are wanting to promote a team mentality, incentivize teams. If you want to promote an individual mentality, incentivize individuals. There is nothing worse than mixing this up. Some organizations put a lot of effort in establishing teams and team mentalities but reward individuals. This has a counter effect on the resources they have put towards establishing a team mentality. In the software projects that I work with we want promote cross functional teams that collaborate. Personally, if I was on a team and knew that there was an opportunity to work on a critical component of the system, and that by doing so I would get a bigger bonus, then I would be hesitant to include other people in solving that problem. Thus, I would hinder the teams efforts in being cross functional and reduce collaboration levels. Does that mean everyone in the team should get an even share of an incentive? In most situations I would say yes - even though this may feel counter-intuitive. I have heard arguments put forward that if “person x contributed more than person Y then they should be rewarded more” – This may sound controversial but I would rather treat people how would you like them to perform, not where they currently are at. To add to this approach, if someone is free loading, you bet your bottom dollar that the team is going to make this a lot more transparent if they feel that individual is going to be rewarded at the same level that everyone else is. Bad incentives promote destructive work If you are going to incentivize people, pick you incentives very carefully. I had an experience once with a sales person who was told they would get a bonus provided that they met an ordering target with a particular supplier. What did this person do? They sold everything at cost for the next month or so. They reached the goal, but the company didn't gain anything from it. It was a bad incentive. Expect the same with development teams, if you incentivize zero bug levels, you will get zero code committed to the solution. If you incentivize lines of code, you will get many many lines of bad code. Is there such a thing as a good incentives? Monetary wise, I am not sure there is. I would much rather encourage organizations to pay their people what they are worth upfront. I would also advise against paying money to teams as an incentive or even a bonus or reward for reaching a milestone. Rather have a breakaway for the team that promotes team building as a reward if they reach a milestone than pay them more money. I would also advise against making the incentive the reason for them to reach the milestone. If this becomes the norm it promotes people to begin to only do their job if there is an incentive at the end of the line. This is not a behaviour one wants to encourage. If the team or individual is in the right mind-set, they should not work any harder than they are right now with normal pay.

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• Some help needed with setting up the PERFECT workflow for web development with 2-3 guys using subver

  - by Roeland

  Hey guys! I run a small web development company along side with my brother and friend. After doing extensive research I have decided on using subversion for version control. Here is how I currently plan on running typical development. Keep in mind there are 3 of us each in a separate location. I set up an account with springloops (springloops.com) subversion hosting. Each time I work on a new project, I create a repository for it. So lets say in this case I am working on site1. I want to have 3 versions of the site on the internet: Web Development - This is the server me and the other developers publish to. (site1.dev.bythepixel.com) Client Preview - This is the server that we update every few days with a good revision for the client to see. (site1.bythepixel.com) Live Site - The site I publish to when going live (site1.com) Each web development machine (at each location) will have a local copy of xamp running virtual host to allow multiple websites to be worked on. The root of the local copy is set up to be the same as the local copy of the subversion repository. This is set up so we can make small tweaks and preview them immediately. When some work has been done, a commit is made to the repository for the site. I will have the dev site automatically be pushed (its an option in springloops). Then, whenever I feel ready to push to the client site I will do so. Now, I have a few concerns with those work flow: I am using codeigniter currently, and in the config file I generally set the root of the site. Ex. http://www.site1.com. So, it looks like each time I publish to one of the internet servers, I will have to modify the config file? Is there any way to make it so certain files are set for each server? So when I hit publish to client preview it just uploads the config file for the client preview server. I don't want the live site , the client preview site and the dev site to share the same mysql server for a variety of reasons. So does this once again mean that I have to adjust the db server info each time I push to a different site? Does this workflow make sense? If you have any suggestion please let me know. I plan for this to be the work flow I use for the next few year. I just need to put a system in place that allows for future expansion! Thanks a bunch!!

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• What are the pros and cons of using a Mac for web development?

  - by Randell

  I have been using Fedora Linux for quite some time now for web development (and for other dev stuff as well). But just recently, someone told me that since I'm doing web development, I might as well use a Mac. I feel like Macs are overrated. Why should I (or should I not) use a Mac?

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• What is the difference between a software development pattern a methodology(agile, dsdm etc) and a p

  - by Dan

  What is the difference between a software development pattern? A methodology such as agile DSDM etc how is OO classed as a methodology and a paradigm? How can OO be applied to a methodology such as agile if itself is a methodology? Whats the difference between a paradigm and a methodology or a development pattern? Thanks for any replys.

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• Are there any new/updated Java web development frameworks to watch for?

  - by predhme

  I know recently Spring 3.0 was released which brought about a nice new set of features and ease of web development with their MVC package. However are there any new frameworks on the horizon and/or new versions of other frameworks that a web developer should have their eyes on? I heard about the Stripes framework, but it seems as though development has stopped. It also seems grails has a new release coming out as well which that looks like it is just an update to support the new features in the latest groovy release.

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• Suggest me which web development technology i gotta use?

  - by shyam-daniel

  I am a newbie to the web application development. I have to start with a Framework which will make me grow up higher in my career. So please suggest which technology i have to choose? Lot of technologies for web development is articulating in this field like PHP,JSP,Stuts,JSF,Flex,ColdFusion etc. Give me some suggestions to how to start?

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• Python or Ruby is better for web development? [closed]

  - by Tattat

  I know that Ruby on rails is very famous on Web Application Development, and python have a powerful library. Which language do you think for a totally brand new web project? Ruby or Python is a gd start? Also, you can share your development experience in both language. thz u.

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• What is the recomended setup for a small .net/php development shop?

  - by JaSk

  First of all I don't know if it this question belongs here if not please tell me. I've recently evolved from freelancer to a small .net/php development shop and we're trying to figure out what the best tools for team development will be (code repository, continuos integration server, automated testing, etc.). Do you have some recommendations, preferible open source or low cost since we are starting out. (We already have visual studio for all the team members). Thanks

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• What are some colleges with good web development programs?

  - by Doug

  I want to get a bachelors degree and I am currently majoing computer science. I'm looking at Full Sail University for web development program and it looks promising but does anyone know how it is? Also can anyone suggest some colleges with good web development programs?

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• Fedora vs. Ubuntu for Software-Development Pros/Cons?

  - by Helper Method

  Why is Fedora chosen by so many developers in preference to Ubuntu? I'm using Ubuntu for software development for some time now, and I'm quite happy with it but I'm thinking to give Fedora a try. So, what are the pros/cons for using Fedora for software development?

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• How can I setup a flexible local web development environment I can easily sync with a production, Amazon AWS based environment?

  - by user607057

  I'm running on an OS X environment and would like to create a flexible web development environment locally... including the option to run on an Nginx server for my PHP-based application. At the end of the day (or, development cycle), I'd like to be able to hit a switch and have it all sync over to Amazon AWS hosting (EC2, S3) - instances, databases, files, configurations, and all. Are there any simple ways to do this?

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• Suitable Hosting for Web Development Company: VPS Hosting, Cloud hosting, Shared Hosting

  - by KoolKabin

  Hi, We are web development company here in nepal. We are still in growth phase. Our URL: http://www.outsourcingnepal.com We have our clients demanding for web hosting and are now ready for getting hosting package to host websites of our clients. Since we have multiple clients and they want their own cpanel for self configuration, only creating ftp channel is not appropirate. So their own cpanel is needed. So i thought of reseller package. When i searched for reseller package i came across with vps, cloud hosting and shared hosting. So now confused which one is better for our company?

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• What is New in ASP.NET 4 Web Development Overview

  - by Aamir Hasan

   Microsoft Recently Microsoft introduce Visual  studio 2010 which have new feature's Name of some new Features are given below. In ASP.NET 4.O has focus on performance and Search Engine Optimization. I'll be taking a look at what I think are the most important new features in ASP.NET 4.Output cache extensibility Session state compression View state mode for individual control Page.MetaKeyword and Page.MetaDescription properties Response.RedirectPermanent method Routing in ASP.NET Increase the URL character length New syntax for Html Encode Predictable Client IDs Web.config file refactoring Auto-Start ASP.NET applications Improvements on Microsoft Ajax LibraryReference:ASP.NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010 Web Development Overview 

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• Scrum for a single programmer?

  - by Rob Perkins

  I'm billed as the "Windows Expert" in my very small company, which consists of myself, a mechanical engineer working in a sales and training role, and the company's president, working in a design, development, and support role. My role is equally as general, but primarily I design and implement whatever programming on our product needs to get done in order for our stuff to run on whichever versions of Windows are current. I just finished watching a high-level overview of the Scrum paradigm, given in a webcast. My question is: Is it worth my time to learn more about this approach to product development, given that my development work items are usually given at a very high level, such as "internationalize and localize the product". If it is, how would you suggest adapting Scrum for the use of just one programmer? What tools, cloud-based or otherwise, would be useful to that end? If it is not, what approach would you suggest for a single programmer to organize his efforts from day to day? (Perhaps the question reduces to that simple question.)

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• career development: build release engineer or .net developer [closed]

  - by runner

  I have been working as .net developer for many years. Recently I got two offers: Continue work as .net developer on a SAAS product. Job duty is to add new features and fix issues, similar to what i have been doing these years. Become a Software configuration management and build engineer, in charge of product build, automation and release. Require some script coding, but not much. For the career development. which one should I choose? thanks.

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• ASP.NET Podcast Show #149 - MonoDroid Development on the Apple Macintosh OSX

  - by Wallym

  Given that I have a cast on my arm, I installed the MonoDroid Development Framework for Apple Macs today.  I walked through it and found that things are pretty much the same as with the MonoDroid plugin for Visual Studio 2010.  This post shows the video displaying this.  This video is based on MonoDroid Preview 11.1. Subscribe to everything. Subscribe to WMV. Subscribe to M4V for iPhone/iPad. Subscribe to MP3. Download WMV. Download M4V. Download MP4. Download MP3.

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• Mobile Chrome Office Hours: Tools for Mobile Web Development

  Mobile Chrome Office Hours: Tools for Mobile Web Development Ask and vote for questions at: goo.gl Are you building for the mobile web? Are you looking for easier and better tools to help you create great experiences? Join Boris Smus and Pete LePage as they show you some of the many tools available to mobile web developers. We'll take a look Chrome's remote debugging features, some of the emulation tools available to you within Chrome and take a deep dive into some of the advanced use cases of these tools to help you build for the mobile web. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 1432 60 ratings Time: 42:16 More in Science & Technology

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• SharePoint 2013 Development Machine - Now Available

  - by Sahil Malik

  SharePoint 2010 Training: more information With SharePoint 2013 RTM’ing, I am thrilled to announce an updated version of my SharePoint 2013 Development Machine book’let. As you know, I am publishing many small booklets, and eventually I will publishing a single big book also – sort of the track/cd model. Also, this self-e-publish model allows me to keep the content updated as I learn more. There is a very minor portion at the end that is still pre-RTM. Specifically as of now SharePoint Designer 2013 and Visual Studio tools for SharePoint 2013 have not yet RTM’ed. However, installing those is not very different from Beta2. The screenshots may change a bit. I will of course update the book soon as the RTM bits are available. Read full article ....

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• Understanding each other in web development

  - by Pete Hotchkin

  During my career I have been lucky enough to work in several different roles within web development with many extremely talented people, from incredible designers who were passionate about the placement of every pixel right through to server administrators and DBAs who were always measuring the improvements they were making to their queries in the smallest possible unit. The problem I always faced was that more often than not I was stuck in the middle trying to mediate between these different functions and enable each side to understand the other’s point of view. The main areas of contention that there have always been between these functional groups in my experience have been at 2 key points: during the build phase and then when there is a problem post-build. During both of these times it is often easier for someone to pass the buck onto someone else than spend the time to understand the other person’s perspective. Below is a quick look at two upcoming tools that will not only speed up the build phase for each function, but  also help when it comes to the issues faced once a site has been pushed live. In my experience a web project goes through several phases of development. The first of these is design, generally handled as Photoshop files which are then passed onto a front-end developer. This is the first point at which heated discussions can arise. One problem I’ve seen several times is that the designer doesn’t fully understand the platform constraints that need to be considered, and as a result has designed something that does not translate very well or is simply not possible. Working at Red Gate, I am lucky enough to be able to meet some amazing people and this happened just the other day when I was introduced to Neil Kinnish and Pete Nelson, the creators of what I believe could be a great asset in this designer-developer relationship, Mixture. Mixture allows the front end developer to quickly prototype a web page with built-in frameworks such as bootstrap. It’s not an IDE however, it just sits there in the background and monitors the project files in the background so every time you save a file from your favorite IDE, it will compile things like LESS, compact your JavaScript and the automatically refresh your test browser so you can see the changes instantly. I think one of the best parts of this however is a single button that pushes the changed files up to the web so the designer can instantly see how far the developer has got and the problem that he is facing at that time without the need to spend time setting up a remote server. I can see this being a real asset to remote teams where there needs to be a compromise between the designer and the front-end developer, or just to allow the designer to see how the build is progressing and suggest small alterations. Once the design has been built into the front end the designer’s job is generally done and there are no other points of contention between the designer and the other functions involved in building these web projects. As the project moves into the stage of integrating it into the back end and deploying it to the production server other functions start to be pulled in and other issues arise such as the back-end developer understanding the frameworks that they are using such as the routes that are in place in an MVC application or the number of database calls that the ORM layer is actually making. There are many tools out there that can actually help with these problems such as mini profiler that gives you a quick snapshot of what is going on directly in the browser. For a slightly more in-depth look at what is happening and to gain a deeper understanding of an application you may be working on though, you may want to consider Glimpse. Created by Nik and Anthony, it is an application that sits at the bottom of your browser (installed via NuGet) which can show you information about how your application is pieced together and how the information on screen is being delivered as it happens. With a wealth of community-built plugins such as one for nHibernate and linq2SQL (full list of plugins on NuGet). It can be customized directly to your own setup to truly delve into the code to see what is happening, and can help to reduce the number of confusing moments about whether it is your code that is going wrong or whether there is something more sinister happening directly on the server. All the tools that I have mentioned in this post help to do one thing above all, and that is to ease the barrier of understanding between the different functions that are involved in building and maintaining a web application. In my experience it is very easy to say “Well, that’s not my problem”, simply because the two functions involved don’t truly understand the other’s point of view. Software should not only be seen as a way to streamline our own working process or as a debugging tool but also a communication aid to improve the entire lifecycle of a web project. Glimpse is actually the project that I am the designer on and I would love to get your feedback if you do decide to try it out or if you would like to share your own experiences of working on web projects please fill in your details at https://www.surveymk.com/s/joinGlimpse  or add a comment below and I will get in touch with you.

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