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• How can I change the color of this part of Nautilus for my Ambiance theme modification?

  - by WarriorIng64

  I am currently messing around with Ambiance, trying to give Nautilus a dark sidebar (because I think it looks much better that way, especially with the current look having the dark-colored breadcrumbs clashing horribly with the light-colored sidebar). I have zero experience and knowledge of how to create GTK+ themes, and I couldn't find any documentation online, so I just made a copy of the folder for Ambiance under /usr/share/themes, renamed it "Ambiance Dark Sidebar" and just started messing with color values. As shown below, I found the value in nautilus.css needed to be tweaked to create the dark sidebar, but there is still one part that stubbornly stays light gray that I want to change so it matches the rest better (I'm not sure what the proper terminology is here, so I just provided a picture and marked it in red). Does anyone know what I need to do to change the color of this part so it matches the rest of the sidebar better? I already know from seeing themes like Adwaita Dark that this should be possible, but even after poking around in that I didn't find anything that seemed to help. Here are the contents of the files I modified in the theme folder Ambiance Dark Sidebar, stored alongside Ambiance in /usr/share/themes: index.theme gtk-3.0/apps/nautilus.css

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• How to explain why design choices are good?

  - by Telastyn

  As I've become a better developer, I find that much of my design skill comes more from intuition than mechanical analysis. This is great. It lets me read code and get a feel for it quicker. It lets me translate designs between languages and abstractions much easier. And it let's me get stuff done faster. The downside is that I find it harder to explain to teammates (and worse, management) why a particular design is advantageous; especially teammates that are behind the times on best practices. "This design is more testable!" or "You should favor composition over inheritance." go right over their heads, and lead into the rabbit hole of me trying to clue everyone in to the last decade of software engineering advances. I'll get better at it with practice of course, but in the mean time it involves a lot of wasted time and/or bad design (that will lead to wasted time fixing it later). How can I better explain why a certain design is superior, when the benefits aren't completely obvious to the audience?

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• Which language meets my needs? [closed]

  - by Gerald Goward

  I am a junior C# developer, working for half a year now. In my company I am working on some enterprise projects and after doing it for quite some time I understood that I dont like enterprise projects. I have my own browser-game written in PHP+MySql with some simple HTML+CSS and I have 300 active (those, who entered the game at least once per 5 days) players currently :) After thinking quite some time I understood that I am interested in: 1). Web-development AND 2). standalone programs (but not enterprise ones). 3). Development for mobile platforms is also nice, Android/iOs. 1st and 2nd categories are what I want the most. Android/iOs is good too. I am NOT interested in big systems which are hard to integrate, I am not interested in enterprise systems. In future I would like to start my own business/projects. I would like to create my own projects or/and create a small programmers company to create and release own products. Please tell me what programming language(s)/technologies would you advice me for it? Thanks alot! UPD: It's NOT a "which language is better" or any flame/holywar generating topic since I ask for language that suits my EXACT needs better. I believe C++ is better for low-level coding, while PHP is good for web-development and Object-C being made for iOs. I am still newbie at programming so dont hate me please.

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• How ReSharper saved the day

  - by Randy Walker

  The Back Story: As a Microsoft MVP awardee, one of the many benefits is free software, books, and various products.  Some of the producers/manufacturers ask for reviews in exchange, others just ask for a brief mention (nothing is ever really free).  But considering that some of the products are essential to my everyday computing, I never mind mentioning their names and evangelizing their products. One of these tools just happened to save me a countless number of hours.  With the release of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010, JetBrains released their new 5.0 version of ReSharper. The Story: My specialty is Visual Basic development.  I am not, and probably will never be a C# developer.  As such, trying to figure out how to debug a C# project, that was written 2 years ago by a contract developer, let’s just say it’s a painful process. I have a special class for config file reading and writing, written in C#.  I kept getting exceptions when the reader would get to a line that had an xml comment in it.  It took me a couple of hours to narrow down where it was happening and why, but I couldn’t figure out the best way to fix it.  It was a for loop that was implicitly casting the type of the variable.  I knew I need to explicitly cast the variable type, but only after the type was verified.  So after I finally got some of the code written, ReSharper gave me some suggestions on how to write the code better. One of the ways was to safely cast the variable into the type I wanted.  Blammo, no more exceptions in a way I hadn’t anticipated.  Instead of having to check the type before I cast it.  Beautiful, simple, and taught me a better way to code C#. Kudos JetBrains … now if it only worked better with VB (then it could be called ReBasic, ReVB, RE???)

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• How can I change the color of the pane separator for my Ambiance theme modification?

  - by WarriorIng64

  I am currently messing around with Ambiance, trying to give Nautilus a dark sidebar (because I think it looks much better that way, especially with the current look having the dark-colored breadcrumbs clashing horribly with the light-colored sidebar). I have zero experience and knowledge of how to create GTK+ themes, and I couldn't find any documentation online, so I just made a copy of the folder for Ambiance under /usr/share/themes, renamed it "Ambiance Dark Sidebar" and just started messing with color values. As shown below, I found the value in nautilus.css needed to be tweaked to create the dark sidebar, but there is still one part that stubbornly stays light gray. This is the pane separator, and I want to change it so it matches the rest better (marked in red). Does anyone know what I need to do to change the color of this part so it matches the rest of the sidebar better? I already know from seeing themes like Adwaita Dark that this should be possible, but even after poking around in that I didn't find anything that seemed to help. Here are the contents of the files I modified in the theme folder Ambiance Dark Sidebar, stored alongside Ambiance in /usr/share/themes: index.theme gtk-3.0/apps/nautilus.css

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• How to void checked exceptions in Java?

  - by deamon

  I consider checked exception for a design mistake in the Java language. They lead to leaky abstractions and a lot of clutter in the code. It seems that they force the programmer to handle exceptions early although they are in most cases better handled lately. So my question is how to avoid checked exception? My idea is to execute the actual code inside an exception translator using lambda expressions. Example: ExceptionConverter.convertToRuntimeException(() => { // do things that could throw checked exceptions here }); If for example a IOException occurs it gets rethrown as an exception with the same name but from a different class hierarchy (based on RuntimeException). This approach would effectivly remove the need to handle or declare checked exceptions. Exceptions could then be handled where and if it makes sense. Another solution would be to declare IOException throws Exception on each method. What do you think which solution is better? Do you know any better approach to avoid (suppress) checked exceptions in Java?

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• Validating data to nest if or not within try and catch

  - by Skippy

  I am validating data, in this case I want one of three ints. I am asking this question, as it is the fundamental principle I'm interested in. This is a basic example, but I am developing best practices now, so when things become more complicated later, I am better equipped to manage them. Is it preferable to have the try and catch followed by the condition: public static int getProcType() { try { procType = getIntInput("Enter procedure type -\n" + " 1 for Exploratory,\n" + " 2 for Reconstructive, \n" + "3 for Follow up: \n"); } catch (NumberFormatException ex) { System.out.println("Error! Enter a valid option!"); getProcType(); } if (procType == 1 || procType == 2 || procType == 3) { hrlyRate = hrlyRate(procType); procedure = procedure(procType); } else { System.out.println("Error! Enter a valid option!"); getProcType(); } return procType; } Or is it better to put the if within the try and catch? public static int getProcType() { try { procType = getIntInput("Enter procedure type -\n" + " 1 for Exploratory,\n" + " 2 for Reconstructive, \n" + "3 for Follow up: \n"); if (procType == 1 || procType == 2 || procType == 3) { hrlyRate = hrlyRate(procType); procedure = procedure(procType); } else { System.out.println("Error! Enter a valid option!"); getProcType(); } } catch (NumberFormatException ex) { System.out.println("Error! Enter a valid option!"); getProcType(); } return procType; } I am thinking the if within the try, may be quicker, but also may be clumsy. Which would be better, as my programming becomes more advanced?

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• There is No Scrum without Agile

  - by John K. Hines

  It's been interesting for me to dive a little deeper into Scrum after realizing how fragile its adoption can be.  I've been particularly impressed with James Shore's essay "Kaizen and Kaikaku" and the Net Objectives post "There are Better Alternatives to Scrum" by Alan Shalloway.  The bottom line: You can't execute Scrum well without being Agile. Personally, I'm the rare developer who has an interest in project management.  I think the methodology to deliver software is interesting, and that there are many roles whose job exists to make software development easier.  As a project lead I've seen Scrum deliver for disciplined, highly motivated teams with solid engineering practices.  It definitely made my job an order of magnitude easier.  As a developer I've experienced huge rewards from having a well-defined pipeline of tasks that were consistently delivered with high quality in short iterations.  In both of these cases Scrum was an addition to a fundamentally solid process and a huge benefit to the team. The question I'm now facing is how Scrum fits into organizations withot solid engineering practices.  The trend that concerns me is one of Scrum being mandated as the single development process across teams where it may not apply.  And we have to realize that Scurm itself isn't even a development process.  This is what worries me the most - the assumption that Scrum on its own increases developer efficiency when it is essentially an exercise in project management. Jim's essay quotes Tobias Mayer writing, "Scrum is a framework for surfacing organizational dysfunction."  I'm unsure whether a Vice President of Software Development wants to hear that, reality nonwithstanding.  Our Scrum adoption has surfaced a great deal of dysfunction, but I feel the original assumption was that we would experience increased efficiency.  It's starting to feel like a blended approach - Agile/XP techniques for developers, Scrum for project managers - may be a better fit.  Or at least, a better way of framing the conversation. The blended approach. Technorati tags: Agile Scrum

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• As a developer, how do I learn sales? [closed]

  - by Dan Abramov

  I quit the company I was working for to pursuit an opportunity as a startup, and I believe in our product. I'm sure it's going to be great if we attract some customers first to keep going. (I don't want funding.) Our product is targeted at private schools and courses, and helps organize the mess other LMSs introduce. The problem is, our team is basically just me and I have very little idea about sales and marketing. I can do reasonably good copywriting but I'm sure I can do better—and being nervous or too techy in a real world conversation with the client doesn't help. I want to get better, in fact, a lot better at negotiating with clients and pitching my product. I did look for some “sales articles” on the web, and a lot of what I found is plain bullshit on SEO-engineered websites promoting books or $5000 courses. What I need instead is a developer's perspective on how to sale a product you think is great. What are typical programmer's mistakes and misconceptions about sales, and how to avoid them? How do you evolve into a reasonably great salesman? I can't believe it's in the mindset and unlearnable. Your own experience, combined with great articles available on the web is most welcome. To Future Readers The question got closed because it is not a good fit for this site. I found some helpful tips in a similar question asked on a sister StackExchange site about startups: I'm a terrible salesperson. What can I do about it?

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• starting up with VPS or cloud hosting? [closed]

  - by FlyOn

  Possible Duplicate: How to find web hosting that meets my requirements? Summary: I want to start hosting my product. I'd like to register domains (at some point). I'm a linux beginner. Thinking about scalability and price, I'm thinking am I better off on a VPN to get started or would some form of cloud hosting be better (not being familiar with either). Full question: I'm creating a product where people can create their own 3D representations of whatever data / info they have, and (re)organise that data. The product is coming along beautifully on my local environment, but it's about time I start getting some form of hosting ready, and I could really use some advice where / how to get started: I'd like people to be able to move/register their own domains on my server. I could start without this just to demo the product, but it would be the very first on the todo list. I'd like to automatically copy some files / install databases etc for each domain. I probably want to see if I can let users manage their own subdomains at some points, but for now: I'd like start as simple as possible. I've always on a windows machine, so my linux experience is quite basic. I really don't mind getting into it, but I'm thinking it's better to get my product out first of all and see where to go from there. Although... I'd like things to be scalable. If I set up some reseller VPN now which only scales to 100 domains or so, which means I have to set up something else / move again when I pass that level, or which means that I'm in trouble if I suddenly get lots of new customers... hmm. Finally, I need to start cheap. I'm putting all I have into starting this company, and live on very little. So before I have any customers, 50 dollars a month is a fair bit and 100 dollars a month may be too much. If anyone has some tips to help get me started I'd be really grateful.

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• Customer retention - why most companies have it wrong

  - by Michel Adar

  At least in the US market it is quite common for service companies to offer an initially discounted price to new customers. While this may attract new customers and robe customers from competitors, it is my argument that it is a bad strategy for the company. This strategy gives an incentive to change companies and a disincentive to stay with the company. From the point of view of the customer, after 6 months of being a customer the company rewards the loyalty by raising the price. A better strategy would be to reward customers for staying with the company. For example, by lowering the cost by 5% every year (compound discount so it does never get to zero). This is a very rational thing to do for the company. Acquiring new customers and setting up their service is expensive, new customers also tend to use more of the common resources like customer service channels. It is probably true for most companies that the cost of providing service to a customer of 10 years is lower than providing the same service in the first year of a customer's tenure. It is only logical to pass these savings to the customer. From the customer point of view, the competition would have to offer something very attractive, whether in terms of price or service, in order for the customer to switch. Such a policy would give an advantage to the first mover, but would probably force the competitors to follow suit. Overall, I would expect that this would reduce the mobility in the market, increase loyalty, increase the investment of companies in loyal customers and ultimately, increase competition for providing a better service. Competitors may even try to break the scheme by offering customers the porting of their tenure, but that would not work that well because it would disenchant existing customers and would be costly, assuming that it is costlier to serve a customer through installation and first year. What do you think? Is this better than using "save offers" to retain flip-floppers?

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• Discovering Your Project

  - by Tim Murphy

  The discovery phase of any project is both exciting and critical to the project’s success.  There are several key points that you need to keep in mind as you navigate this process. The first thing you need to understand is who the players in the project are and what their motivations are for the project.  Leaving out a key stakeholder in the resulting product is one of the easiest ways to doom your project to fail.  The better the quality of the input you have at this early phase the better chance you will have of creating a well accepted deliverable. The next task you should tackle is to gather the goals for the project.  Specifically, what does the company expect to get for the money they are about to layout.  This seems like a common sense task, but you would be surprised how many teams to straight to building the system.  Even if you are following an agile methodology I believe that this is critical. Inventorying the resources that already exists gives you an idea what you are going to have to build and what you can leverage at lower risk.  This list should include documentation, servers, code repositories, databases, languages, security systems and supporting teams.  All of these are “resources” that can effect the cost and delivery schedule of your project. Finally, you need to verify what you have found and documented with the stakeholders and subject matter experts.  Documentation that has not been reviewed is actually a list of assumptions and we all know that assumptions are the mother of all screw ups. If you give the discovery phase of your project the attention that it deserves your project has a much better chance of success. I would love to hear what other people find important for this phase.  Please leave comments on this post so we can share the knowledge. del.icio.us Tags: Project discovery,documentation,business analysis,architecture

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• Authorization design-pattern / practice?

  - by Lawtonfogle

  On one end, you have users. On the other end, you have activities. I was wondering if there is a best practice to relate the two. The simplest way I can think of is to have every activity have a role, and assign every user every role they need. The problem is that this gets really messy in practice as soon as you go beyond a trivial system. A way I recently designed was to have users who have roles, and roles have privileges, and activities require some combinations of privileges. For the trivial case, this is more complex, but I think it will scale better. But after I implemented it, I felt like it was overkill for the system I had. Another option would be to have users, who have roles, and activities require you to have a certain role to perform with many activities sharing roles. A more complex variant of this would given activities many possible roles, which you only needed one of. And an even more complex variant would be to allow logical statements of role ownership to use an activity (i.e. Must have A and (B exclusive or C) and must not have D). I could continue to list more, but I think this already gives a picture. And many of these have trade offs. But in software design, there are oftentimes solutions, while perhaps not perfect in every possible case, are clearly top of the pack to an extent it isn't even considered opinion based (i.e. how to store passwords, plain text is worse, hashing better, hashing and salt even better, despite the increased complexity of each level) (i.e. 2, Smart UI designs for applications are bad, even if it is subjective as to what the best design is). So, is there a best practice for authorization design that is not purely opinion based/subjective?

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• Writing a DB Python or Ruby

  - by WojonsTech

  I am planning on writing a database. I know it's crazy and people will tell me there is no good reason to do so. I am really using it to get better at programming overall, this database wont be used in production. I am planning on writing it Ruby or Python. I have some experience with both languages, but no job or large project experience. I don't want this to be a this is better than that randomly I really need some facts. The things that I need to know are which of the language are better at the following things. Searching arrays/hashes? Sorting? Threading? Sockets? Memory management? Disk Reads/Writes? base64 encode/decode? Again this is just a project for myself. I will port it on github for the hell of it, but I don't expect it to be amazing or going up against mysql or mongodb any day.

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• What is the basic loadout for an open source web developer?

  - by DeveloperDon

  Thus far, I have mainly been an embedded developer, but I am interested in having the flexibility to do mobile and web development as well. I think my tools should include the following, but probably a lot more. LAMP stack. Java IDEs like Eclipse and IntelliJ. JS frameworks like Dojo, Node.JS, AngularJS, (is it better to mix or commit to one?). Cloud solutions like EC2 and Azure (again, ok to mix or better to commit to one?). Google APIs. Continuous integration server. Source control tools with Git for new work, SVN, CVS, +others for imports. FTP server. Unit test runners. Bug trackers. OOAD modeling tools or plug-ins? Graphic design tools? Hosting services. XML / JSON / other markup? Content management, SEO? I am also interested to know if there are tools where it might be better to mix, match, or support all available (maybe for source control) and others where the full focus should be on one (maybe Java vs. C# or Windows vs. Linux vs. MacOS). Perhaps some of these questions need context of whether the projects will be greenfield (just pick favorite) or maintenance (no choice, each project continues legacy, sometimes with a poor tools).

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• Does this syntax for specifying Django conditional form display align with python/django convention?

  - by andy

  I asked a similar question on Stackoverflow and was told it was better asked here. So I'll ask it slightly rephrased. I am working on a Django project, part of which will become a distributable plugin that allows the python/django developer to specify conditional form field display logic in the form class or model class. I am trying to decide how the developer must specify that logic. Here's an example: class MyModel(models.Model): #these are some django model fields which will be used in a form yes_or_no = models.SomeField...choices are yes or no... why = models.SomeField...text, but only relevant if yes_or_no == yes... elaborate_even_more = models.SomeField...more text, just here so we can have multiple conditions #here i am inventing some syntax...i am looking for suggestions!! #this is one possibility why.show_if = ('yes_or_no','==','yes') elaborate_even_more.show_if = (('yes_or_no','==','yes'),('why','is not','None')) #help me choose a syntax that is *easy*...and Pythonic and...Djangonic...and that makes your fingers happy to type! #another alternative... conditions = {'why': ('yes_or_no','==','yes'), 'elaborate_even_more': (('yes_or_no','==','yes'),('why','is not','None')) } #or another alternative... """Showe the field whiche hath the name *why* only under that circumstance in whiche the field whiche hath the name *yes_or_no* hath the value *yes*, in strictest equality.""" etc... Those conditions will be eventually passed via django templates to some javascript that will show or hide form fields accordingly. Which of those options (or please propose a better option) aligns better with conventions such that it will be easiest for the python/django developer to use? Also are there other considerations that should impact what syntax I choose?

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• Downloaded chm is blocked, is there a solution?

  - by David Rutten

  CHM files that are downloaded are often tagged as potentially malicious by Windows, which effectively blocks all the html pages inside of it. There's an easy fix (just unblock the file after you download it), but I was wondering if there's a better way to provide unblocked chm files. What if I were to download the chm file (as a byte stream) from our server inside the application, then write all the data to a file on the disk. Would it still be blocked? Is there another/better way still? Edit: Yes, downloading the file using a System.Net.WebClient does solve the problem. But, is there still a better way?

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• Creating a backup - Rsync - Connection refused (111)

  - by pablofiumara

  I am trying to create a backup of my website for free. I just want to have a backup of my website, including not only all files and the configuration but also the databases. I mean, a full backup. If it can be done automatically, it would be better. I feel there are better ways than using the cpanel to achieve that (actually, I believe sometimes web hosters does not have any cpanel). I read the following on how to do it: Automatically mirror the entire contents and configuration of your main server to a secondary backup server on a completely separate network in a different data centre. Use RSync, FXP, cPanel voodoo, or whatever method you wish to automate syncing. That is why I installed Rsync Daemon which is an alternative to SSH for remote backups. I configured it but the test went wrong. The terminal is showing me this: pablofiumara@pablofiumara-Lenovo-G470:~$ sudo rsync [email protected]::share [sudo] password for pablofiumara: rsync: failed to connect to pablofiumara.com (50.87.147.75): Connection refused (111) rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(122) [Receiver=3.0.9] pablofiumara@pablofiumara-Lenovo-G470:~$ sudo rsync [email protected]::share failed to connect to 50.87.147.7 (50.87.147.7): Connection refused (111) rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at clientserver.c(122) [Receiver=3.0.9] What should I do? Is there a better or easier way to achieve what I wish (I mentioned this in the first paragraph)?

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• Planning milestones and time

  - by Ignas

  I was hired by a marketing company a year ago initially for link building / SEO stuff, but I'm actually a Web developer and took the job just in desperation to have one (I'm still quite young and just finished 2nd year of University). From the 3rd day my boss realised that I'm not into that stuff at all and since he had an idea of a web based app we started to plan it. I estimated that it shouldn't take me longer than two months to do it, but as I was making it we soon realised that we want to add more and more stuff to make it even better. So the development on my own lasted for about 4 months, but then it became an enterprise size app and we hired another programmer to work along me. The guy was awesome at what he did, but because I was assigned to be programmer/project manager I had to set up milestones with deadlines and we missed most of them, because most of the time it was too much work, and my lack of experience kept me setting really optimistic deadlines. We still kept adding features and had changed the architecture of the application twice. My boss is a great guy and he gets that when we add features it expands the time frame in which things should be done so he wasn't angry at me nor the other guy. But I was feeling bad (I still am) that I suck at planning. I gained loads of experience from the programming side, but I still lack the management/planning skills which make me go nuts. So over the last year I have dedicated probably about 8 months of work to this app (obviously my studies affected it) and we're launching as a closed beta this month. So my question is how do I get better at planning/managing a project, how do you estimate the times? What do you take into consideration when setting goals. I'm working alone again because the other guy moved from the city. But I'm sure we'll be hiring to help me maintain it so I need to get better at it. Any hints, points or anything on the topic are appreciated.

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• Office 2010 Client &ndash; Should I go with 32 bit or 64 bit?

  - by Sahil Malik

  Ad:: SharePoint 2007 Training in .NET 3.5 technologies (more information). As you know, Office 2010 client now comes in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions. The question is, should you go with 32 bit or 64 bit? 64 is bigger than 32 .. so 64 is better no? NO! Given a choice, or unless you have a very strong reason not to – GO WITH 32 bit. Why is that? Here is why - 32 bit apps actually work better on 64 bit OS’s in most scenarios due to WoW, and the additional 64 bit VLSW calculations. If you have 2007 installations to support, SharePoint designer 2010 cannot be used to work with SharePoint 2007 sites. So you will have to install SharePoint designer 2007 32bit side by side with SharePoint designer 2010 32 bit side by side. So you cannot mix and match 32 bit and 64 bit here. Of course you can virtualize and not have this problem to begin with :-D. 64 bit office will break many things on your SharePoint experience for that client – example, that fancy datasheet view won’t work on lists. 32 bit office apps don’t have this issue. There are some extreme situations where you DO want 64 bit client apps though. Specifically if you have HUGE excel sheets to work with, then 64 bit office client excel is much better than the equivalent 32 bit excel. Comment on the article ....

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• Parameterized Django models

  - by mgibsonbr

  In principle, a single Django application can be reused in two or more projects, providing functionality relevent to both. That implies that the same database structure (tables and relations) will be re-created identically in different databases, and most times this is not a problem (assuming the projects/databases are unrelated - for instance when someone downloads a complete app to use in their own projects). Sometimes, however, the models must be "tweaked" a little to better fit the problem needs. This can be accomplished by forking the app, but I wondered if there wouldn't be a better option in cases where the app designer can anticipate the most common customizations. For instance, if I have a model that could relate to another as one-to-one or one-to-many, I could specify the unique property as a parameter, that can be specified in the project's settings: class This(models.Model): other = models.ForeignKey(Other, unique=settings.OTHER_TO_THIS) Or if a model can relate to many others, I could create an intermediate table for each of them (thus enforcing referential integrity) instead of using generic fks: for related in settings.MODELS_RELATED_TO_OTHER: model_name = '%s_Other' % related globals()[model_name] = type(model_name, (models.Model,) { me:models.ForeignKey(find_model_class(related)), other:models.ForeignKey(Other), # Some other properties all intersection tables must have }) Etc. Let me stress out that I'm not proposing to change the models at runtime nor anything like that; once the parameters were defined and syncdb called for the first time, those parameters are not to be changed again (unless you're doing a schema migration). Is this a good design? Are there better ways to accomplish the same thing, or maybe drawbacks I coulnd't anticipate? This technique is meant to be used sparingly (only on apps meant to be reused in wildly different contexts, and only when a specific need of customization can be detected while the app model is being designed).

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• Software Manager who makes developers do Project Management

  - by hdman

  I'm a software developer working in an embedded systems company. We have a Project Manager, who takes care of the overall project schedule (including electrical, quality, software and manufacturing) hence his software schedule is very brief. We also have a Software Manager, who's my boss. He makes me write and maintain the software schedule, design documents (high and low level design), SRS, change management, verification plans and reports, release management, reviews, and ofcourse the software. We only have one Test Engineer for the whole software team (10 members), and at any given time, there are a couple of projects going on. I'm spending 80% of my time making these documents. My boss comes from a Process background, and believes what we need is better documentation to improve software: (1) He considers the design to be paramount, coding is "just writing the design down", it shouldn't take too long, and "all the code should be written before the hardware is ready". (2) Doesn't understand the difference between a Central & Distributed Version control, even after we told him its easier to collaborate with a distributed model. (3) Doesn't understand code, and wants to understand every bug and its proposed solution. (4) Believes verification should be done by developer, and validation by the Tester. Thing is though, our verification only checks if implementation is correct (we don't write unit tests, its never considered in the schedule), and validation is black box testing, so the units tests are missing. I'm really confused. (1) Am I responsible for maintaining all these documents? It makes me feel like I'm doing the Software Project Management, in essence. (2) I don't really like creating documents, I want to solve problems and write code. In my experience, creating design documents only helps to an extent, its never the solution to better or faster code. (3) I feel the boss doesn't really care about making better products, but only about being a good manager in the eyes of the management. What can I do?

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• Learning a new concept - write from scratch or use frameworks?

  - by Stu

  I have recently been trying to learn about MVVM and all of the associated concepts such as repositories, mediators, data access. I made a decision that I would not use any frameworks for this so that I could gain a better understanding of how everything worked. I’m beginning to wonder if that was the best idea because I have hit some problems which I am not able to solve, even with the help of Stack Overflow! Writing from scratch I still feel that you have a much better understanding of something when you have been in the guts of it than if you were at a higher level. The other side of that coin is that you are in the guts of something that you don't fully understand which will lead to bad design decisions. This then makes it hard to get help because you will create unusual scenarios which are less likely to occur when you working within the confines of a framework. I have found that there are plenty of tutorials on the basics of a concept but very few that take you all the way from novice to expert. Maybe I should be looking at a book for this? Using frameworks The biggest motivation for me to use frameworks is that they are much more likely to be used in the workplace than a custom rolled solution. This can be quite a benefit when starting a new job if it's one less thing you have to learn. I feel that there is much better support for a framework than a custom solution which makes sense; many more people are using the framework than the solution that you created. The level of help is much wider as well, from basic questions to really specific, detailed questions. I would be interested to hear other people's views on this. When you are learning something new, should you/do you use frameworks or not? Why? If it's a combination of both, when do you stop one and move on to the other?

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• Reformatting and version control

  - by l0b0

  Code formatting matters. Even indentation matters. And consistency is more important than minor improvements. But projects usually don't have a clear, complete, verifiable and enforced style guide from day 1, and major improvements may arrive any day. Maybe you find that SELECT id, name, address FROM persons JOIN addresses ON persons.id = addresses.person_id; could be better written as / is better written than SELECT persons.id, persons.name, addresses.address FROM persons JOIN addresses ON persons.id = addresses.person_id; while working on adding more columns to the query. Maybe this is the most complex of all four queries in your code, or a trivial query among thousands. No matter how difficult the transition, you decide it's worth it. But how do you track code changes across major formatting changes? You could just give up and say "this is the point where we start again", or you could reformat all queries in the entire repository history. If you're using a distributed version control system like Git you can revert to the first commit ever, and reformat your way from there to the current state. But it's a lot of work, and everyone else would have to pause work (or be prepared for the mother of all merges) while it's going on. Is there a better way to change history which gives the best of all results: Same style in all commits Minimal merge work ? To clarify, this is not about best practices when starting the project, but rather what should be done when a large refactoring has been deemed a Good Thing™ but you still want a traceable history? Never rewriting history is great if it's the only way to ensure that your versions always work the same, but what about the developer benefits of a clean rewrite? Especially if you have ways (tests, syntax definitions or an identical binary after compilation) to ensure that the rewritten version works exactly the same way as the original?

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• Structuring cascading properties - parent only or parent + entire child graph?

  - by SB2055

  I have a Folder entity that can be Moderated by users. Folders can contain other folders. So I may have a structure like this: Folder 1 Folder 2 Folder 3 Folder 4 I have to decide how to implement Moderation for this entity. I've come up with two options: Option 1 When the user is given moderation privileges to Folder 1, define a moderator relationship between Folder 1 and User 1. No other relationships are added to the db. To determine if the user can moderate Folder 3, I check and see if User 1 is the moderator of any parent folders. This seems to alleviate some of the complexity of handling updates / moved entities / additions under Folder 1 after the relationship has been defined, and reverting the relationship means I only have to deal with one entity. Option 2 When the user is given moderation privileges to Folder 1, define a new relationship between User 1 and Folder 1, and all child entities down to the grandest of grandchildren when the relationship is created, and if it's ever removed, iterate back down the graph to remove the relationship. If I add something under Folder 2 after this relationship has been made, I just copy all Moderators into the new Entity. But when I need to show only the top-level Folders that a user is Moderating, I need to query all folders that have a parent folder that the user does not moderate, as opposed to option 1, where I just query any items that the user is moderating. I think it comes down to determining if users will be querying for all parent items more than they'll be querying child items... if so, then option 1 seems better. But I'm not sure. Is either approach better than the other? Why? Or is there another approach that's better than both? I'm using Entity Framework in case it matters.

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