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• Can the "Documents" standard folder be rescued and how?

  - by romkyns

  Anyone who likes their Documents folder to contain only things they place there knows that the standard Documents folder is completely unsuitable for this task. Every program seems to want to put its settings, data, or something equally irrelevant into the Documents folder, despite the fact that there are folders specifically for this job. So that this doesn't sound empty, take my personal "Documents" folder as an example. I don't ever use it, in that I never, under any circumstances, save anything into this folder myself. And yet, it contains 46 folders and 3 files at the top level, for a total of 800 files in 500 folders. That's 190 MB of "documents" I didn't create. Obviously any actual documents would immediately get lost in this mess. My question is: can anything be done to improve the situation sufficiently to make "Documents" useful again, say over the next 5 years? Can programmers be somehow educated en-masse not to use it as a dumping ground? Could the OS start reporting some "fake" location hidden under AppData through the existing APIs, while only allowing Explorer and the various Open/Save dialogs to know where the "real" Documents folder resides? Or are any attempts completely futile or even unnecessary?

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• Updating query results

  - by Francisco Garcia

  Within a DDD and CQRS context, a query result is displayed as table rows. Whenever new rows are inserted or deleted, their positions must be calculated by comparing the previous query result with the most recent one. This is needed to visualize with an animation new or deleted rows. The model of my view contains an array of the displayed query results. But I need a place to compare its contents against the latest query. Right now I consider my model view part of my application layer, but the comparison of two query result sets seems something that must be done within the domain layer. Which component should cache a query result and which one compare them? Are view models (and their cached contents) supposed to be in the application layer?

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• How to Avoid a Busy Loop Inside a Function That Returns the Object That's Being Waited For

  - by Carl Smith

  I have a function which has the same interface as Python's input builtin, but it works in a client-server environment. When it's called, the function, which runs in the server, sends a message to the client, asking it to get some input from the user. The user enters some stuff, or dismisses the prompt, and the result is passed back to the server, which passes it to the function. The function then returns the result. The function must work like Python's input [that's the spec], so it must block until it has the result. This is all working, but it uses a busy loop, which, in practice, could easily be spinning for many minutes. Currently, the function tells the client to get the input, passing an id. The client returns the result with the id. The server puts the result in a dictionary, with the id as the key. The function basically waits for that key to exist. def input(): '''simplified example''' key = unique_key() tell_client_to_get_input(key) while key not in dictionary: pass return dictionary.pop(pin) Using a callback would be the normal way to go, but the input function must block until the result is available, so I can't see how that could work. The spec can't change, as Python will be using the new input function for stuff like help and pdb, which provide their own little REPLs. I have a lot of flexibility in terms of how everything works overall, but just can't budge on the function acting exactly like Python's. Is there any way to return the result as soon as it's available, without the busy loop?

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• What is the good way of sharing specific data between ViewModels

  - by voroninp

  We have IAppContext which is injected into ViewModel. This service contains shared data: global filters and other application wide properties. But there are cases when data is very specific. For example one VM implements Master and the second one - Details of selected tree item. Thus DetailsVm must know about the selected item and its changes. We can store this information either in IAppContext or inside each concerned VM. In both cases update notifications are sent via Messenger. I see pros and cons for any of the approaches and can not decide which one is better. 1st: + explicitly exposed shared proerties, easy to follow dependencies - IAppContxt becomes cluttered with very specific data. 2nd: the exact opposite of the first and more memory load due to data duplication. May be someone can offer design alternatives or tell that one of the variants is objectively superior to the other cause I miss something important?

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• How to switch off? [closed]

  - by Xophmeister

  While I've programmed software for many years, I've only recently started doing so professionally and have noticed a bit of a problematic pattern. I hope this is the best place to pose such a question, as I am interested in others' experiences and solutions... Writing software is, by its nature, a cerebral exercise. When coding for my own sake, I would do so until I was satisfied; even if that meant going all night. Now I'm coding in exchange for goods and services, on projects that are inherently uninteresting to me, I want to 'switch off' when it's time to go home. Maybe you consider that to be a 'bad attitude', but I just don't feel that whatever I'm working on is worth caring about after-hours. Besides, my employer doesn't exactly have the infrastructure required to make out-of-office changes; I can't just clone a repo and even remote login is a PITA. Anyway, the problem I'm experiencing is that, while I'm not particularly overworked or stressed, if I'm faced with a problem, my brain will work on a solution. Generally, it won't give up. Hence I can't switch off and, sometimes, the problem or the solution is significant enough that it disrupts my sleep. While, paradoxically, this doesn't seem to affect my coding ability, it can have a profound impact of the rest of my life. I get increasingly low as I get tired. So far, the best solutions I've found are writing little notes on the matter (and, say, e-mailing them back to my work address) and exercise. Neither of these can switch me off entirely and, as the week progresses, exercise especially becomes untenable due to tiredness. TL;DR How can you stop from being a coding zombie?

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• returning null vs returning zero, which would be better?

  - by Dark Star1

  I inherited a project that I am managing and having to maintain pending the redevelopment of the code base. At the moment I am being tasked with adding little feature all over the place and have gotten into the habit of returning null instead of zero in parts of the code where I am working on. The problem is we have a client that is using this code and parts of code that require data from my implemented features recieve a null and dump the stack trace in UI. I would like to avoid this entirely from my input but without the nullPointer exceptions there's the potential that errors would be introduced into the client's data which may go un-noticed. Usually I would have come up with my own error notification system but I have never inherited a project before. so I am unsure whether to continue down this path. I still believe that the stack dump is preferable to un-noticed data corruption/inaccuracies.

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• Entity and pattern validation vs DB constraint

  - by Joerg

  When it comes to performance: What is the better way to validate the user input? If you think about a phone number and you only want numbers in the database, but it could begin with a 0, so you will use varchar: Is it better to check it via the entity model like this: @Size(min = 10, max = 12) @Digits(fraction = 0, integer = 12) @Column(name = "phone_number") private String phoneNumber; Or is it better to use on the database side a CHECK (and no checking in the entity model) for the same feature?

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• How should UI layer pass user input to BL layer?

  - by BornToCode

  I'm building an n-tier application, I have UI, BL, DAL & Entities (built from POCO) projects. (All projects have a reference to the Entities). My question is - how should I pass user input from the UI to the BL, as a bunch of strings passed to the BL method and the BL will build the object from the parameters, or should I build the objects inside the UI submit_function and send objects as parameters? EDIT: I wrote n-tier application, but what I actually meant was just layers.

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• Visitor-pattern vs inheritance for rendering

  - by akaltar

  I have a game engine that currently uses inheritance to provide a generic interface to do rendering: class renderable { public: void render(); }; Each class calls the gl_* functions itself, this makes the code hard to optimize and hard to implement something like setting the quality of rendering: class sphere : public renderable { public: void render() { glDrawElements(...); } }; I was thinking about implementing a system where I would create a Renderer class that would render my objects: class sphere { void render( renderer* r ) { r->renderme( *this ); } }; class renderer { renderme( sphere& sphere ) { // magically get render resources here // magically render a sphere here } }; My main problem is where should I store the VBOs and where should I Create them when using this method? Should I even use this approach or stick to the current one, perhaps something else? PS: I already asked this question on SO but got no proper answers.

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• Can you recommend a good test plan template?

  - by Ethel Evans

  Can you recommend a good test plan template for an agile testing team? I know there are templates for testing on the web and have already looked at some found by search engines, but I could really use something lightweight and something that has already been tried by skilled testers and is known to work well. Many templates I've seen give me the feeling that writing test documents is expected to be a third of the work that those testers are doing, but my team really prefers to use less documentation and more actual test writing. We use a wiki for documentation, so an approach that lends itself to living documents would be great. My hope is that using a more structured approach to test planning will increase the usefulness of my test plan while reducing the effort to create it by allowing me to think about the tests, and not the format and structure of the plan. My workplace does not have something already on hand, so whatever I start doing might be adopted by the company.

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• How to control messages to the same port from different emitters?

  - by Alex In Paris

  Scene: A company has many factories X, each emits a message to the same receive port in a Biztalk server Y; if all messages are processed without much delay, each will trigger an outgoing message to another system Z. Problem: Sometimes a factory loses its connection for a half-day or more and, when the connection is reestablished, thousands of messages get emitted. Now, the messages still get processed well by Y (Biztalk can easily handle the load) but system Z can't handle the flood and may lock up and severely delay the processing of all other messages from the other X. What is the solution? Creating multiple receive locations that permits us to pause one X or another would lose us information if the factory isn't smart enough to know whether the message was received or not. What is the basic pattern to apply in Biztalk for this problem? Would some throttling parameters help to limit the flow from any one X? Or are their techniques on the end part of Y which I should use instead ? I would prefer this last one since I can be confident that the message box will remember any failures, which could then be resumed.

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• How do you plan your asynchronous code?

  - by NullOrEmpty

  I created a library that is a invoker for a web service somewhere else. The library exposes asynchronous methods, since web service calls are a good candidate for that matter. At the beginning everything was just fine, I had methods with easy to understand operations in a CRUD fashion, since the library is a kind of repository. But then business logic started to become complex, and some of the procedures involves the chaining of many of these asynchronous operations, sometimes with different paths depending on the result value, etc.. etc.. Suddenly, everything is very messy, to stop the execution in a break point it is not very helpful, to find out what is going on or where in the process timeline have you stopped become a pain... Development becomes less quick, less agile, and to catch those bugs that happens once in a 1000 times becomes a hell. From the technical point, a repository that exposes asynchronous methods looked like a good idea, because some persistence layers could have delays, and you can use the async approach to do the most of your hardware. But from the functional point of view, things became very complex, and considering those procedures where a dozen of different calls were needed... I don't know the real value of the improvement. After read about TPL for a while, it looked like a good idea for managing tasks, but in the moment you have to combine them and start to reuse existing functionality, things become very messy. I have had a good experience using it for very concrete scenarios, but bad experience using them broadly. How do you work asynchronously? Do you use it always? Or just for long running processes? Thanks.

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• Is it okay to have many Abstract classes in your application?

  - by JoseK

  We initially wanted to implement a Strategy pattern with varying implementations of the methods in a commmon interface. These will get picked up at runtime based on user inputs. As it's turned out, we're having Abstract classes implementing 3 - 5 common methods and only one method left for a varying implementation i.e. the Strategy. Update: By many abstract classes I mean there are 6 different high level functionalities i.e. 6 packages , and each has it's Interface + AbstractImpl + (series of Actual Impl). Is this a bad design in any way? Any negative views in terms of later extensibility - I'm preparing for a code/design review with seniors.

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• Quick and Good: ( Requirement -> Validation -> Design ) for self use?

  - by Yugal Jindle

  How to casually do the required Software Engineering and designing? I am an inexperienced developer and face the following problem: My company is a start up and has no fix Software engineering systems. I am assigned tasks with not very clear and conflicting requirements. I don't have to follow any designs or verify requirements officially. Problem: I code all day and finally get stuck where requirement conflicts and I have to start over again. I can-not spend a lot of time doing proper SRS or SDD. How should I: List out Requirements for myself. (Not an official document) How to verify and validate the requirements? How to visualize them? How to design them with minimum effort? (As its going to be with me only) I don't want to waste my time coding something that's gonna collapse according to requirement conflict or something! I don't want to compromise with quality but don't want to re-write everything on some change that I didn't expected. I imagine making a diagram for my thought process that will show me conflict in the diagram itself, then finally correcting the diagram - I decide my design and structure my code in terms of interfaces or something. And then finally start implementing my design. I am able to sense the lack of systematic approach, but don't know how to proceed! Update: Please suggest me some tools that can ask me the questions and help me aggregate important details. How can I have diagram that I talked about for requirement verification?

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• Why do most of us use 'i' as a loop counter variable?

  - by kprobst

  Has anyone thought about why so many of us repeat this same pattern using the same variable names? for (int i = 0; i < foo; i++) { // ... } It seems most code I've ever looked at uses i, j, k and so on as iteration variables. I suppose I picked that up from somewhere, but I wonder why this is so prevalent in software development. Is it something we all picked up from C or something like that? Just an itch I've had for a while in the back of my head.

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• Sites with overlapping code-bases. Developing multiple sites with little changes

  - by Web Developer

  I have to develop 3 different sites video.com for hosting video audio.com for hosting audio docs.com for hosting docs. domain names for example only Almost 80% of the functionality is the same for all the three, with remaining 20% being completely different features... How do I handle this? How does sites like SO handle this? I am developing this in YII framework and was thinking of having these different features as modules but in this case the menu/code links in html code can become difficult.

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• What are some good debugging techniques [closed]

  - by Brad Bruce

  I frequently run into situations where I'm working with other programmers, helping out with debugging issues. Over the years, I've acquired my own techniques for logically breaking down a problem and tracing through it. I see several others who are great at writing programs, but freeze up when debugging. Are there any good resources I can point people to that describe some good debugging techniques?

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• Can decoupling hurt maintainability in certain situations?

  - by Ceiling Gecko

  Can the fact that the business logic is mapped to interfaces instead of implementations actually hinder the maintenance of the application in certain situations? A naive example with the Java's Hibernate framework would be, that for example (provided I don't have the whole code-base in my head, the project structure is a mess and classes are named with arbitrary names) if I wish to see what's going on in a certain DAO, to see if it actually is doing what it's supposed to do, then instead of traversing backwards up the tree from the point where the data service is invoked (where the tree will end in an interface with no implementation details whatsoever apart from the signature) I have to for example go and look for a configuration XML file to see which class is mapped to said interface as the implementation before being able to access the actual implementation details. Are there any situations where having loose coupling can actually hurt maintainability?

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• Learning how to design knowledge and data flow [closed]

  - by max

  In designing software, I spend a lot of time deciding how the knowledge (algorithms / business logic) and data should be allocated between different entities; that is, which object should know what. I am asking for advice about books, articles, presentations, classes, or other resources that would help me learn how to do it better. I code primarily in Python, but my question is not really language-specific; even if some of the insights I learn don't work in Python, that's fine. I'll give a couple examples to clarify what I mean. Example 1 I want to perform some computation. As a user, I will need to provide parameters to do the computation. I can have all those parameters sent to the "main" object, which then uses them to create other objects as needed. Or I can create one "main" object, as well as several additional objects; the additional objects would then be sent to the "main" object as parameters. What factors should I consider to make this choice? Example 2 Let's say I have a few objects of type A that can perform a certain computation. The main computation often involves using an object of type B that performs some interim computation. I can either "teach" A instances what exact parameters to pass to B instances (i.e., make B "dumb"); or I can "teach" B instances to figure out what needs to be done when looking at an A instance (i.e., make B "smart"). What should I think about when I'm making this choice?

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• Diving into a computer science career [closed]

  - by Willis

  Well first I would like to say thank you for taking the time to read my question. I'll give you some background. I graduated two years ago from a local UC in my state with a degree in cognitive psychology and worked in a neuroscience lab. During this time I was exposed to some light Matlab programming and other programming tidbits, but before this I had some basic understanding of programming. My father worked IT for a company when I was younger so I picked up his books and took learned things along the way growing up. Naturally I'm an inquisitive person, constantly learning, love challenges, and have had exposure to some languages. Yet at this point I was fully pursue it as a career and always had this in the back of my head. Where do I start? I'm 25 and feel like I still have time to make a switch. I've immersed myself in the terminal/command prompt to start, but which language do I focus on? I've read the A+ book and planning to take on the exam, then the networking exam, but I want to deal with more programming, development, and troubleshooting. I understand to get involved in open source, but where? I took the next step and got a small IT assistant job, but doesn't really deal with programming, development, just troubling shooting and small network issues. Thank you!

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• Where ORMs blur the lines between code and data, how do you decide what logic should be a stored procedure, and what should be coded?

  - by PhonicUK

  Take the following pseudocode: CreateInvoiceAndCalculate(ItemsAndQuantities, DispatchAddress, User); And say CreateInvoice does the following: Create a new entry in an Invoices table belonging to the specified User to be sent to the given DispatchAddress. Create a new entry in an InvoiceItems table for each of the items in ItemsAndQuantities, storing the Item, the Quantity, and the cost of the item as of now (by looking it up from an Items table) Calculate the total amount of the invoice (ex shipping and taxes) and store it in the new Invoice row. At a glace you wouldn't be able to tell if this was a method in my applications code, or a stored procedure in the database that is being exposed as a function by the ORM. And to some extent it doesn't really matter. Now technically none of this is business logic. You're not making any decisions - just performing a calculation and creating records. However some may argue that because you are performing a calculation that affects the business (the total amount to be invoiced) that this isn't something that should be done in a stored procedure and instead should be in code. So for this specific example - why would it be more appropriate to do one or the other? And where do you draw the line? Or does it even particular matter as long as it's sufficiently well documented?

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• What is a useful pattern to maintaining an object state in a one to many relationship?

  - by ahenderson

  I am looking for a design for my application, here are the players(classes) involved. struct Transform { // Uses a matrix to transform the position. // Also acts acts as the state of a Dialog. Position transform(Position p); //other methods. }; struct Dialog { // There are multiple dialog for the user to transform the output. Transform& t; void ChangeTranformation(){t.rotate(360);} } struct Algorithm { //gives us a position based on an implementation. For example this can return points on a circle or line. Transform& t; Position m_p; Dialog& d; Position GetCurrentPosition(){ return t.transform(m_p);} //other methods. } Properties I need: Each algorithms has one dialog and each dialog can have many algorithms associated with it. When the user selects an algorithm a dialog associated with that algorithm is displayed. If the user selects a different algorithm then re-selects back the state is restored in the dialog. Basically I want a good design pattern to maintain the state of the dialog given that many algorithms use it and they can be switched back and forth. Does anyone have any suggestions? Here is a use case: Dialog1 has a single edit box to control the radius. Algorithm1 generates points on a unit circle. Algorithm2 is the same as Algorithm1. The user has selected Algorithm1 and entered 2 into the edit box. This will generate points on a circle of radius 2. The user then selects Algorithm2 and enters 10 into the edit box of Dialog1. This will generate points on a circle of radius 10. Finally Algorithm1 is selected again. The edit box of Dialog1 should show 2 and points on a circle of radius 2 should be generated.

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• Use decorator and factory together to extend objects?

  - by TheClue

  I'm new to OOP and design pattern. I've a simple app that handles the generation of Tables, Columns (that belong to Table), Rows (that belong to Column) and Values (that belong to Rows). Each of these object can have a collection of Property, which is in turn defined as an enum. They are all interfaces: I used factories to get concrete instances of these products, depending on circumnstances. Now I'm facing the problem of extending these classes. Let's say I need another product called "SpecialTable" which in turn has some special properties or new methods like 'getSomethingSpecial' or an extended set of Property. The only way is to extend/specialize all my elements (ie. build a SpecialTableFactory, a SpecialTable interface and a SpecialTableImpl concrete)? What to do if, let's say, I plan to use standard methods like addRow(Column column, String name) that doesn't need to be specialized? I don't like the idea to inherit factories and interfaces, but since SpecialTable has more methods than Table i guess it cannot share the same factory. Am I wrong? Another question: if I need to define product properties at run time (a Table that is upgraded to SpecialTable at runtime), i guess i should use a decorator. Is it possible (and how) to combine both factory and decorator design? Is it better to use a State or Strategy pattern, instead?

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• To reorganize code, what to choose between library and service?

  - by essbeev

  I want to reorganize a large application with lot of code duplication into multiple components. Plus, some code is also duplicated over other applications. The common set of functionality that can be taken out of main application is clearly defined. Now, do I write a library or do I write a service for this functionality; so that all such applications continue to work and there is only one code-base (of common functionality) to maintain ?

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• Entity Framework 5, separating business logic from model - Repository?

  - by bnice7

  I am working on my first public-facing web application and I’m using MVC 4 for the presentation layer and EF 5 for the DAL. The database structure is locked, and there are moderate differences between how the user inputs data and how the database itself gets populated. I have done a ton of reading on the repository pattern (which I have never used) but most of my research is pushing me away from using it since it supposedly creates an unnecessary level of abstraction for the latest versions of EF since repositories and unit-of-work are already built-in. My initial approach is to simply create a separate set of classes for my business objects in the BLL that can act as an intermediary between my Controllers and the DAL. Here’s an example class: public class MyBuilding { public int Id { get; private set; } public string Name { get; set; } public string Notes { get; set; } private readonly Entities _context = new Entities(); // Is this thread safe? private static readonly int UserId = WebSecurity.GetCurrentUser().UserId; public IEnumerable<MyBuilding> GetList() { IEnumerable<MyBuilding> buildingList = from p in _context.BuildingInfo where p.Building.UserProfile.UserId == UserId select new MyBuilding {Id = p.BuildingId, Name = p.BuildingName, Notes = p.Building.Notes}; return buildingList; } public void Create() { var b = new Building {UserId = UserId, Notes = this.Notes}; _context.Building.Add(b); _context.SaveChanges(); // Set the building ID this.Id = b.BuildingId; // Seed 1-to-1 tables with reference the new building _context.BuildingInfo.Add(new BuildingInfo {Building = b}); _context.GeneralInfo.Add(new GeneralInfo {Building = b}); _context.LocationInfo.Add(new LocationInfo {Building = b}); _context.SaveChanges(); } public static MyBuilding Find(int id) { using (var context = new Entities()) // Is this OK to do in a static method? { var b = context.Building.FirstOrDefault(p => p.BuildingId == id && p.UserId == UserId); if (b == null) throw new Exception("Error: Building not found or user does not have access."); return new MyBuilding {Id = b.BuildingId, Name = b.BuildingInfo.BuildingName, Notes = b.Notes}; } } } My primary concern: Is the way I am instantiating my DbContext as a private property thread-safe, and is it safe to have a static method that instantiates a separate DbContext? Or am I approaching this all wrong? I am not opposed to learning up on the repository pattern if I am taking the total wrong approach here.

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