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  • The illusion of Competence

    - by tony_lombardo
    Working as a contractor opened my eyes to the developer food chain.  Even though I had similar experiences earlier in my career, the challenges seemed much more vivid this time through.  I thought I’d share a couple of experiences with you, and the lessons that can be taken from them. Lesson 1: Beware of the “funnel” guy.  The funnel guy is the one who wants you to funnel all thoughts, ideas and code changes through him.  He may say it’s because he wants to avoid conflicts in source control, but the real reason is likely that he wants to hide your contributions.  Here’s an example.  When I finally got access to the code on one of my projects, I was told by the developer that I had to funnel all of my changes through him.  There were 4 of us coding on the project, but only 2 of us working on the UI.  The other 2 were working on a separate application, but part of the overall project.  So I figured, I’ll check it into SVN, he reviews and accepts then merges in.  Not even close.  I didn’t even have checkin rights to SVN, I had to email my changes to the developer so he could check those changes in.  Lesson 2: If you point out flaws in code to someone supposedly ‘higher’ than you in the developer chain, they’re going to get defensive.  My first task on this project was to review the code, familiarize myself with it.  So of course, that’s what I did.  And in familiarizing myself with it, I saw so many bad practices and code smells that I immediately started coming up with solutions to fix it.  Of course, when I reviewed these changes with the developer (guy who originally wrote the code), he smiled and nodded and said, we can’t make those changes now, it’s too destabilizing.  I recommended we create a new branch and start working on refactoring, but branching was a new concept for this guy and he was worried we would somehow break SVN. How about some concrete examples? I started out by recommending we remove NUnit dependency and tests from the application project, and create a separate Unit testing project.  This was met with a little bit of resistance because - “How do I access the private methods?”  As it turned out there weren’t really any private methods that weren’t exposed by public methods, so I quickly calmed this fear. Win 1 Loss 0 Next, I recommended that all of the File IO access be wrapped in Using clauses, or at least properly wrapped in try catch finally.  This recommendation was accepted.. but never implemented. Win 2  Loss 1 Next recommendation was to refactor the command pattern implementation.  The command pattern was implemented, but it wasn’t really necessary for the application.  More over, the fact that we had 100 different command classes, each with it’s own specific command parameters class, made maintenance a huge hassle.  The same code repeated over and over and over.  This recommendation was declined, the code was too fragile and this change would destabilize it.  I couldn’t disagree, though it was the commands themselves in many cases that were fragile. Win 2 Loss 2 Next recommendation was to aid performance (and responsiveness) of the application by using asynchronous service calls.  This on was accepted. Win 2 Loss 3 If you’re paying any attention, you’re wondering why the async service calls was scored as a loss.. Let me explain.  The service call was made using the async pattern.  Followed by a thread.sleep  <facepalm>. Now it’s easy to be harsh on this kind of code, especially if you’re an experienced developer.  But I understood how most of this happened.  One junior guy, working as hard as he can to build his first real world application, with little or no guidance from anyone else.  He had his pattern book and theory of programming to help him, but no real world experience.  He didn’t know how difficult it would be to trace the crashes to the coding issues above, but he will one day.  The part that amazed me was the management position that “this guy should be a team lead, because he’s worked so hard”.  I’m all for rewarding hard work, but when you reward someone by promoting them past the point of their competence, you’re setting yourself and them up for failure.  And that’s lesson 3.  Just because you’ve got a hard worker, doesn’t mean he should be leading a development project.  If you’re a junior guy busting your ass, keep at it.  I encourage you to try new things, but most importantly to learn from your mistakes.  And correct your mistakes.  And if someone else looks at your code and shows you a laundry list of things that should be done differently, don’t take it personally – they’re really trying to help you.  And if you’re a senior guy, working with a junior guy, it’s your duty to point out the flaws in the code.  Even if it does make you the bad guy.  And while I’ve used “guy” above, I mean both men and women.  And in some cases mutant dinosaurs. 

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  • Microsoft Introduces WebMatrix

    - by Rick Strahl
    originally published in CoDe Magazine Editorial Microsoft recently released the first CTP of a new development environment called WebMatrix, which along with some of its supporting technologies are squarely aimed at making the Microsoft Web Platform more approachable for first-time developers and hobbyists. But in the process, it also provides some updated technologies that can make life easier for existing .NET developers. Let’s face it: ASP.NET development isn’t exactly trivial unless you already have a fair bit of familiarity with sophisticated development practices. Stick a non-developer in front of Visual Studio .NET or even the Visual Web Developer Express edition and it’s not likely that the person in front of the screen will be very productive or feel inspired. Yet other technologies like PHP and even classic ASP did provide the ability for non-developers and hobbyists to become reasonably proficient in creating basic web content quickly and efficiently. WebMatrix appears to be Microsoft’s attempt to bring back some of that simplicity with a number of technologies and tools. The key is to provide a friendly and fully self-contained development environment that provides all the tools needed to build an application in one place, as well as tools that allow publishing of content and databases easily to the web server. WebMatrix is made up of several components and technologies: IIS Developer Express IIS Developer Express is a new, self-contained development web server that is fully compatible with IIS 7.5 and based on the same codebase that IIS 7.5 uses. This new development server replaces the much less compatible Cassini web server that’s been used in Visual Studio and the Express editions. IIS Express addresses a few shortcomings of the Cassini server such as the inability to serve custom ISAPI extensions (i.e., things like PHP or ASP classic for example), as well as not supporting advanced authentication. IIS Developer Express provides most of the IIS 7.5 feature set providing much better compatibility between development and live deployment scenarios. SQL Server Compact 4.0 Database access is a key component for most web-driven applications, but on the Microsoft stack this has mostly meant you have to use SQL Server or SQL Server Express. SQL Server Compact is not new-it’s been around for a few years, but it’s been severely hobbled in the past by terrible tool support and the inability to support more than a single connection in Microsoft’s attempt to avoid losing SQL Server licensing. The new release of SQL Server Compact 4.0 supports multiple connections and you can run it in ASP.NET web applications simply by installing an assembly into the bin folder of the web application. In effect, you don’t have to install a special system configuration to run SQL Compact as it is a drop-in database engine: Copy the small assembly into your BIN folder (or from the GAC if installed fully), create a connection string against a local file-based database file, and then start firing SQL requests. Additionally WebMatrix includes nice tools to edit the database tables and files, along with tools to easily upsize (and hopefully downsize in the future) to full SQL Server. This is a big win, pending compatibility and performance limits. In my simple testing the data engine performed well enough for small data sets. This is not only useful for web applications, but also for desktop applications for which a fully installed SQL engine like SQL Server would be overkill. Having a local data store in those applications that can potentially be accessed by multiple users is a welcome feature. ASP.NET Razor View Engine What? Yet another native ASP.NET view engine? We already have Web Forms and various different flavors of using that view engine with Web Forms and MVC. Do we really need another? Microsoft thinks so, and Razor is an implementation of a lightweight, script-only view engine. Unlike the Web Forms view engine, Razor works only with inline code, snippets, and markup; therefore, it is more in line with current thinking of what a view engine should represent. There’s no support for a “page model” or any of the other Web Forms features of the full-page framework, but just a lightweight scripting engine that works with plain markup plus embedded expressions and code. The markup syntax for Razor is geared for minimal typing, plus some progressive detection of where a script block/expression starts and ends. This results in a much leaner syntax than the typical ASP.NET Web Forms alligator (<% %>) tags. Razor uses the @ sign plus standard C# (or Visual Basic) block syntax to delineate code snippets and expressions. Here’s a very simple example of what Razor markup looks like along with some comment annotations: <!DOCTYPE html> <html>     <head>         <title></title>     </head>     <body>     <h1>Razor Test</h1>          <!-- simple expressions -->     @DateTime.Now     <hr />     <!-- method expressions -->     @DateTime.Now.ToString("T")          <!-- code blocks -->     @{         List<string> names = new List<string>();         names.Add("Rick");         names.Add("Markus");         names.Add("Claudio");         names.Add("Kevin");     }          <!-- structured block statements -->     <ul>     @foreach(string name in names){             <li>@name</li>     }     </ul>           <!-- Conditional code -->        @if(true) {                        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->        <text>         true        </text>;    }    else    {        <!-- Literal Text embedding in code -->       <text>       false       </text>;    }    </body> </html> Like the Web Forms view engine, Razor parses pages into code, and then executes that run-time compiled code. Effectively a “page” becomes a code file with markup becoming literal text written into the Response stream, code snippets becoming raw code, and expressions being written out with Response.Write(). The code generated from Razor doesn’t look much different from similar Web Forms code that only uses script tags; so although the syntax may look different, the operational model is fairly similar to the Web Forms engine minus the overhead of the large Page object model. However, there are differences: -Razor pages are based on a new base class, Microsoft.WebPages.WebPage, which is hosted in the Microsoft.WebPages assembly that houses all the Razor engine parsing and processing logic. Browsing through the assembly (in the generated ASP.NET Temporary Files folder or GAC) will give you a good idea of the functionality that Razor provides. If you look closely, a lot of the feature set matches ASP.NET MVC’s view implementation as well as many of the helper classes found in MVC. It’s not hard to guess the motivation for this sort of view engine: For beginning developers the simple markup syntax is easier to work with, although you obviously still need to have some understanding of the .NET Framework in order to create dynamic content. The syntax is easier to read and grok and much shorter to type than ASP.NET alligator tags (<% %>) and also easier to understand aesthetically what’s happening in the markup code. Razor also is a better fit for Microsoft’s vision of ASP.NET MVC: It’s a new view engine without the baggage of Web Forms attached to it. The engine is more lightweight since it doesn’t carry all the features and object model of Web Forms with it and it can be instantiated directly outside of the HTTP environment, which has been rather tricky to do for the Web Forms view engine. Having a standalone script parser is a huge win for other applications as well – it makes it much easier to create script or meta driven output generators for many types of applications from code/screen generators, to simple form letters to data merging applications with user customizability. For me personally this is very useful side effect and who knows maybe Microsoft will actually standardize they’re scripting engines (die T4 die!) on this engine. Razor also better fits the “view-based” approach where the view is supposed to be mostly a visual representation that doesn’t hold much, if any, code. While you can still use code, the code you do write has to be self-contained. Overall I wouldn’t be surprised if Razor will become the new standard view engine for MVC in the future – and in fact there have been announcements recently that Razor will become the default script engine in ASP.NET MVC 3.0. Razor can also be used in existing Web Forms and MVC applications, although that’s not working currently unless you manually configure the script mappings and add the appropriate assemblies. It’s possible to do it, but it’s probably better to wait until Microsoft releases official support for Razor scripts in Visual Studio. Once that happens, you can simply drop .cshtml and .vbhtml pages into an existing ASP.NET project and they will work side by side with classic ASP.NET pages. WebMatrix Development Environment To tie all of these three technologies together, Microsoft is shipping WebMatrix with an integrated development environment. An integrated gallery manager makes it easy to download and load existing projects, and then extend them with custom functionality. It seems to be a prominent goal to provide community-oriented content that can act as a starting point, be it via a custom templates or a complete standard application. The IDE includes a project manager that works with a single project and provides an integrated IDE/editor for editing the .cshtml and .vbhtml pages. A run button allows you to quickly run pages in the project manager in a variety of browsers. There’s no debugging support for code at this time. Note that Razor pages don’t require explicit compilation, so making a change, saving, and then refreshing your page in the browser is all that’s needed to see changes while testing an application locally. It’s essentially using the auto-compiling Web Project that was introduced with .NET 2.0. All code is compiled during run time into dynamically created assemblies in the ASP.NET temp folder. WebMatrix also has PHP Editing support with syntax highlighting. You can load various PHP-based applications from the WebMatrix Web Gallery directly into the IDE. Most of the Web Gallery applications are ready to install and run without further configuration, with Wizards taking you through installation of tools, dependencies, and configuration of the database as needed. WebMatrix leverages the Web Platform installer to pull the pieces down from websites in a tight integration of tools that worked nicely for the four or five applications I tried this out on. Click a couple of check boxes and fill in a few simple configuration options and you end up with a running application that’s ready to be customized. Nice! You can easily deploy completed applications via WebDeploy (to an IIS server) or FTP directly from within the development environment. The deploy tool also can handle automatically uploading and installing the database and all related assemblies required, making deployment a simple one-click install step. Simplified Database Access The IDE contains a database editor that can edit SQL Compact and SQL Server databases. There is also a Database helper class that facilitates database access by providing easy-to-use, high-level query execution and iteration methods: @{       var db = Database.OpenFile("FirstApp.sdf");     string sql = "select * from customers where Id > @0"; } <ul> @foreach(var row in db.Query(sql,1)){         <li>@row.FirstName @row.LastName</li> } </ul> The query function takes a SQL statement plus any number of positional (@0,@1 etc.) SQL parameters by simple values. The result is returned as a collection of rows which in turn have a row object with dynamic properties for each of the columns giving easy (though untyped) access to each of the fields. Likewise Execute and ExecuteNonQuery allow execution of more complex queries using similar parameter passing schemes. Note these queries use string-based queries rather than LINQ or Entity Framework’s strongly typed LINQ queries. While this may seem like a step back, it’s also in line with the expectations of non .NET script developers who are quite used to writing and using SQL strings in code rather than using OR/M frameworks. The only question is why was something not included from the beginning in .NET and Microsoft made developers build custom implementations of these basic building blocks. The implementation looks a lot like a DataTable-style data access mechanism, but to be fair, this is a common approach in scripting languages. This type of syntax that uses simple, static, data object methods to perform simple data tasks with one line of code are common in scripting languages and are a good match for folks working in PHP/Python, etc. Seems like Microsoft has taken great advantage of .NET 4.0’s dynamic typing to provide this sort of interface for row iteration where each row has properties for each field. FWIW, all the examples demonstrate using local SQL Compact files - I was unable to get a SQL Server connection string to work with the Database class (the connection string wasn’t accepted). However, since the code in the page is still plain old .NET, you can easily use standard ADO.NET code or even LINQ or Entity Framework models that are created outside of WebMatrix in separate assemblies as required. The good the bad the obnoxious - It’s still .NET The beauty (or curse depending on how you look at it :)) of Razor and the compilation model is that, behind it all, it’s still .NET. Although the syntax may look foreign, it’s still all .NET behind the scenes. You can easily access existing tools, helpers, and utilities simply by adding them to the project as references or to the bin folder. Razor automatically recognizes any assembly reference from assemblies in the bin folder. In the default configuration, Microsoft provides a host of helper functions in a Microsoft.WebPages assembly (check it out in the ASP.NET temp folder for your application), which includes a host of HTML Helpers. If you’ve used ASP.NET MVC before, a lot of the helpers should look familiar. Documentation at the moment is sketchy-there’s a very rough API reference you can check out here: http://www.asp.net/webmatrix/tutorials/asp-net-web-pages-api-reference Who needs WebMatrix? Uhm… good Question Clearly Microsoft is trying hard to create an environment with WebMatrix that is easy to use for newbie developers. The goal seems to be simplicity in providing a minimal development environment and an easy-to-use script engine/language that makes it easy to get started with. There’s also some focus on community features that can be used as starting points, such as Web Gallery applications and templates. The community features in particular are very nice and something that would be nice to eventually see in Visual Studio as well. The question is whether this is too little too late. Developers who have been clamoring for a simpler development environment on the .NET stack have mostly left for other simpler platforms like PHP or Python which are catering to the down and dirty developer. Microsoft will be hard pressed to win those folks-and other hardcore PHP developers-back. Regardless of how much you dress up a script engine fronted by the .NET Framework, it’s still the .NET Framework and all the complexity that drives it. While .NET is a fine solution in its breadth and features once you get a basic handle on the core features, the bar of entry to being productive with the .NET Framework is still pretty high. The MVC style helpers Microsoft provides are a good step in the right direction, but I suspect it’s not enough to shield new developers from having to delve much deeper into the Framework to get even basic applications built. Razor and its helpers is trying to make .NET more accessible but the reality is that in order to do useful stuff that goes beyond the handful of simple helpers you still are going to have to write some C# or VB or other .NET code. If the target is a hobby/amateur/non-programmer the learning curve isn’t made any easier by WebMatrix it’s just been shifted a tad bit further along in your development endeavor when you run out of canned components that are supplied either by Microsoft or the community. The database helpers are interesting and actually I’ve heard a lot of discussion from various developers who’ve been resisting .NET for a really long time perking up at the prospect of easier data access in .NET than the ridiculous amount of code it takes to do even simple data access with raw ADO.NET. It seems sad that such a simple concept and implementation should trigger this sort of response (especially since it’s practically trivial to create helpers like these or pick them up from countless libraries available), but there it is. It also shows that there are plenty of developers out there who are more interested in ‘getting stuff done’ easily than necessarily following the latest and greatest practices which are overkill for many development scenarios. Sometimes it seems that all of .NET is focused on the big life changing issues of development, rather than the bread and butter scenarios that many developers are interested in to get their work accomplished. And that in the end may be WebMatrix’s main raison d'être: To bring some focus back at Microsoft that simpler and more high level solutions are actually needed to appeal to the non-high end developers as well as providing the necessary tools for the high end developers who want to follow the latest and greatest trends. The current version of WebMatrix hits many sweet spots, but it also feels like it has a long way to go before it really can be a tool that a beginning developer or an accomplished developer can feel comfortable with. Although there are some really good ideas in the environment (like the gallery for downloading apps and components) which would be a great addition for Visual Studio as well, the rest of the development environment just feels like crippleware with required functionality missing especially debugging and Intellisense, but also general editor support. It’s not clear whether these are because the product is still in an early alpha release or whether it’s simply designed that way to be a really limited development environment. While simple can be good, nobody wants to feel left out when it comes to necessary tool support and WebMatrix just has that left out feeling to it. If anything WebMatrix’s technology pieces (which are really independent of the WebMatrix product) are what are interesting to developers in general. The compact IIS implementation is a nice improvement for development scenarios and SQL Compact 4.0 seems to address a lot of concerns that people have had and have complained about for some time with previous SQL Compact implementations. By far the most interesting and useful technology though seems to be the Razor view engine for its light weight implementation and it’s decoupling from the ASP.NET/HTTP pipeline to provide a standalone scripting/view engine that is pluggable. The first winner of this is going to be ASP.NET MVC which can now have a cleaner view model that isn’t inconsistent due to the baggage of non-implemented WebForms features that don’t work in MVC. But I expect that Razor will end up in many other applications as a scripting and code generation engine eventually. Visual Studio integration for Razor is currently missing, but is promised for a later release. The ASP.NET MVC team has already mentioned that Razor will eventually become the default MVC view engine, which will guarantee continued growth and development of this tool along those lines. And the Razor engine and support tools actually inherit many of the features that MVC pioneered, so there’s some synergy flowing both ways between Razor and MVC. As an existing ASP.NET developer who’s already familiar with Visual Studio and ASP.NET development, the WebMatrix IDE doesn’t give you anything that you want. The tools provided are minimal and provide nothing that you can’t get in Visual Studio today, except the minimal Razor syntax highlighting, so there’s little need to take a step back. With Visual Studio integration coming later there’s little reason to look at WebMatrix for tooling. It’s good to see that Microsoft is giving some thought about the ease of use of .NET as a platform For so many years, we’ve been piling on more and more new features without trying to take a step back and see how complicated the development/configuration/deployment process has become. Sometimes it’s good to take a step - or several steps - back and take another look and realize just how far we’ve come. WebMatrix is one of those reminders and one that likely will result in some positive changes on the platform as a whole. © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET   IIS7  

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  • How could this diagram of the current most lucrative technologies be improved?

    - by Edward Tanguay
    I'm giving a talk in April 2011 on the "Developer English" and showing my non-developer audience, mostly English teachers, various diagrams to explain how developers see their industry etc. One of these diagrams is "Hot Technologies", basically, if you want to become a developer, what technologies should you learn to have the highest chance of (1) getting a job (2) making a good salary, and (3) work with the most exciting technology. This is a draft I made just to get some ideas out, basically C#, PHP, Java are where the bulk of the jobs are. Mobile development has a big future. JavaScript is becoming more and more important, and I want to list "minor technologies" such a Python, Ruby on Rails to the side, I assume e.g. that in general, there are a much smaller percentage of jobs in these technologies as in C#, PHP, Java. How could this diagram be improved?

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  • How to manage PHP projects?

    - by Shakti Singh
    I am a PHP developer and I want to know how to manage a project with more than one developer working on the same time. Are there some tools to manage them if any please let me know I don't know about that? The tool which can show everything which developer is working on what task. when he will be available for another task. Who one is free right now? Something managing project as well as utilization of your team member. Tool which can take care of all the phases of a project from coding to delivery.

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  • Oracle Technology Network Newsletters Revisited

    - by Justin Kestelyn
    You may find this hard to believe, some analysts content that email newsletters are still among the most preferred methods of "information awareness" by developers today. And in our experience, the numbers back it up: subscriptions to Oracle Technology Network newsletters grow organically by 15% every year, even after you take continual list cleanup into account. At this point, we have honed our newsletter strategy to a fine edge; the choices are now: Oracle's Java Developer Newsletter Oracle's Database Application Developer Newsletter (also suitable for DBAs) Oracle's Architect Community Newsletter Oracle's Solaris Community Newsletter (new!) Oracle's .NET Developer Newsletter All of which you can subscribe to here; sample issues also available. Have a taste, you'll like them!

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  • Slides, Code, and Photos from SPTechCon San Francisco 2011

    - by Brian Jackett
    Note: This is a temporary post containing my slides and code from my session “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” at SPTechCon San Francisco 2011.     Thanks to all of my attendees that came to “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010”.  They had such great questions that we ran out of time before covering all of the planned material.  I wanted to provide my slides and code samples so that you can walk through them sooner than later.  I’ll update this post after the event with a more complete post. Slides and Code   Click here for “The Expanding Developer Toolbox for SharePoint 2010” materials         -Frog Out

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  • With a small development team, how do you organize second-level support?

    - by Lenny222
    Say, you have a team of 5 developers and your inhouse customers demand a reasonable support availability of say 5 days a week, 9am-6pm. I can imagine the following scenarios: the customers approach the same guy, every time. Downside: single point of failure, if the guy is unavailable. each developer is assigned one week of support duty. Downside: how to you distribute the work evenly in times of planned (vacation) and unplanned (sickness) unavailability? each developer is assigned one day of support duty. Downside: similar to above, but not as bad. a randomly picked developer handles the support request. Downside: maybe not fair, see above. What is your experience?

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  • Day 1 - Finding Like Minds

    - by dapostolov
    So, is being a Game Developer any different from being an IT Developer? I picture a poorly lit environment where I get to purchase my own desk lamp; I'm thinking one of those huge lava lamps that pump out so much heat you could fry an egg on it. To my right: a "great wall" of empty coke cans dwarf me. Eating my last slice of pizza I look across my desk to see a fellow developer with a smug look on his face;  he's just coded his latest module for the game and it looks like he's in nirvana. My duty, of course, is to remind him to keep focused on the job at hand. So, picking up my trusty elastic and aerodynamically crafted paper bullet I begin a 10 minute war of welts and laughter which is promptly abrupted by our Project Manager demanding more details from our morning Scrum meeting. After providing about 5 minutes of geek speak and several words of comfort to make his eyes glaze over...it hits me, the idea for the module...beckoning my developer friend over, we quickly shoo the Project Manager away and begin our brainstorming frenzy ... now, where'd I put that full can of coke? OK. OK. This isn't probably the most ideal game developer environment, but it definitely sounds fun to me...and from what I gather is nothing like most game development companies. But I'm not doing this blog series to "go pro"; like I stated in my first post I want to make a 2D game from an idea my best friend and I drummed up long, long ago. I'm in this for the passion AND I want to see how easy it is for us .Net Developers to create a game. So where do I start? Where can I find like minded individuals? What technologies are there? What do I need to make a video game? The questions are endless....AND...since I already have an idea ... lets start with ... Technology (yes, I'm a geek, live with it...) Technology OK. Predominantly, games are still made in C++ or even C. I'm not sure how much assembly code is floating around lately, however, that is not my concern. I do know C / C++ from my past, enough to even get me by, but I'm mainly interested in a recent, not-so-new, technology called XNA. What is XNA? XNA allows us .Net Developers to make 2D / 3D games for windows, Xbox*, and Windows Mobile 7*. * = for a nominal fee *cough* The following link is your one stop shop to XNA game development: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted The above site hosts information such as: - getting started - a sample/instructional shooter game in 2D / 3D with code (if I'm taking too long for you in this blog series) - downloads - starter kits... http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/starterkits/ And of course...forums. You can also subscribe and pay for their premium membership which gets you some pretty awesome tutorials, resources, downloads, and premium community support. Some general Wiki information about XNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNA_%28Microsoft%29 Community Support OK. Let's move on to industry and community support. Apart from XNA, there are some really cool sites out there, I just haven't found all of them yet. However, I found a really cool Game Development website called Gamastura. You can click on the following link to get you there: http://www.gamasutra.com/ The site is 100% dedicated to "The Art & Business of Making Games". Armed with blogs, twitter, jobs/resumes and most importantly industry news; one could subscribe to the feed and got lost in the wealth of information it provides. On a side note: I remember Gamasutra being around when my best friend and I wanted to make a video game...meaning, they've been around for a while now. I think the most beneficial aspect of this site is to understand the industry you want to get into. Otherwise, it's just a cool site to keep up to date with the industry in general. Another Community Support option is LinkedIn. Amongst the land of extremely bloated achievements and responsibilities lay 3 groups (that I have found) that deal with game development.: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=59205 - Game Developers http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=824817 - DirectX Game Developer Network http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=756587 - DirectX Developers The Game Developers group in LinkedIn is by far the most active of the three and could possibly provide a wealth of support. What I've done thus far: - I lightly researched the XNA technology - I looked around for some community sites to assist me - I downloaded the XNA Game Studio 3.1 on my PC and installed it on my IDE - I even tried both tutorials! http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bgintro/chapter1   Best Regards D.

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  • Effective template system

    - by Alex
    I'm building a content management system, and need advice on which theming structure should I adopt. A few options (This is not a complete list): Wordpress style: the controller decides what template to load based on the user request, like: home page / article archive / single article page etc. each of these templates are unrelated to other templates, and must exist within the theme the theme developer decides if (s)he want to use inner-templates (like "sidebar", "sidebar item"), and includes them manually where (s)he thinks are needed. Drupal style: the controller gives control to the theme developer only to inner-templates; if they don't exist it falls back internally to some default templates (I find this very restrictive) Funky style: the controller only loads a "index.php" template and provides the theme developer conditional tags, which he can use to include inner-templates if (s)he wants. Among these styles, or others what style of template system allows for fast development and a more concise design and implementation.

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  • How to explain to non-technical person why the task will take much longer then they think?

    - by Mag20
    Almost every developer has to answer questions from business side like: Why is going to take 2 days to add this simple contact form? When developer estimates this task, they may divide it into steps: make some changes to Database optimize DB changes for speed add front end HTML write server side code add validation add client side javascript use unit tests make sure SEO is setup is working implement email confirmation refactor and optimize the code for speed ... These maybe hard to explain to non-technical person, who basically sees the whole task as just putting together some HTML and creating a table to store the data. To them it could be 2 hours MAX. So is there a better way to explain why the estimate is high to non-developer?

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  • Are Java certifications important for an architect role?

    - by Tahir Akram
    My this question is career path related. I want to know how much Java Certifications (SCJP, SCWCD and others) are important for an architect position. If a person posses a good experience in Java development and want to pursue his career on architect level, do you guys think he need to have certification on his CV. If he has never worked on lead developer roles? If you conducting my interview for an architect position. And I have worked as a Java web developer in different teams having 5 years of exp. Never lead any. And I am having certification badges on my CV. How can a developer make his career path towards being an architect in a team?

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  • Are there any downsides of 2 developers getting married ?

    - by simpson
    I remember that in my first year at college, the professor told us that his wife is also a software developer, and a few decades ago when there has been a tough period of 2-3 years in the software field they both had been unemployed and had experienced some hard times. Of course I am not asking about this economic downside, as it is a general conclusion for a family working in the same field, and is not related specifically to programming. I am asking about any other possible downsides of a family where both people are programmers. To all developers married to developers - I am not asking if it is "horrible" or something like that, of course it's not, just if there are any specific issues (all kinds of relationships has some specific issues, and at the same time are immune to others). And yes, I am asking about a male developer married to a female developer, I am clarifying to avoid jokes like "I believe that 2 developers can get married in some states" and so on :)

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  • Speaking at AMD Fusion conference

    - by Daniel Moth
    Next Wednesday at 2pm I will be presenting a session at the AMD Fusion developer summit in Bellevue, Washington State. For more on this conference please visit the official website. If you filter the catalog by 'Speaker Last Name' to "Moth", you'll find my talk. For your convenience, below is the title and abstract Blazing-fast code using GPUs and more, with Microsoft Visual C++ To get full performance out of mainstream hardware, high-performance code needs to harness, not only multi-core CPUs, but also GPUs (whether discrete cards or integrated in the processor) and other compute accelerators to achieve orders-of-magnitude speed-up for data parallel algorithms. How can you as a C++ developer fully utilize all that heterogeneous hardware from your Visual Studio environment? How can your code benefit from this tremendous performance boost without sacrificing your developer productivity or the portability of your solution? The answers will be presented in this session that introduces a new technology from Microsoft. Hope to see many of you there! Comments about this post welcome at the original blog.

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  • How to handle estimates for programmers joining the team?

    - by Jordan
    Iteration has already started, new programmer joins the team, task X has already been estimated to be 30 hours by a different developer. What is the best practice in this situation? new developer runs with the given estimate (the idea being that any discrepancy will be corrected for when velocity is calculated?) new developer re-estimates task? (if so, what if it's significantly higher and no longer fits in the iteration?) throw our hands up and go back to waterfall? something else entirely?

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  • Career growth in Adobe Flex or HTML5? [closed]

    - by Raj
    I have been working as a java/j2ee developer in a mnc from past 2 years. I have worked on javascript,jsp,struts,html,css on the 1st project. Now I am working on javascript/xsl/Adobe Flex in current project for 6 months. I am getting calls for java/flex developer from jobsites. Recently got a call for a Javascript/HTML5 developer. Is it a good option compared to Adobe Flex in current project? Please guide me among these technologies which will take my career in right direction and good growth which keeps in demand.

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  • Confused about career options in Web Developement.

    - by Radheshyam Nayak
    I am currently in the final year of my graduation in computer science course. I love programming in PHP but not under pressure. As my graduation life is going to be over I have to shape up my career. My personal desire is to become a web developer and start my own web-based company after completion of courses. I do not have any desire to work for a company as a developer. Currently I have programming knowledge of PHP, Mysql and Javascript. Though I have not completed any type of project in PHP. So to become a complete web developer what else do I need to know to be able to get developement project? Any project I apply for are simply declined due to lack of portfolio. So how should I proceed?

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  • Java Developers: Open-source Modules, Great Tools, Opportunity.

    - by Paul Sorensen
    The role of Java developer may just be better than ever. An excellent article in Java Magazine discusses the availability of web-based tools that help development teams more effectively manage their projects and modules. If you are a Java developer you should definitely read this article. I especially like the Expert Opinions scattered throughout the article. These highlight real-world usage of the latest and greatest development tools.  As you consider steps to move your career forward, consider Java certification. Oracle has over 15 unique Java certification credentials available. The process of becoming certified in Java and preparing for your exams will require you to study, learn and practice (code). All of this activity will help you sharpen your skills and increase your working knowledge of Java - making you a better developer and more valuable member of your team. You can use the Certification Finder on the Oracle certification homepage to find a Java certification that is right for you. Thanks! 

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  • Can we put percentage on amount of work of a certain role in project's lifecycle?

    - by deviDave
    The title may be confusing, but I will elaborate it here. I am trying to figure our how much time and effort each person spend during some project. I divided roles into: - junior developer (works mainly on UI and some light things) - senior developer (develops complex logic, database structures, etc.) - lead developer (leads the team, usually most experienced person) - negotiator/resolver (a person who directly talk to a client trying to either negotiate terms and timeframe or to clarify vagueness presented by a team leader) My AIM is to calculate percentage of role's involvement based on quality, not time (obviously a junior will spend most time in project, but with the least quality). In the end I would get a table which may look like this: Total: 100% ---------------- Junior: 10% Senior: 50% Lead: 30% Negotiator: 10% Can this be achieved? Has anyone found any source which may help me?

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  • Software consultancy or in-house developement?

    - by JefClaes
    What are the benefits and drawbacks of working as an in-house developer versus working as a consultant and vice versa? I am pretty sure both breeds can be found on these forums and I hope you are willing to share your experience. Edit: Let me clarify the question. I wonder how the experience is like being a developer. For example: Being an in-house developer, you are able to learn from your mistakes. Being a consultant is often more challenging, because there is more variety in the problems you have to solve. PS: Although I realise that this is a subjective question, I don't necessarily see it as one of those bad-subjective questions.

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  • WebLogic Application Server: free for developers!

    - by Bruno.Borges
    Great news! Oracle WebLogic Server is now free for developers! What does this mean for you? That you as a developer are permited to: "[...] deploy the programs only on your single developer desktop computer (of any type, including physical, virtual or remote virtual), to be used and accessed by only (1) named developer." But the most interesting part of the license change is this one: "You may continue to develop, test, prototype and demonstrate your application with the programs under this license after you have deployed the application for any internal data processing, commercial or production purposes" (Read the full license agreement here) If you want to take advantage of this licensing change and start developing Java EE applications with the #1 Application Server in the world, read now the previous post, How To Install WebLogic Zip on Linux!

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  • Use Case Diagrams - should I create a diagram just for a view business rule?

    - by Periback
    I'm modeling a UCD where I have two actors ( a content producer and a developer).. the content producer is going to create and specify details of a storyboard functionality, and the other actor (developer) will only be able to view this storyboard ( he'll log in the application and read the storyboard to start developing what it says, outside the application..) I'm working on the specification of this storyboard functionality and I'd like to know it would be like a best-practice if I describe something like " actor- developer", "UCD - read scenes of storyboard" . This is the specification of an application I developed for my thesis and they asked me to add some specification...

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  • Why bother writing an Windows 8 app?

    - by Dennis Vroegop
    So you want to know more about development for Window 8. Great! There are lots of reasons you should be excited about this. Since I don’t know why YOU are interested in this, I’ll make a list of reasons people can choose from. (as a side note: whenever I talk about Win8 development I am referring to the Metro Style / WinRt side of things. Apps for the ‘classic’ desktop side of Win8 on Intel are business as usual…) So… Why would you care about making an app for Windows 8? 1. It’s cool. Let’s not beat around the bush: if you like development for a hobby then you’ll love to work on this new platform. You can create apps in a relative short time (short time as in compared to writing a new CRM system) and that makes it great for a hobby product. 2. You’ll stand out. Hey, we all need an ego boost every now and then. We all need to feel special. So if you can manage to be one of the first to have you app in the Store then you’ll likely to be noticed. Just close your eyes for a moment and image you standing in a bar. It’s crowded, and then you casually say “Oh yeah, I just had my app certified and it’s in the Win8 store now”. People will stop talking, will offer you drinks and beautiful women / gorgeous man / furry creatures from Alpha Centauri (whatever your preferences are) will propose. Or maybe not. Anyway…. 3. Make some cash! IDC predicts there will be about 350,000,000 Windows 8 licenses sold in the next year. Think about that number. 350,000,000. And they all have access to the Store. Where you’re app will be. With one little click they can select it, download and somehow magically $1.00 or $2.00 from their bank account is transferred to yours. Now, I am not saying that all of those people will download and buy your app but what if only 1% of them did? Remember: there aren’t that many apps available yet….. 4. Learn. Creating new small apps is a great way to learn new stuff. Yes, you could read about it (on this blog for instance) but the only way to learn something is to do it. So be prepared for the future and learn something new by doing it.Write an app! Now! 5. The biggie (for me at least): it’s fun. Even if you remove the points above it’s still fun to write for these devices and this platform. Now some of you will say : “But why not write a great app for IOS or Android?” I think this is a valid question. Of course the novelty of the platform wears out and points 2 and 3 from above list will not be as relevant as it is today. But still 1 4 and 5 remain. And don’t forget: if you already work on the Microsoft platform it’s not that hard to learn this new Win8 stuff. If you have done some XAML development (be it WPF or Silverlight) you are almost there in becoming a good Win8 developer. So you’ll be more productive much sooner than when you have to learn Objective C or Java. Even if you’re a HTML / Javascript developer (I say developer here, not designer) you’ll be up to speed on Win8 development pretty soon. Yes, you, that funky Web Developer who lives and breathes HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript / Node.Js / JQuery: you too can be a Win8 developer. A first class Win8 developer! So.. Download the stuff you need from http://dev.windows.com install Windows 8 and Visual Studio 12 and by the time you’re ready I’ll be working on the next article: how to do all this? Happy coding!

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  • Rapid Application Development, good, bad or ugly?

    - by chrisw
    I have been working for such a shop for the past three years and I know deep down it cannot be like this everywhere. When I think of Rapid Application Development I immediately think programming without fore-thought. For example, when my company decides to come out with a new product, they don't do any type of relationship mapping, no ER diagrams, no round table discussions on expandability. No, the senior developer that ends up working on the product puts together a screen shot walk-through of the application to show to the client. Once the client signs off on the project work is underway by the senior developer. Now you have a senior developer (I use that term "senior" loosely) coding the application in under a week with no unit testing. Well I guess the good to this is it keeps programmers employed due to the enormous amount of unforeseen "features" in the newly created application. Have any of you dealt with a company like this? If you did how did you preserve your sanity?

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  • Effects of automated time tracking/monitoring [closed]

    - by user73937
    What are the effects of monitoring the developers' computer usage? (Which program they use - based on the title of the applications - and how much time in a day they use the keyboard and mouse.) Would it has any positive or negative effects on productivity, morale, motivation, etc? It will not have any direct impact on the developers' salary or their performance review it's just for curiosity. The developer and their manager will only see the results. Would it change anything if only the developer is allowed to see the results? The developer can disable the monitoring (for privacy) but it won't count as work time (in the monitoring program).

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  • Introducing Windows Phone 7 Development Tools

    Today at MIX10, we are introducing the Windows Phone 7 Series development story.  At the heart of Windows Phone 7 Series development is Silverlight.  This enables you to bring your existing development skills in building Windows Phone 7 applications. Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, Microsofts developer toolset for Windows Phone 7 Series, is available for download today. The Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP contains what you need to get started with Windows Phone 7 development. ...Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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