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• What have you learnt that has a steep learning curve?

  - by Jonathan Khoo

  Recently, I've invested time in learning the intricacies of Git and it has got me thinking about time and learning. (My previous experience with version control systems was only limited use of CVS and SVN.) It took me a whole day's worth of reading to be able to understand the concepts and differences of Git. There are an infinite number of things available for us to learn. Some, more useful than others. I don't know Fortran - I'm relatively young. But looking back at the preceding years of my life, I notice that I'm busier and busier as time goes on. The amount of things I have to get through in a day is increasingly out of my control. It doesn't take a genius to extrapolate that information and realise I'll have even less time in the future - unless I get fired, but I have no strong plans relating to that idea for now. So, given that I have much more time and energy now than I will have in the future: what have you learnt, that has a steep learning curve, that you would possibly recommend to a fellow programmer? Edit: I've stumbled upon the excellent question What programming skills have provided you the best return on investment? and hav realised that my way of approaching how to spend learning time was naive - it doesn't matter if ten useful concepts can be learnt in the time of one if they're worth it.

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• Annotate source code with diagrams as comments

  - by Steven Lu

  I write a lot of (primarily c++ and javascript) code that touches upon computational geometry and graphics and those kinds of topics, so I have found that visual diagrams have been an indispensable part of the process of solving problems. I have determined just now that "oh, wouldn't it just be fantastic if I could somehow attach a hand-drawn diagram to a piece of code as a comment", and this would allow me to come back to something I worked on, days, weeks, months earlier and far more quickly re-grok my algorithms. As a visual learner, I feel like this has the potential to improve my productivity with almost every type of programming because simple diagrams can help with understanding and reasoning about any type of non-trivial data structure. Graphs for example. During graph theory class at university I had only ever been able to truly comprehend the graph relationships that I could actually draw diagrammatical representations of. So... No IDE to my knowledge lets you save a picture as a comment to code. My thinking was that I or someone else could come up with some reasonably easy-to-use tool that can convert an image into a base64 binary string which I can then insert into my code. If the conversion/insertion process can be streamlined enough it would allow a far better connection between the diagram and the actual code, so I no longer need to chronographically search through my notebooks. Even more awesome: plugins for the IDEs to automatically parse out and display the image. There is absolutely nothing difficult about this from a theoretical point of view. My guess is that it would take some extra time for me to actually figure out how to extend my favorite IDEs and maintain these plugins, so I'd be totally happy with a sort of code post-processor which would do the same parsing out and rendering of the images and show them side by side with the code, inside of a browser or something. Since I'm a javascript programmer by trade. What do people think? Would anyone pay for this? I would.

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• Cross-platform desktop programming: C++ vs. Python

  - by John Wells

  Alright, to start off, I have experience as an amateur Obj-C/Cocoa and Ruby w/Rails programmer. These are great, but they aren't really helpful for writing cross-platform applications (hopefully GNUStep will one day be complete enough for the first to be multi platform, but that day is not today). C++, from what I can gather, is extremely powerful but also a huge, ugly behemoth that can take half a decade or more to master. I've also read that you can very easily not only shoot yourself in the foot, but blow your entire leg off with it since memory management is all manual. Obviously, this is all quite intimidating. Is it correct? Python seems to provide most of the power of C++ and is much easier to pick up at the cost of speed. How big is this sacrifice? Is it meaningful or can it be ignored? Which will have me writing fast, stable, highly reliable applications in a reasonable amount of time? Also, is it better to use Qt for your UI or instead maintain separate, native front ends for each platform? EDIT: For extra clarity, there are two types applications I want to write: one is an extremely friendly and convenient database frontend and the other, which no doubt will come much later on, is a 3D world editor.

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• Is Joel Test really a good gauging tool?

  - by henry

  I just learned about Joel Test. I have been computer programmer for 22 years, but somehow never heard about it before. I consider my best job so far to be this small investment managing company with 30 employees and only 3 people in IT department. I am no longer with them but I had being working there for 5 years – my longest streak with any given company. To my surprise they scored extremely poor on Joel Test. The only two questions I would answer “yes” are #4: Do you have a bug database? And #9: Do you use the best tools money can buy? Everything else is either “sometimes” or straight “no”. Here is what I liked about the company however: a) Good pay, they bragged about it to my face and I bragged about it to their face, so it was almost like a family environment. b) I always knew big picture. When writing a code to solve particular problem there were no ambiguity about the business nature of that problem. Even though we did not always had written specs we could ask business users a question anytime, often yelling it across the floor. I could even talk to executives any time I felt like doing it: no appointment necessary. c) Immediate feedback. Once we implement a solution and make business users happy they immediately let us know that, we (programmers) become heroes of the moment. d) No red tape. I could always buy any tools I deem necessary, and design solutions the way my professional judgment dictates. e) Flexibility. If I had mid-day dental appointment that is near my house rather than near the office, I would send email to the company: "FYI: I work from home today". As long as one of 3 IT guys was on the floor (to help traders in case their monitors go dark) they did not care where 2 others are. So the question thus becomes how valuable Joel Test is? Why bother with it?

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• Default Parameter in .NET 4(C#)

  - by Yousef_Jadallah

  During my using for the new release .NET 4, I notice that C# support default (Optional) Parameters, after thousands of complains form C# programmer- especially it was supported by VB.NET- now it's available. Let's create Test function with Optional Parameter   private void TestFunction(string para1, string para2 = "Default") { Response.Write("Parameter one =" + para1 +" , Parameter two="+ para2 ); } Then, if you try to call this method the Intellisense display likes this:   .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Therefore,if you don’t pass the second parameter the value of para2 will be “Default”. With this new future in C#, you can ignore many overload functions event it was acceptable solution!

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• High-Level Application Architecture Question

  - by Jesse Bunch

  So I'm really wanting to improve how I architect the software I code. I want to focus on maintainability and clean code. As you might guess, I've been reading a lot of resources on this topic and all it's doing is making it harder for me to settle on an architecture because I can never tell if my design is the one that the more experienced programmer would've chosen. So I have these requirements: I should connect to one vendor and download form submissions from their API. We'll call them the CompanyA. I should then map those submissions to a schema fit for submitting to another vendor for integration with the email service provider. We'll call them the CompanyB. I should then submit those responses to the ESP (CompanyB) and then instruct the ESP to send that submitter an email. So basically, I'm copying data from one web service to another and then performing an action at the latter web service. I've identified a couple high-level services: The service that downloads data from CompanyA. I called this the CompanyAIntegrator. The service that submits the data to CompanyB. I called this CompanyBIntegrator. So my questions are these: Is this a good design? I've tried to separate the concerns and am planning to use the facade pattern to make the integrators interchangeable if the vendors change in the future. Are my naming conventions accurate and meaningful to you (who knows nothing specific of the project)? Now that I have these services, where should I do the work of taking output from the CompanyAIntegrator and getting it in the format for input to the CompanyBIntegrator? Is this OK to be done in main()? Do you have any general pointers on how you'd code something like this? I imagine this scenario is common to us engineers---especially those working in agencies. Thanks for any help you can give. Learning how to architect well is really mind-cluttering.

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• I want to turn VB.Net Option Strict On

  - by asjohnson

  I recently found out about strong typing in VB.Net (naturally it was on here, thanks!) and am deciding I should take another step toward being a better programmer. I went from vba macros - VB.Net, because I needed a program that I could automate and I never read anything about strong typing, so I kind of fell into the VB.Net default trap. Now I am looking to turn it on and sort out this whole type thing. I was hoping someone could direct me towards some resources to make this transistion as painless as possible. I have read around some and ctype seems to come up a lot, but past that I am at a bit of a loss. What are the benefits of switching? Is there more to it than just using ctype to cast things? I feel like there is a good article that I have failed to come across and any direction would be great. Would a good approach to be to rewrite a program that is written with option strict off and note differences?

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• Can I use access used by Visual Basic for building a database [on hold]

  - by user3413537

  I am the only programmer where I work (summer job) and I am a student with only a few years of programming experience. So I was asked to build a database and I am very excited about this project because hopefully I can learn a lot from this. Using this database my manager is supposed to be able to assign work (dealing with businesses) to different people within the company using an interface (all workers have a shared drive). When workers are done with that paperwork related to the business, they can check off that its done, add comments at the bottom of the interface, and then move on to the next business. The only experience I've had with databases is some querying with SQL, and I've built GUI interfaces with JAVA. The information on the interface will be populated from Excel so workers know what businesses they are dealing with. I've done some research and I believe the best way to build this would be building a GUI using Microsoft Visual Studio (Visual Basic) first, then figuring out a way to populate the Interface from Excel. Also because the data is pretty straight forward and not complicated I will be using MS Access to store and track the database. I know this won't be easy, but for all you geniuses out there, is this on the right path? Thanks.

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• Good ruby book with exercises? [closed]

  - by watabou

  I find that I learn the best with a book that has a number of exercises at the end of each chapters. A great example of this is C++ Primer Plus by Stephen Prata or Scientific Programming with Python or the Horstmann Java books. All of those books have a number of programming exercises at the end tailored to that specific chapter. I love the styles of those book and was wondering if there is anything similar for Ruby. I've extensively searched google for this and people have been suggesting different stuff like different websites like Ruby Koans and LRTHW but honestly, I've tried those and they aren't for me. I taught myself Python with the the Hard Way book and to be honest, it's not for me. Now, forgive me if I'm blunt but does anyone have a Ruby programming BOOK (i.e. not a website), that has EXERCISES in it? I do NOT want a website, unless the book is only or is freely available online by the author, similar to the Hard Way books. I would say that I'm a intermediate level programmer with only some Ruby experience but if you know of a beginner book on Ruby, that is fine too. Thanks in advance, I would really really appreciate the help.

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• Does it make sense to develop open source python library for database inspection?

  - by gruszczy

  Some time ago I came up with an idea for a library for database inspection. I started developing it and got some very basic functionality, just to check if that's possible. Recently however, I get second thoughts, whether such project would really be useful. I am actually planning to develop following software suite: library for python, that would provide easy interface to inspect database structure, desktop application in PyQt that would use the interface to provide graphical database inspection, web application in Django that would use the interface to provide database inspection through the browser. Do you think such suite would be useful for other developers/database administrators/analysts? I know, that there is pgadmin for PostgreSQL and some tool for sqlite3 and that there is Java tool called DBInspect. Usually I would be against creating new tool and rather join existing project, but I am not Java programmer (and I would rather stick to python or C, which I like) and none of these projects provide a library for database inspection. Anyway I would like to hear some opinions from fellow developers, whether such project make sense or I should try to spend my free time on developing something else.

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• What is your unique programming problem-solving style? [closed]

  - by gcc

  Everyone has their own styles and technique for approaching and solving real world problems. These distinguish us from other people or other programmers. (Actually, I think it make us more desirable as programmers and improves computer science) To improve, we read a lot of books; for example, programming style, how to solve problems, how to approach problems, software and algorithms, et al. Can I learn your technique? In other words, if someone gives you a problem, at first step, what are you doing to solve it? I want learn the style in which you approach, analyze, and solve a problem. EDIT: every programmer is a unique instance; each of us approach problems and converge on solutions in our own... idiomatic manner. This manner is sometimes a quirk of training, a bias of tools, but often it is an insightful nugget, a little golden hammer that cracks nuts just slightly faster then others. When answering, give your general approaches but also take a moment to identify how you look at things in ways that your peers do not. Let's call this your Unique Solving Perspective, or USP.

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• Visual WebGui helps Dawsons put its Windows Forms HR system on the web

  - by Webgui

  Dawsons needed to upgrade their existing Windows Forms LAN human resources system to allow better and flexible access to the ever increasing data size as labor hire clients are demanding easy access to copies of tickets and licenses and etc. The company has some 30,000 applicants on file, but access to this data has been complex and limited with the current system. Therefore the IT department was asked to find a possible solutions that would allow creating a web based application while utilizing as much of the existing Windows Forms code as possible. Visual WebGui was found to be highly regarded in many frameworks comparisons so the team decided to give Visual WebGui a try. It didn’t take long for them to recognize that the Visual WebGui controls appear and react over the web the same as desktop controls. This and the fact that most of the code was directly ported which saved Dawsons hundreds of development hours are what make Visual WebGui so unique and productive. “My first impression of Visual WebGui was perhaps disbelief. Not being a seasoned Web programmer, I initially found it hard to accept so much functionality from a web based application. Also, the speed is exceptional” said John Sainsbury, Financial Controller of the Dawsons Group who added “Since working with Visual WebGui, I have showcased parts of the application to our major clients, some of whom use SAP portals, and they are amazed.” The result was so satisfying that the company is now looking to produce a mobile version for accessing the labor pool on the go. “By removing the barriers of the local network, Visual WebGui has changed how we can do business” said Lloyd Everist, General Manager Dawsons Group. Read more about this story

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• using cin and cout in textmate [migrated]

  - by That Guy

  I am usually a Java programmer, and have used textmate for that almost exclusively, but lately I started using C++ with it. but when i use even the most basic programs and incorporate the cin keyword, and run the program, I dont get an oppurtunity to put in anything during runtime and sometimes it inserts random values by itself! for example, if i ran this in textmate: #include <iostream> int stonetolb(int); int main() { using namespace std; int stone; cout << "enter the weight in stone"; cin >> stone; int pounds = stonetolb(stone); cout << stone << "stone = "; cout << pounds <<" pounds."; return 0; } int stonetolb(int sts) { return 14 * sts; } I would come out with the output: enter the weight in stone32767stone = 458738 pounds. Why is this happening, and how do I stop it?

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• Screen lock broken when using separate x screens

  - by Wolf

  For some reason, the screen lock appears to be broken when I use separate x screens (it works fine if I use twin view or just one monitor, though). If I wait for the screen to lock (or if I tell it to lock), it fades to black, showing only the mouse cursor. However, when I move the mouse to bring up the password prompt, nothing happens, the screens remain completely blank. Furthermore, it would appear that the screen lock never activated in the first place, for two reasons: one, if I blindly enter my password and press enter, nothing happens; and two, if I press ctrl+alt+delete and then enter it logs me out (which shouldn't happen if the password prompt is there, right), losing any progress I have on any of the open programs (meaning, not a very friendly option for a programmer ;) ). So yeah, does anyone know why this is happening, and how to fix it? Thanks! Notes: I am using Ubuntu 11.10 64 bit. I am using gnome-classic, but the same problem occurs when I use unity. I do not have xscreensaver, nor do I have any screen savers running (except, I guess for the default blank one).

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• Facilitating XNA game deployments for non programmers

  - by Sal

  I'm currently working on an RPG, using the RPG starter kit from XNA as a base. (http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US/education/catalog/sample/roleplaying_game) I'm working with a small team (two designers and one music/sound artist), but I'm the only programmer. Currently, we're working with the following (unsustainable) system: the team creates new pics/sounds to add to the game, or they modify existing sounds/pics, then they commit their work to a repository, where we keep a current build of everything. (Code, images, sound, etc.) Every day or so, I create a new installer, reflecting the new images, code changes, and sound, and everyone installs it. My issue is this: I want to create a system where the rest of the team can replace the combat sounds, for instance, and they can immediately see the changes, without having to wait for me to build. The way XNA's setup, if I publish, it encodes all of the image and sound files, so the team can't "hot swap." I can set up Microsoft VS on everyone's machine and show them how to quickly publish, but I wanted to know if there was a simpler way of doing this. Has anyone come up against this when working with teams using XNA?

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• How to Export Flash Animation Data

  - by charliep

  I'd love for my partner, the artist, to be able to animate using flash movieclips and timelines. Then I, the programmer, would like to read the raw Flash info and re-program it into my engine of choice (which happens to be Torque2D). The data I'd want is the bitmap images that were used in Flash, like the head and body the links between the images, like where the head connects to the body the motion data from the flash animation, like move, rotate (at what speed), shear, etc. for the head or arms or whatever. Is there any way to get this data? Here's what I know so far. There are tools like SWFSheet and Spriteloq that convert the entire flash animation into a frame by frame sprite animation (in a sprite sheet). This would take too much space in my case, so I'd like to avoid that. Re-animating on the fly would take much less texture memory. There is a PDF that describes the SWF file format but NOT the individual components like the movieclips. So anyone know of a library I can use, or how I can learn more about the movieclip components and whatnot? (more better tags: transform, export, convert)

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• Ruby or Python?

  - by Bobby Tables

  Hi all, This question is extremely subjective and open-ended. It might even sound like something I should just research for myself and make my own decision. But I'd like to put it out there and get some thoughts from others. Long story short - I burned out with the rat race and am on a self-funded sabbatical this year. Much of it is to take a break from the corporate grind and travel around, but I also want to play around with new technologies and do some self-learning projects, to stay up to speed on programming, and well - I just love tinkering with programming, when there's no pressure! Here's the thing: I am a lifetime C/C++/Java programmer. I'm a bit of a squiggly bracket snob since I've been working with this family of languages for my entire programming career. So I'd like to learn a language which isn't so closely syntactically related to this group. What I'm basically looking for is a language which is relatively general purpose, fun to learn, has some new concepts that are different from C++/Java, and has a good community. A secondary consideration is that it has good web development frameworks. A tertiary consideration is that it's not totally academic (read: there are real world jobs out there using it). I've narrowed it down to Ruby or Python. My impression of Ruby is that it is extremely web oriented - that the only real application of it is as a server side scripting language for doing web stuff (mainly Ruby on Rails). For Python I'm not so sure. TL;DR and to put it as succinctly as possible: which of these would be better for a C++/Java guy to learn to get some new perspectives on programming? And which is more open and general purpose and applicable to a wider set of applications? I'm leaning towards Ruby at the moment, but I worry to an extent that it looks like it's used as nothing but a server side web language.

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• Which shopping cart / ecommerce platform to choose?

  - by fabien7474

  I need to build an ecommerce website within a tight budget and schedule. Of course, I have never done that before, so I have googled out what my solutions are and I have concluded that the following were not valid candidates anymore : Magento : Steep learning curve osCommerce : old, bad design, buggy and not user-friendly Zencart, CRE Loaded, CubeCart : based on osCommerce Virtuemart, uberCart, eCart : based on CMS (Joomal, Drupal, WordPress) that is not necessary for my use-case So I finally narrowed down my choices to these solutions : PrestaShop : easy-to-use, great templating engine (smarty) but many modules are not free buy yet indispensable OpenCart : security issues and not a great support from the main developer. See here and here. So, as you can see, I am a little bit confused and if you can help me choosing an easy-to-use, lightweight and cheap (not-necessarily free) ecommerce solution, I would really appreciate. By the way, I am a Java/Grails programmer but I am also familiar with PHP and .NET. (not with Python or Ruby/Rails) EDIT: It seems that this question is more appropriate for the Webmaster StackExchange site. So please move this question to where it belongs (I cannot do that) instead of downvoting it. BTW, I have found out a question quite similar on SO (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3315638/php-ecommerce-system-which-one-is-easiest-to-modify) which is quite popular.

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• Free NOSQL database for use with C# client [closed]

  - by Mitten

  I've never used NOSQL databases before, but so far it seems like the best data storage solution for my project. I am going to implement a datamining application. The data I would like to mine is thousands of documents which cannot be imported into datamining applications. To make to import easier and faster (than importing thousands of documents) I am planning to import these documents into a NOSQL database first and when import NOSQL database into datamining software. At the very least once I have all the data in NOSQL database I should be able to code simplest datamining logic myself. Am I correct that NOSQL databases allow to creates records of data, but they don't mandate all the records to adhere to the same data schema (same column names/types in a classic table oriended SQL databases)? I think for each document I would create a row/entry/object (not sure what is the correct term is in use in NOSQL world) which would be a string id, few (columns) with unstructured text data, and a dozens of columns mostly of datetime and integer types. From its name NOSQL does not support SQL query syntax, but it support locating the object(row/entry?) by its unique id. Does NOSQL support qyuering objects using property=value syntax? Unfortunately most of free NOSQL db only support Java/C++ clients, which free NOSQL db would you recommend for a C# programmer?

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• How to keep word document, html and pdf documentation aligned

  - by dendini

  Is there a way to write documentation in a WYSIWYG editor which can then export into HTML, WORD and PDF and keep copies synchronized? This documentation are mostly technical notes and some contextual help for some softwares so they must contain images and some styling, they are not programmer's documentation (API list or functions list) for which probably a program like Javadoc or Doxygen would be the best choice. For example how do companies with hundreds different software lines and thousands of programmers deal with this? I have several solutions but they all seem lacking in some aspect: Latex/Tex : very good pdf and html export, not very user friendly and no full-blown WYSIWYG editor available. LibreOffice/OpenOffice : full blown WYSIWYG editor however html export not so good (need to edit manually exported html which needs to be maintained separately ) Mediawiki or any other wiki : could be keeping documentation in wikitext format, so html is automatically generated, pdf exportation is quite good with many available plugins. Again however need some formation for the staff to use it and need to setup a server for this. Notice I'm not asking for software A vs software B, I'm asking for general advice, big companies procedures for documentation and yes some software product names if available.

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• Business Analyst role in development process

  - by Ryan

  I work as a business analyst and I currently oversee much of the development efforts of an internal project. I'm responsible for the requirements, specs, and overall testing. I work closely with the developers (onshore and offshore). The offshore team produces all of the reports. Version 1.0 had a 9 month development cycle and I had about 4-5 months to test all the reports. There was the usual back and forth to get the implementation right. Version 2.0 had a much shorter development cycle (3 months). I received the first version of the reports about 3 weeks ago and noticed a lot of things wrong with it. Many of the requirements were wrong and the performance of the queries was horrendous at 5x - 6x longer than it should have been. The onshore lead developer was out and did not supervise the offshore development team in generating the reports. Without consulting management, I took a look at the SQL in the reports and was able to improve performance greatly (by a factor of 6x) which is acceptable for this version. I sent the updated queries as guidelines to the offshore team and told them they should look at doing X instead of Y to improve performance and also to fix some specific logic issues. I then spoke to my managers about this because it doesn't feel right that I was developing SQL queries, but given our time crunch I saw no other way. We were able to fix the issue quite fast which I'm happy with. Current situation: the onshore managers aren't too pleased that the offshore team did not code for performance. I know there are some things I could have done better throughout this process and I do not in any way consider myself a programmer. My question is, if an offshore team that works apart from the onshore project resources fails to deliver an acceptable release, is it appropriate to clean up their work to meet a deadline? What kind of problems could this create in the future?

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• Did the developers of Java conciously abandon RAII?

  - by JoelFan

  As a long-time C# programmer, I have recently come to learn more about the advantages of Resource Acquisition Is Initialization (RAII). In particular, I have discovered that the C# idiom: using (my dbConn = new DbConnection(connStr) { // do stuff with dbConn } has the C++ equivalent: { DbConnection dbConn(connStr); // do stuff with dbConn } meaning that remembering to enclose the use of resources like DbConnection in a using block is unnecessary in C++ ! This seems to a major advantage of C++. This is even more convincing when you consider a class that has an instance member of type DbConnection, for example class Foo { DbConnection dbConn; // ... } In C# I would need to have Foo implement IDisposable as such: class Foo : IDisposable { DbConnection dbConn; public void Dispose() { dbConn.Dispose(); } } and what's worse, every user of Foo would need to remember to enclose Foo in a using block, like: using (var foo = new Foo()) { // do stuff with "foo" } Now looking at C# and its Java roots I am wondering... did the developers of Java fully appreciate what they were giving up when they abandoned the stack in favor of the heap, thus abandoning RAII? (Similarly, did Stroustrup fully appreciate the significance of RAII?)

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• XNA Masking Mayhem

  - by TropicalFlesh

  I'd like to start by mentioning that I'm just an amateur programmer of the past 2 years with no formal training and know very little about maximizing the potential of graphics hardware. I can write shaders and manipulate a multi-layered drawing environment, but I've basically stuck to minimalist pixel shaders. I'm working on putting dynamic point light shadows in my 2d sidescroller, and have had it working to a reasonable degree. Just chucking it in without working on serious optimizations outside of basic culling, I can get 50 lights or so onscreen at once and still hover around 100 fps. The only issue is that I'm on a very high end machine and would like to target the game at as many platforms I can, low and high end. The way I'm doing shadows involves a lot of masking before I can finally draw the light to my light layer. Basically, my technique to achieveing such shadows is as follows. See pics in this album http://imgur.com/a/m2fWw#0 The dark gray represents the background tiles, the light gray represents the foreground tiles, and the yellow represents the shadow-emitting foreground tile. I'll draw the light using a radial gradient and a color of choice I'll then exclude light from the mask by drawing some geometry extending through the tile from my point light. I actually don't mask the light yet at this point, but I'm just illustrating the technique in this image Finally, I'll re-include the foreground layer in my mask, as I only want shadows to collect on the background layer and finally multiply the light with it's mask to the light layer My question is simple - How can I go about reducing the amount of render target switches I need to do to achieve the following: a. Draw mask to exclude shadows from the foreground to it's own target once per frame b. For each light that emits shadows, -Begin light mask as full white -Render shadow geometry as transparent with an opaque blendmode to eliminate shadowed areas from the mask -Render foreground mask back over the light mask to reintroduce light to the foreground c. Multiply light texture with it's individual mask to the main light layer.

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• Which algorithms/data structures should I "recognize" and know by name?

  - by Earlz

  I'd like to consider myself a fairly experienced programmer. I've been programming for over 5 years now. My weak point though is terminology. I'm self-taught, so while I know how to program, I don't know some of the more formal aspects of computer science. So, what are practical algorithms/data structures that I could recognize and know by name? Note, I'm not asking for a book recommendation about implementing algorithms. I don't care about implementing them, I just want to be able to recognize when an algorithm/data structure would be a good solution to a problem. I'm asking more for a list of algorithms/data structures that I should "recognize". For instance, I know the solution to a problem like this: You manage a set of lockers labeled 0-999. People come to you to rent the locker and then come back to return the locker key. How would you build a piece of software to manage knowing which lockers are free and which are in used? The solution, would be a queue or stack. What I'm looking for are things like "in what situation should a B-Tree be used -- What search algorithm should be used here" etc. And maybe a quick introduction of how the more complex(but commonly used) data structures/algorithms work. I tried looking at Wikipedia's list of data structures and algorithms but I think that's a bit overkill. So I'm looking more for what are the essential things I should recognize?

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• Learning to be a good developer: what parts can you skip over?

  - by Andrew M

  I have set myself the goal of becoming a decent developer by this time next year. By this I mean full experience of the development 'lifecycle,' a few good apps/sites/webapps under my belt, and most importantly being able to work at a steady pace without getting sidelined for hours by some should-know-this-already technique. I'm not starting from scratch. I've written a lot of html/css, SQL, javascript, python and VB.net, and studied other languages like C and Java. I know about things like OOP, design patterns, TDD, complexity, computational linguistics, pointers/references, functional programming, and other academic/theoretical matters. It's just I can't say I've really done these things yet. So I want to get up to speed, and I want to know what things I can leave till a later date. For instance, studying algorithms and the maths behind them is interesting and all, but so far I've hardly needed to write anything but the most basic nested loops. Investigating Assembly to have a clearer picture of low-level operations would be cool... but I imagine rarely infringes on daily work. On the other hand, looking at a functional programming language might help me write programs that are more comprehensible and less prone to hidden failures (at the moment I'm finding the biggest difficulty is when the complexity of the app exceeds my capacity to understand it - for instance passing data around was fine... until I had to start doing it with AJAX, which was a painful step up). I could spend time working through case studies of design patterns, but I'm not sure how many of them get used in 'real life.' I'm a programmer with basic abilities - what skills should I focus on developing? (also my Unix skills are very weak, and also knowledge of Windows configuration... not sure how much time I should spend on that)

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