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• TDD - beginner problems and stumbling blocks

  - by Noufal Ibrahim

  While I've written unit tests for most of the code I've done, I only recently got my hands on a copy of TDD by example by Kent Beck. I have always regretted certain design decisions I made since they prevented the application from being 'testable'. I read through the book and while some of it looks alien, I felt that I could manage it and decided to try it out on my current project which is basically a client/server system where the two pieces communicate via. USB. One on the gadget and the other on the host. The application is in Python. I started off and very soon got entangled in a mess of rewrites and tiny tests which I later figured didn't really test anything. I threw away most of them and and now have a working application for which the tests have all coagulated into just 2. Based on my experiences, I have a few questions which I'd like to ask. I gained some information from http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1146218/new-to-tdd-are-there-sample-applications-with-tests-to-show-how-to-do-tdd but have some specific questions which I'd like answers to/discussion on. Kent Beck uses a list which he adds to and strikes out from to guide the development process. How do you make such a list? I initially had a few items like "server should start up", "server should abort if channel is not available" etc. but they got mixed and finally now, it's just something like "client should be able to connect to server" (which subsumed server startup etc.). How do you handle rewrites? I initially selected a half duplex system based on named pipes so that I could develop the application logic on my own machine and then later add the USB communication part. It them moved to become a socket based thing and then moved from using raw sockets to using the Python SocketServer module. Each time things changed, I found that I had to rewrite considerable parts of the tests which was annoying. I'd figured that the tests would be a somewhat invariable guide during my development. They just felt like more code to handle. I needed a client and a server to communicate through the channel to test either side. I could mock one of the sides to test the other but then the whole channel wouldn't be tested and I worry that I'd miss that. This detracted from the whole red/green/refactor rhythm. Is this just lack of experience or am I doing something wrong? The "Fake it till you make it" left me with a lot of messy code that I later spent a lot of time to refactor and clean up. Is this the way things work? At the end of the session, I now have my client and server running with around 3 or 4 unit tests. It took me around a week to do it. I think I could have done it in a day if I were using the unit tests after code way. I fail to see the gain. I'm looking for comments and advice from people who have implemented large non trivial projects completely (or almost completely) using this methodology. It makes sense to me to follow the way after I have something already running and want to add a new feature but doing it from scratch seems to tiresome and not worth the effort. P.S. : Please let me know if this should be community wiki and I'll mark it like that. Update 0 : All the answers were equally helpful. I picked the one I did because it resonated with my experiences the most. Update 1: Practice Practice Practice!

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• Invoicing vs Quoting or Estimating

  - by FreshCode

  If invoices can be voided, should they be used as quotations? I have an Invoices tables that is created from inventory associated with a Job or Order. I could have a Quotes table as a halfway-house between inventory and invoices, but it feels like I would have duplicate data structures and logic just to handle an "Is this a quote?" bit. From a business perspective, quotes are different from invoices: a quote is sent prior to an undertaking and an invoice is sent once it is complete and payment is due, but how to represent this in my repository and model. What is an elegant way to store and manage quotes & invoices in a database? Edit: indicated Job === Order for this particular instance.

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• Giving the script tag an ID

  - by The Code Pimp

  Hi guys, i came across a scenario where giving a <script> element an "ID" would solve a problem easily. However, after reading about the script tag at w3schools and quirksmode, it seems doing so could have some unforeseen consequences. Has anyone come across any of these issues with modern browsers such as Chrome, Safari, FF3 up and IE 7 up? Thanks

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• is this a secure approach in ActiveRecords in Rails?

  - by Adnan

  Hello, I am using the following for my customers to unsubscribe from my mailing list; def index @user = User.find_by_salt(params[:subscribe_code]) if @user.nil? flash[:notice] = "the link is not valid...." render :action => 'index' else Notification.delete_all(:user_id => @user.id) flash[:notice] = "you have been unsubscribed....." redirect_to :controller => 'home' end end my link looks like; http://site.com/unsubscribe/32hj5h2j33j3h333 so the above compares the random string to a field in my user table and accordingly deletes data from the notification table. My question; is this approach secure? is there a better/more efficient way for doing this? All suggestions are welcome.

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• syntax for binding multiple variables within text

  - by danke

  When binding multiple variables value1 value2 value3 in the same text field, do I do this: text="{some text value1 other text value2 and other text value3}" or text="some text {value1} other text {value2} and other text {value3}" I noticed both work, but which is the right way to do it and will work all the time.

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• Win7: Right place to install a program that may be 'shared' with other computers

  - by robsoft

  We have an app that currently installs itself into 'program files\our app', and it puts the internal data files into the common Application Data folder. This means the program is available to any user on that particular PC. Now we want to make a multi-user version of this program, multiple PCs accessing the program at the same time across the network. In the bad old days, under XP, we'd just have the user who installed the app 'share' the app directory and off we'd go. In principle, is this still the 'right' way to do it under Vista/Windows 7? We'd like to do this 'properly' and be as compliant as possible! Is there a recommended 'Microsoft' approach for doing this, or is it largely down to whatever we can get away with and subsequently support (hah!). I've tried researching this on the MS websites but not found anything too helpful at all - it'd be really useful to have a 'if you're trying to install this kind of thing, put it here' type guide for developers!

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• Communication between layers in an application

  - by Petar Minchev

  Hi guys! Let's assume we have the following method in the business layer. What's the best practice to tell the UI layer that something went wrong and give also the error message? Should the method return an empty String when it was OK, otherwise the error message, or should it throw another exception in the catch code wrapping the caught exception? If we choose the second variant then the UI should have another try,catch which is too much try,catch maybe. Here is a pseudocode for the first variant. public String updateSomething() { try { //Begin transaction here dataLayer.do1(); dataLayer.do2(); dataLayer.doN(); } catch(Exception exc) { //Rollback transaction code here return exc.message; } return ""; } Is this a good practice or should I throw another exception in the catch(then the method will be void)?

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• What's the best way to unit test code that generates random output?

  - by Flynn1179

  Specifically, I've got a method picks n items from a list in such a way that a% of them meet one criterion, and b% meet a second, and so on. A simplified example would be to pick 5 items where 50% have a given property with the value 'true', and 50% 'false'; 50% of the time the method would return 2 true/3 false, and the other 50%, 3 true/2 false. Statistically speaking, this means that over 100 runs, I should get about 250 true/250 false, but because of the randomness, 240/260 is entirely possible. What's the best way to unit test this? I'm assuming that even though technically 300/200 is possible, it should probably fail the test if this happens. Is there a generally accepted tolerance for cases like this, and if so, how do you determine what that is?

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• Definitive method for sizing font in css

  - by David

  Hi there, I would like to know some opinions from experienced developers on what they think the definitive way to size fonts (in a base sense). I know that working with ems is considered best but im referring to the best way to set the base font size. There is the technique of setting font to 10px using 62.5 method but i think ie has an issue with rounding which throws this out slightly (perhaps not) YUI framework uses body { font:13px/1.231 arial,helvetica,clean,sans-serif; /* for IE6/7 */ *font-size:small; /* for IE Quirks Mode */ *font:x-small; } which really confuses me! Tripoli uses html { font-size:125%; } body { font-size:50%; } a list apart suggest something along the lines of : body { font-size: 16px; *font-size: 100%; } So which is the best either out of these methods or any alternatives. The best being the easiest to work with and the most reliable cross browser.

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• C++ : Efficient code

  - by Alerty

  What code sample is a brilliant example of efficiency in the C++ programming language and its features?

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• How to not over-use jQuery?

  - by Fedyashev Nikita

  Typical jQuery over-use: $('button').click(function() { alert('Button clicked: ' + $(this).attr('id')); }); Which can be simplified to: $('button').click(function() { alert('Button clicked: ' + this.id); }); Which is way faster. Can you give me any more examples of similar jQuery over-use?

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• A better UPDATE method in LINQ to SQL

  - by Refracted Paladin

  The below is a typical, for me, Update method in L2S. I am still fairly new to a lot of this(L2S & business app development) but this just FEELs wrong. Like there MUST be a smarter way of doing this. Unfortunately, I am having trouble visualizing it and am hoping someone can provide an example or point me in the right direction. To take a stab in the dark, would I have a Person Object that has all these fields as Properties? Then what, though? Is that redundant since L2S already mapped my Person Table to a Class? Is this just 'how it goes', that you eventually end up passing 30 parameters(or MORE) to an UPDATE statement at some point? For reference, this is a business app using C#, WinForms, .Net 3.5, and L2S over SQL 2005 Standard. Here is a typical Update Call for me. This is in a file(BLLConnect.cs) with other CRUD methods. Connect is the name of the DB that holds tblPerson When a user clicks save() this is what is eventually called with all of these fields having, potentially, been updated-- public static void UpdatePerson(int personID, string userID, string titleID, string firstName, string middleName, string lastName, string suffixID, string ssn, char gender, DateTime? birthDate, DateTime? deathDate, string driversLicenseNumber, string driversLicenseStateID, string primaryRaceID, string secondaryRaceID, bool hispanicOrigin, bool citizenFlag, bool veteranFlag, short ? residencyCountyID, short? responsibilityCountyID, string emailAddress, string maritalStatusID) { using (var context = ConnectDataContext.Create()) { var personToUpdate = (from person in context.tblPersons where person.PersonID == personID select person).Single(); personToUpdate.TitleID = titleID; personToUpdate.FirstName = firstName; personToUpdate.MiddleName = middleName; personToUpdate.LastName = lastName; personToUpdate.SuffixID = suffixID; personToUpdate.SSN = ssn; personToUpdate.Gender = gender; personToUpdate.BirthDate = birthDate; personToUpdate.DeathDate = deathDate; personToUpdate.DriversLicenseNumber = driversLicenseNumber; personToUpdate.DriversLicenseStateID = driversLicenseStateID; personToUpdate.PrimaryRaceID = primaryRaceID; personToUpdate.SecondaryRaceID = secondaryRaceID; personToUpdate.HispanicOriginFlag = hispanicOrigin; personToUpdate.CitizenFlag = citizenFlag; personToUpdate.VeteranFlag = veteranFlag; personToUpdate.ResidencyCountyID = residencyCountyID; personToUpdate.ResponsibilityCountyID = responsibilityCountyID; personToUpdate.EmailAddress = emailAddress; personToUpdate.MaritalStatusID = maritalStatusID; personToUpdate.UpdateUserID = userID; personToUpdate.UpdateDateTime = DateTime.Now; context.SubmitChanges(); } }

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• Is a "Confirm Email" input good practice when user changes email address?

  - by dibson

  My organization has a form to allow users to update their email address with us. It's suggested that we have two input boxes for email: the second as an email confirmation. I always copy/paste my email address when faced with the confirmation. I'm assuming most of our users are not so savvy. Regardless, is this considered a good practice? I can't stand it personally, but I also realize it probably isn't meant for me. If someone screws up their email, they can't login, and they must call to sort things out.

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• Debugging TestNG configuration failures

  - by Ula Karzelek

  I'm running testng from ant. I'm using my own test listeners. I'm refactoring the code and once a while I got [testng] Total tests run: 7, Failures: 0, Skips: 7 [testng] Configuration Failures: 1, Skips: 2 What will be the best approach to fix configuration failures?

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• Good code architecture for this problem?

  - by RCIX

  I am developing a space shooter game with customizable ships. You can increase the strength of any number of properties of the ship via a pair of radar charts*. Internally, i represent each ship as a subclassed SpaceObject class, which holds a ShipInfo that describes various properties of that ship. I want to develop a relatively simple API that lets me feed in a block of relative strengths (from minimum to maximum of what the radar chart allows) for all of the ship properties (some of which are simplifications of the underlying actual set of properties) and get back a ShipInfo class i can give to a PlayerShip class (that is the object that is instantiated to be a player ship). I can develop the code to do the transformations between simplified and actual properties myself, but i would like some recommendations as to what sort of architecture to provide to minimize the pain of interacting with this translator code (i.e. no methods with 5+ arguments or somesuch other nonsense). Does anyone have any ideas? *=not actually implemented yet, but that's the plan.

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• Should Factories Persist Entities?

  - by mxmissile

  Should factories persist entities they build? Or is that the job of the caller? Pseudo Example Incoming: public class OrderFactory { public Order Build() { var order = new Order(); .... return order; } } public class OrderController : Controller { public OrderController(IRepository repository) { this.repository = repository; } public ActionResult MyAction() { var order = factory.Build(); repository.Insert(order); ... } } or public class OrderFactory { public OrderFactory(IRepository repository) { this.repository = repository; } public Order Build() { var order = new Order(); ... repository.Insert(order); return order; } } public class OrderController : Controller { public ActionResult MyAction() { var order = factory.Build(); ... } } Is there a recommended practice here?

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• P/Invoke or C++/CLI for wrapping a C library

  - by Ian G

  Have a moderate size (40-odd function) C API that needs to be called from a C# project. The functions logically break up to form a few classes that will be API presented to the rest of the project. Are there any objective reasons to prefer P/Invoke or C++/CLI for the interoperability underneath that API, in terms of robustness, maintainability, deployment, ...? The issues I could think of that might be, but aren't problematic are: C++/CLI will require an separate assembly, the P/Invoke classes can be in the main assembly. (We've already got multiple assemblies and there'll be the C dlls anyway so not a major issue). Performance doesn't seem differ noticeable between the two methods. Issues that I'm not sure about are: My feeling is C++/CLI will be easier to debug if there's inter-op problem, is this true? Language familiarity enough people know C# and C++ but knowledge of details of C++/CLI are rarer here. Anything else?

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• How to write a good PHP database insert using an associative array

  - by Tom

  In PHP, I want to insert into a database using data contained in a associative array of field/value pairs. Example: $_fields = array('field1'=>'value1','field2'=>'value2','field3'=>'value3'); The resulting SQL insert should look as follows: INSERT INTO table (field1,field2,field3) VALUES ('value1','value2','value3'); I have come up with the following PHP one-liner: mysql_query("INSERT INTO table (".implode(',',array_keys($_fields)).") VALUES (".implode(',',array_values($_fields)).")"); It separates the keys and values of the the associative array and implodes to generate a comma-separated string . The problem is that it does not escape or quote the values that were inserted into the database. To illustrate the danger, Imagine if $_fields contained the following: $_fields = array('field1'=>"naustyvalue); drop table members; --"); The following SQL would be generated: INSERT INTO table (field1) VALUES (naustyvalue); drop table members; --; Luckily, multiple queries are not supported, nevertheless quoting and escaping are essential to prevent SQL injection vulnerabilities. How do you write your PHP Mysql Inserts? Note: PDO or mysqli prepared queries aren't currently an option for me because the codebase already uses mysql extensively - a change is planned but it'd take alot of resources to convert?

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• What are some good usability guidelines an average developer should follow?

  - by Allain Lalonde

  I'm not a usability specialist, and I really don't care to be one. I just want a small set of rules of thumb that I can follow while coding my User Interfaces so that my product has decent usability. At first I thought that this question would be easy to answer "Use your common sense", but if it's so common among us developers we wouldn't, as a group, have a reputation for our horrible interfaces. Any Suggestions?

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• Is there a way to express Django admin settings inside the models, instead of admin.py?

  - by Off Rhoden

  Talking about Django 1.1.1. I thought at one time (0.96) the kinds of things put inside of the admin.py file were part of an inner class of the model. There's a certain beauty in having all of this in one place. But I don't know if this change was out of necessity. Any compelling reasons one way or the other?

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• Exposing a service to external systems - How should I design the contract?

  - by Larsi

  Hi! I know this question is been asked before here but still I'm not sure what to select. My service will be called from many 3 party system in the enterprise. I'm almost sure the information the service will collect (MyBigClassWithAllInfo) will change during the products lifetime. Is it still a good idea to expose objects? This is basically what my two alternatives: [ServiceContract] public interface ICollectStuffService { [OperationContract] SetDataResponseMsg SetData(SetDataRequestMsg dataRequestMsg); } // Alternative 1: Put all data inside a xml file [DataContract] public class SetDataRequestMsg { [DataMember] public string Body { get; set; } [DataMember] public string OtherPropertiesThatMightBeHandy { get; set; } // ?? } // Alternative 2: Expose the objects [DataContract] public class SetDataRequestMsg { [DataMember] public Header Header { get; set; } [DataMember] public MyBigClassWithAllInfo ExposedObject { get; set; } } public class SetDataResponseMsg { [DataMember] public ServiceError Error { get; set; } } The xml file would look like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Message>   <Header>     <InfoAboutTheSender>...</InfoAboutTheSender>   </Header>   <StuffToCollectWithAllTheInfo>   <stuff1>...</stuff1> </StuffToCollectWithAllTheInfo> </Message> Any thought on how this service should be implemented? Thanks Larsi

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• ajax.microsoft.com vs cookieless domain for cdn.

  - by ais

  If I'm right, each request for http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.2.js use something like 3 kb of microsoft.com cookies. I don't understand something and it doesn't matter or microsoft do it wrong?

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• How to cope with developing against a poor 3rd party API/application?

  - by wsanville

  I'm a web developer, and my organization has recently started to use a proprietary ASP.NET CMS for our web sites. I was excited to get started using the CMS, thinking it would bring a lot of value to our end users and be fun to work with, since my skills are a good match for the types of projects we're using it for. That was about a year ago. Since then, we've ran into all kinds of issues, from blatant bugs in the product, to nasty edge cases in the APIs, to extremely poor documentation for developers. On about a weekly basis, we are forced to pursue workarounds and rewrite some of the out of the box functionality, and even find some of the basic features unusable. In many cases, since this is a closed source application (and obfuscated of course), there's nothing we can do as developers to solve these issues. So my question is, how does one attempt to develop a good application in such a scenario? The application mostly works when using the the exact out of the box behavior, or using one of the company's starter sites. However, my attempts to use the underlying APIs to implement slightly different, yet reasonable behavior has proved to be extremely time consuming (not to mention just as buggy), given the lack of good information about the APIs. I've given this a lot of thought, and my conflicting viewpoints are the following: Strongly advise against any customization to the CMS, as development time will rise exponentially, or even have an extremely high chance of failing. While this is accurate, I do not want to give the impression that I am not willing to code my own solutions to problems and take the initiative to implement something difficult or complex. I don't want to be perceived as someone who is not motivated, lazy, or not knowledgeable to do anything complex, because this is simply not the case. I love coding my own solutions, trying new/difficult things, I just dislike the vendor app we're using. Continue on the path I'm on now, which is hacking my way past all issues I encounter and try my best to deliver an application that meets the needs and specs exactly. My goals are to make it as seamless and easy to use as possible to the end user, even when integrating the CMS with our other applications internally. The problem I'm finding with this approach is it is very time consuming. I open support cases with the vendor on a regular basis to solve issues and to gain knowledge of their APIs, but this is extremely time consuming, and in some cases it leads to dead ends. I post on the vendors forums on a regular basis but have become frustrated as most of my posts get 0 replies. So, what would you, a reasonable developer, do in this case? How can I make the best of the situation? And just for fun, here are some of the code smells and anti-patterns I've dealt with using the product (aside from their own code blatantly failing): Use of StringBuilder to concatenate a giant string that is hard coded and does not change. They use it to concatenate their Javascript and write it out into the body tags of their pages. Methods that accept object or Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection as the parameters. In the case of the VB Collection, the data is not a list of any kind, it's used instead of making a class. Methods that return a Hashtable of VB Collections Method names of the form MethodName_v45, MethodName_v20, etc... Multiple classes with the same name in different namespaces with different functionality/behavior. Intellisense that reads "Note: this parameter is non functional" Complete lack of coding standards, API is filled with magic numbers and magic strings. Properties with a getter of type object that accepts totally different things, like enum or strings, and throw exceptions at runtime when you pass in something not supported. And much, much, more...

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• What are the reasons for casting a void pointer?

  - by Maulrus

  I'm learning C++ from scratch, and as such I don't have an expert understanding of C. In C++, you can't cast a void pointer to whatever, and I understand the reasons behind that. However, I know that in C, you can. What are the possible reasons for this? It just seems like it's be a huge hole in type safety, which (to me) seems like a bad thing.

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• Self-Configuring Classes W/ Command Line Args: Pattern or Anti-Pattern?

  - by dsimcha

  I've got a program where a lot of classes have really complicated configuration requirements. I've adopted the pattern of decentralizing the configuration and allowing each class to take and parse the command line/configuration file arguments in its c'tor and do whatever it needs with them. (These are very coarse-grained classes that are only instantiated a few times, so there is absolutely no performance issue here.) This avoids having to do shotgun surgery to plumb new options I add through all the levels they need to be passed through. It also avoids having to specify each configuration option in multiple places (where it's parsed and where it's used). What are some advantages/disadvantages of this style of programming? It seems to reduce separation of concerns in that every class is now doing configuration stuff, and to make programs less self-documenting because what parameters a class takes becomes less explicit. OTOH, it seems to increase encapsulation in that it makes each class more self-contained because no other part of the program needs to know exactly what configuration parameters a class might need.

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