The rich presentational capabilities of WPF and Silverlight mean developers like me will be working closely with graphic designers more often these days, as is the case in my next project. Does anyone out there have any tips and experience (from both points of view) on making this go more smoothly? For example, when I mentioned sou...
I am trying to implement a software Null Modem. Any suggestion how to create virtual COM Ports? Looking for tips, strategy, known techniques, etc.. ...
You know how it goes, every other day you'll find someone whether it be at an internet forum or on a spec doc whose literary efforts can be described as abysmal. These kind of people try to write something intelligently but often come off as a complete jerk. These kind of people could be kick-ass coders but fail to write any comment ...
I am rewriting code to handle some embedded communications and right now the protocol handling is implemented in a While loop with a large case/switch statement. This method seems a little unwieldy. What are the most commonly used flow control methods for implementing communication protocols? ...
Has anyone successfully talked profibus from a .NET application? If you did, what device/card did you use to accomplish this, what was the application, and did you use any kind of preexisting or available code? ...
Where is a good place to start with making an application in .NET that communicates through OPC? ...
Using .Net (C#), how can you work with USB devices? How can you detect USB events (connections/disconnections) and how do you communicate with devices (read/write). Is there a native .Net solution to do this? ...
With the plethora of communication methods available to co-workers, how do you manage to keep distractions at bay for a large enough block of time to accomplish some focused programming? Do you quit or close all communications, have you informed people that an away message really means you are a way, or something else? ...
I've worked with folks who are chatting online with their peers, constantly batting around ideas. I've also worked with folks who adamantly refuse and think it's a waste of time. Are online live chatting forums of particular use to you? Why or why not? Internal to your company, or external and world-wide? Does your employer encourage o...
What single piece of advice would you give to a programmer who can write decent code, but has trouble communicating relevant details of his work to colleagues and users? ...
I work as the Sysadmin for both the development and QA departments of a software development company. I support both teams equally. Recently I was asked for some ideas on how to improve inter-team communication. First, what are some ways to improve the relationship between a development and QA team, from the developer's point of view? ...
Normal practice is to use case studies, construct work- and data-flows, etc. But this does not necessarily create a shared vocabulary between the user/sponsor and the analyst-designer: one or the other, both normally, will have to acquire terms and views of the "internals" of the others area of expertise, and this usually leads to misund...
Years ago I created a programming collaboratory in Diversity University MOO -- a room written in MOOcode that used TCP/IP to communicate with a perl server back at my campus to compile and execute C, Perl, Bash and other programs and return results to the MOO collaboratory -- all for demonstrating programming languages in a MOO teaching ...
There have been a couple of other questions about explaining technical things to non-technical people, but I am specifically wondering if anyone has any tips for explaining technical problems to business oriented clients. For example, suppose the client asks for a specific feature, with certain requirements. However, the technical limi...
It is a seemingly taboo subject. I imagine I want people to tell me I have a bad idea or did something totally wrong... but no one ever does. Of course I am part of the same problem, a good friend of mine is really smart, reads tech blogs, and goes to conventions... but always seems to make things that are more complicated then they ha...
There are lots of questions on how to improve communication between teams. One way to start is to identify what one team actually does that the other team really values and do more of that. For example. Our QA team provided a VM for us with: The latest release of our server-based commercial software installed and configured (not an e...
There are a lot of websites offering free hosting of opensource projects with bug tracker, version control, discussion boards, ...: Codeplex Sourceforge Codeproject Google Code ...? How would you administer and develop your own projects? When choosing one of those sites what benefits can you get from it? Is it even better to host it ...
We're in the process of developing a measurement device that will be running CE 6.0 with CF 3.5 on x86 embedded hardware, a PC is used to control the device and is connected with it using ethernet. We would like to communicate using interfaces (using DCOM (we know it is not supported by default on CE6), .NET Remoting or Web services)...
We have some COBOL programs running on our mainframe and we need one of those to communicate with our back end vault through a Java API. Is there any way a Cobol program can invoke the Java program? Would it be possible to use a Web Service from Cobol? How would I integrate a Cobol program with anything else? ...
We have some COBOL programs in our financial applications which need to interact with some of our backend systems. One of the available interfaces is through a web service. Can a program written in Cobol make requests to a web service? ...