I am interested in choosing a good structure for an online message board-type application. I will use SO as an example, as I think it's an example that we are all familiar with, but my question is more general; it is about how to achieve the right balance between organization and flexibility in online message boards. The questions page...
I'm looking to get a logo designed, but all my designer friends/colleagues are pretty busy. Since I've never done it before, I thought it would be interesting to crowd source the design. Does anyone know of any good design crowd sourcing sites? ...
When designing and writing code, after "make it work" what are your top design considerations? ...
Refactoring is the process of improving the existing system design without changing its behavior. Besides Martin Fowler's seminal book "Refactoring - Improving the design of existing code" and Joshua Kerievsky's book "Refactoring to Patterns", are there any good resources on refactoring? ...
I think this is a fun engineering-level question. I need to design a control which displays a line chart. What I want to be able to do is use a designer to add multiple Pens which actually describe the data and presentation so that it ends up with Xaml something along these lines: <Chart> <Pen Name="SalesData" Color="Green" Data=".....
So if I have a method of parsing a text file and returning a list of a list of key value pairs, and want to create objects from the kvps returned (each list of kvps represents a different object), what would be the best method? The first method that pops into mind is pretty simple, just keep a list of keywords: private const string NAM...
G'day, I was thinking about a comment from Kristopher Johnson about my answer to this question regarding Software Development Quality. I'd posted a list of software quality metrics that I could think of off the top of my head that included: McCabe Cyclometric Complexity - basically a measure of the number of linear paths through code...
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...
Where I work, the design and development departments are totally separated, however we (the design department) are responsible for managing the CSS for our sites. Typically, new CSS needs to be released to the production server far more often than new website code. Because of this, we are deploying the CSS separately, and it lives outsid...
What are good Open Source / Free software packages that let you design GUIs quickly, like "on a napkin" style, but also give a bit of polish that you could throw into a slide deck? Preference would be to use some clipart/objects ala Visio, but not required. NOT: Visio PowerPoint KeyNote OmniGraffe Balsamiq (althought it's worth the m...
Hi, Whenever I am desiging a new application, I tend to use paper and pencil to get an idea of the database structure, major modules and feature set etc. I do own a copy of mind manager but I find that nothing beats the personal touch of pencil and paper. The negative aspect of this approach is I end up having 2-3 pages full of drawing...
Slashdot has a little widget that allows you to tweak your comment threshold to filter out down-modded comments. It will be in one place if you scroll to the top of the page, and as you scroll down, at some point, where its original home is about to scroll off the page, it will switch to fixed position, and stay on your screen. (To see...
I like the idea of having Interfaces and Implementation separate. But how separate? Are the Interface definitions in a separate .Net assembly? Do you have a single project that defines all Interfaces for a solution? Otherwise are there issues with circular dependencies of Interfaces? ...
I'm obviously not talking about a full solution, but just a good starting point for common applications for software architects. It could be for a CMS, e-commerce storefront, address book, etc. A UML diagram is not essential, but a table schema with data types in the least. Thanks! ...
I'm sure others agree, when code hits the pavement it is much easier to think of all the elements that will go into your application. Meaning, once you get going, you think of the what's next because you have reached a point where you have to design another table or class. The drawbacks of this approach are obvious and we don't need to...
I'm looking for design\architectual guidance for modern text editors. Modern text editor means that: It has support for syntax highlighting It has auto-completion (something like IntelliSense) It has advanced navigation capabilities (incremental search, etc.) Following properties will be a plus: Implemented in managed language (...
As a developer completely void of artistic skills, it's frustrating building applications from scratch. I know there are several open-source template web sites to draw from, but are there any good books/tutorials/web sites that can turn a poor, artistically-challenged developer into a moderately-capable graphic designer? ...
I had an idea I was mulling over with some colleagues. None of us knew whether or not it exists currently. The Basic Premise is to have a system that has 100% uptime but can become more efficient dynamically. Here is the scenario: * So we hash out a system quickly to a specified set of interfaces, it has zero optimizations, yet...
I'm using a few (2 or 3) master pages in my ASP.NET MVC application and they must each display bits of information from the database. Such as a list of sponsors, current fundings status etc. So my question was, where should I put these master-page database calling code? Normally, these should goes into its own controller class right? B...
My designer keeps throwing out the term "liquid" layout. What does this mean? Thanks for the clarification, I have always just called this a percentage layout, and thought he was saying that the pieces could be moved around, and that was liquid ...