I have a large collection of retro games consoles and computers, I want to create some sort of catalogue to keep track of them using Drupal. I could do it as a series of pages in Drupal, but would rather have some sort of more structured method. It'd be great if I could somehow define a record consisting of certain fields (manufacturer,...
I know it's possible, and I've seen simple examples in the docs, but I was wondering if anyone on here has actually used them. I use attributes at the class and method level all the time, but have never used them on method parameters. Have any of you guys? If so, what was your reason and can we see the example? I'm not interested in see...
The popular design pattern MVC (Model/View/Controller) has an extended cousin MVC-ARS (Action/Representation/State). The added components all live within the database layer and while are not part of the model, they are invoked by it. Details are as follows: State, as in state machine. This follows the classic state machine pattern. ...
Has anyone read Uncle Bob's last book Clean code? UPDATE: Is it similar to Martin Fowler's "Refactoring"? ...
What are the alternative "design methods" to the Model View Controller? MVC seems to be popular (SO was built with it, I know that much) but is it the only method used? ...
Let's say I have one class Foo that has a bunch of logic in it and another class Bar which is essentially the same. However, as Foo and Bar are different (but related) entities I need the difference to be apparent from my code (i.e. I can tell whether an instance is a Foo or a Bar) As I was whacking this together without much thought I ...
I'm looking for some kind of a resource (website) that would list all possible window/dialog frame styles and their respective combinations with images. I'm only really interested in Vista, as my software won't support older platforms anyway. I have a more specific case here too: I'm wondering if there are other ways to achieve a smalle...
I'm building Desktop Software for over 10 years now, mostly it's simple Data-Input Software. My problem is, it's always looking the same: A Treeview on the Left and a lot of Text/Data Fields to the right, depending on the type of data currently is worked on. Are there any fresh ideas how such software nowadays should look like? For furt...
I recently built an API and was often asked to replace the StringCollections i was returning by objects containing a single property, The reason being that it was easier to bind with a listview or other controls in ASP.Net. Since the API was used by the web application, the Web service and the dataloader I decided on keeping the StringC...
Do you use visual studio's class diagram generator? Or, do you suggest any other better tool? The main features I'm expecting out of such a tool are: Ability to generate C#/VB.net code skeletons Ability to reverse engineer C#/VB.net code (Ability to update class diagram if I modified my source code) Integration with Visual Studio, if ...
What number of classes do you think is ideal per one namespace "branch"? At which point would one decide to break one namespace into multiple ones? Let's not discuss the logical grouping of classes (assume they are logically grouped properly), I am, at this point, focused on the maintainable vs. not maintainable number of classes. ...
Background: I am developing a site in Asp.net 2.0 . Up until now i was handling both the design and development of the site. I used css for the design part. Now the company wants to outsource the design work to a web designer. Question: How exactly are a designer and developer supposed to coordinate What specifications should i give...
How does a new programming language get established? How could I design one and be famous? What steps would I need to take to get it 'Out There'? ...
I have a function, parseQuery, that parses a SQL query into an abstract representation of that query. I'm about to write a function that takes an abstract representation of a query and returns a SQL query string. What should I call the second function? ...
I was wondering what would be the best strategy to implement a badges system using asp.net mvc. The one that stackoverflow has is pretty interesting. What do you suggest? I guess I need to clarify the question a bit. The problem would be the different criteria for earning every badges. How do make that logic extensible? ...
When you move from analysis of the requirements through design, you go through a decomposition/workflow/dataflow/composition/etc process. I need tools to facilitate this process. The result of analysis & design would be an implementation design which I can happily document using UML. I cannot use UML for analysis & design: it is a...
I was taught to draw diagrams in UML to see the interactions between classes, objects, and participants/the system and so on. However, I've seen several answers here stating the UML is a documentation tool and not a design tool. How do you depict designs graphically if you don't use UML? ...
Howdy, I have a middle tier containing several related objects and a data tier that is using a DataSet with several DataTables and relationships. I want to call a Save method on one of my objects (a parent object) and have its private variable data transformed into a DataRow and added to a DataTable. Some of the private variable data ...
I know it is easy to recommend several cross platform libraries. However, are there benefits to treating each platform individually for your product? Yes there will be some base libraries used in all platforms, but UI and some other things would be different on each platform. I have no restriction that the product must be 100% alike...
I'm working on a Java library and would like to remove some functions from it. My reasons for this is public API and design cleanup. Some objects have setters, but should be immutable, some functionality has been implemented better/cleaner in different methods, etc. I have marked these methods 'deprecated', and would like to remove them...