We all have different needs due to the platform and/or stack we work with, and simple programmer preference is famous for starting religious wars. However, in each area there is usually a set of tools that get recommended over and over, even though people might individually prefer one member over the others. Unix text mode code editors...
Can anybody recommend some good portable apps for development? I'd prefer not to deal with U3, but what I'm hoping for is an IDE/editor with code completion and syntax highlighting. Edit: Notepad++ appears to have completion and some other awesome features. I think I'm going to give that a shot. Thanks, Greg!...
Jeff Atwood is often expounding the benefits of triple monitor setups for developers, and I have to say I agree with him. However, we are about to take on a good number of new developers and are hoping to kit them out with a nice development environment. I was wondering, if given the opportunity, what you people would think of as the p...
So why do you want to get involved with answering other people's questions? I do it mostly to improve my own skills because I will see things that I might run into myself down the road. In other words helping others helps me indirectly by improving my skill set....
I noticed as a JR programmer, bright eyed and excited about new technologies, is the serious amount of loathing Windows developers have for Windows platform. It's starting to take it's toll. Really. My question is: How do you deal with the constant carcinogen? Especially when you are afraid to publicly disagree with EVERYONE on you...
Last year we were focused on improve our technical capacities and leveraging our knowledge of various architectures and frameworks and methodologies. This year (August mark the start of a new accounting year) we need to improve our productivity. By this I don't means we need to get more KLOCs per month per programmer. What we need is t...
Hi, I'm developing a small SDK in C, is there any good book or article on best practice and guidelines in the subject? I mean functions design, source code organization, portability issues etc. ...
So I do development for in-house web apps, C#. We've always had a problem with developers tripping over each other since we typically don't set up more than a shared "development" environment and a "production" environment. I want to end that, 'course, but would like some feedback on how to do it. What's the best way you've found to deve...
This question might be a little too open-ended, because there are so many variables involved. I'm sure someone could describe a modern take on Brooks' Surgical Team from MMM. I'm wondering what people's opinions are on specialists vs. generalists. Should you build a team of people who can pretty much do it all (jack-of-all-trades), or...
I apologize for asking such a generalized question, but it's something that can prove challenging for me. My team is about to embark on a large project that will hopefully drag together all of the random one-off codebases that have evolved through the years. Given that this project will cover standardizing logical entities across the com...
I asked the same question about SCJP. What about the Sun Certified Java Developer exam (SCJD)? I haven't taken it, but am thinking about doing so. Is it worth the effort? ...
Microsoft says that Visual Studio 2008 can be installed on any version of Vista (excluding started edition). But I am not sure, if Home Editions cause not problems with debugging, virtual machines, IIS, MS SQL 2008 and all other tools which developers use or with some old tools like Visual Basic 6.0. Seems that Vista Business would be ...
Our organisation uses PRINCE2 for every project we run; IT is large part of our organisation but we're not a software house. Whilst I appreciate PRINCE2 is a great method of running projects, and, we've had a lot of success with it, I feel it's fairly high level for the nitty-gritty of building software. Is it unheard of to run an AGILE...
I am a C/C++ programmer professionally, but I've created a couple of personal web sites using PHP and MySQL. They're pretty basic, and I'd like to jazz them up using Ajax, but I've never done any Ajax. I've done all the development so far manually, i.e. no IDE or anything like that. Does anyone have suggestions on Ajax development envir...
For those who don't know, Niters are people Not Interested in Technology. If when working on software projects someone brings up the subject of XML or database design or C# delegates, the Niter looks the speaker straight in the eye and says "I'm not interested." So my question is: Do Niters belong in software development teams? No, ...
I want to expand my programming horizons to Linux. A good, dependable basic toolset is important, and what is more basic than an IDE? I could find these SO topics: Lightweight IDE for linux and What tools do you use to develop C++ applications on Linux? I'm not looking for a lightweight IDE. If an IDE is worth the money, then I will...
Not very technical, but... I have to implement a bad words filter in a new site we are developing. So I need a "good" bad words list to feed my db with... any hint / direction? Looking around with google I found this one, and it's a start, but nothing more. Yes, I know that this kind of filters are easily escaped... but the client will ...
Do you use Design by Contract professionally? Is it something you have to do from the beginning of a project, or can you change gears and start to incorporate it into your software development lifecycle? What have you found to be the pros/cons of the design approach? I came across the Design by Contract approach in a grad school course....
Let's say I have a certain budget to buy the displays for my development setup. With that budget I can either buy one larger monitor with a higher resolution or two smaller monitors and set them up in a dual-monitor setup. What are people's preferences and why? I'm interested in perspectives related to a development setup as opposed to ...
I'm a big fan of screen real estate. I love big monitors and multiple monitors. I ran dual 19" CRTs for years, and switched to dual 19" LCDs a few years ago. That's still what I run at home, but I recently started a new job where I wrangled a big hardware budget and promptly blew a bunch of it on twin 24" monitors. I really love thes...