In my company each developer is given a project to work on his own, so there is hardly any teamwork. I've been building software like this, without the discipline of a good methodology of development, for a year. The results were ok but I would like to change and start using a more serious development approach for my next projects. What...
Typically when writing new code you discover that you are missing a #include because the file doesn't compile. Simple enough, you add the required #include. But later you refactor the code somehow and now a couple of #include directives are no longer needed. How do I discover which ones are no longer needed? Of course I can manually re...
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...
In one of the early SO podcasts, my evil twin (Obvious Troll) asked if he should go to grad school - and the answer was a resounding "meh". Now, since then, I've made my decision - but I still want to know: Do you think it's worthwhile for a "software engineer" to get a masters in Software Engineering? Update: To extend the question...
If you had chance to select, which application would you like to develop? For instance, "I want to save the world, I want to develop an application for that matter. Yay!" could be one of the best answers. Maybe people can find each other for developing an exotic application for the sake of humankind. ...
I just got a new monitor to replace one of the ones I have at work. I went from this*: 1: 1600x1280 2: 1400x768 to this**: 1: 1768x1340 2: 1600x1280 (was formerly 1) This was a pretty big jump up for me, although in my office I seem to be a bit unusual in that I seem to be the only one who still has two CRT monitors on my desk (two...
The following bit of code catches the EOS Exception using (var reader = new BinaryReader(httpRequestBodyStream)) { try { while (true) { bodyByteList.Add(reader.ReadByte()); } } catch (EndOfStreamException) { } } So why do I still receive first-chance exceptions in my console? A first chance ex...
Almost 5 years ago Joel Spolsky wrote this article, "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)". Like many, I read it carefully, realizing it was high-time I got to grips with this "replacement for ASCII". Unfortunately, 5 years later I feel I have slip...
Currently my workflow with Emacs when I am coding in C or C++ involves three windows. The largest on the right contains the file I am working with. The left is split into two, the bottom being a shell which I use to type in compile or make commands, and the top is often some sort of documentation or README file that I want to consult w...
I've recently started using Eclipse Ganymede CDT for C development and I couldn't like it more. I'm aware the learning curve could be sort of pronounced, therefore and with your help, my goal is to flatten it as much as possible. I'm looking for the best hacks, hints, tips, tricks, and best practices to really unleash the full power of t...
I'm really interested to hear what you think about Model-driven Software Development for Java and/or .NET. Does it save time? Does it improve quality? ...
What advantage, if any, is provided by formatting C code as follows: while(lock_file(lockdir)==0) { count++; if(count==20) { fprintf(stderr,"Can't lock dir %s\n",lockdir); exit(1); } sleep(3); } if(rmdir(serverdir)!=0) { switch(errno) { case EEXIST: ...
Sorry for the Windows developers out there, this solution is for Macs only. This set of applications accounts for: Usability Testing, Screen Capture (Video and Still), Version Control, Task Lists, Bug Tracking, a Developer IDE, a Web Server, A Blog, Shared Doc Editing on the Web, Team and individual Chat, Email, Databases and Continuous...
Where can I go to get a good Drupal + SugerCRN developer? ...
How to you find the URL that represents the documentation of a .NET framework method on the MSDN website? For example, I want to embed the URL for the .NET framework method into some comments in some code. The normal "mangled" URL that one gets searching MSDN isn't very friendly looking: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/xd12z8ts.aspx....
How do you quickly find the URL for a Win32 API on MSDN? It's easy for .NET methods -- just add the method name (for example, System.Byte.ToString) to http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/. However, for Win32 APIs (say GetLongPathName), this doesn't work: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/GetLongPathName. I want to be able to use t...
I have recently been befuddled with comments regarding the speed at which some people claim to be able to develop various applications. I tend to feel that there is a definite relationship between application quality, reliability and speed of delivery. I take Stackoverflow as a good example. I love the quality of the site, (and I think ...
What are the best anti-code sites that people have found? What I mean by "anti-code" is websites, books, blogs, etc. that describe or explain bad code with the tongue-in-cheek goal of showing us what we should not do. (I made up the phase anti-code for lack of a better term.) These are the sites I'm familiar with: How to write unmaint...
What do you think the biggest problem is with software development? To me, when I think of the problems I face developing software, I think of a lack of precision. There's too much "Hey, let's try this out and maybe it'll work." Not all of you may work in a field that requires any kind of precision, but for me, I'm constantly battling ...
What are your favourite assemblers, compilers, environments, interpreters for the good old ZX Spectrum? ...