I might be an exception here but I have never worked on a team with more than three developers and / or five people. Still we could manage to get the job done (somehow). Is there a software development process which fits this "extreme" scenario? And, if you work as a standalone programmer is there something you can adapt to your daily l...
I was reviewing this morning a piece of code written by a beginner, when I found these lines: If ... ElseIf ... ElseIf ... Endif I told him "Please, Do Not Use This". And the other guy sitting aside (more experimented) said: "Oh no DoN't Use This!". I think there are many reasons explaining this reaction: a bad experience when we f...
I recently build myself a semi beef up PC (Q9450, 8GB DDR2 1066, 1TB HDD, Dual 8600GT, Vista Ultimate and Dual 22' Monitors) and I'm evaluating whether i should develop on a VPC/VMWare session on top of Vista or not? One benefit i can see is that i can run the same VM on my Vista laptop so my development environment is the same on any o...
Say there are two possible solutions to a problem: the first is quick but hacky; the second is preferable but would take longer to implement. You need to solve the problem fast, so you decide to get the hack in place as quickly as you can, planning to start work on the better solution afterwards. The trouble is, as soon as the problem ...
Could someone point to some online resources about how to track developers productivity (tools, article and so on) or point to some article where it's debated that productivity of developers can be really measured? I've found some document and presentations from an old Gartner group CD but they are pretty old (2005), maybe in the years p...
What tools do you use that may be considered rare in that aspect that you have only seen a few people use it? It may be any tool that may be valuable for programmers. I myself use UPX on occasions. ...
Is it only me, or is coding getting slower and slower, until a product("a project") is finished? This question came to me as I saw the "Write a program in 30 minutes": I thought it is impossible to write a decent piece of code which runs smoothly. As I am getting older I see on all projects, even simple ones a lot of additional work,...
Hello, I've seen many medium and large businesses set up elaborate processes for their software development and testing, be it Windows or Linux-based, web or local, for-profit or internal. How would a small business or group of developers go about setting up such environment, with minimal software and hardware costs? The idea is have a...
Do you allocate some hours during the weekend to code? If so, are you developing for self-improving, personal side projects, for the community (i.e. Open Source projects) or just because you can't stop doing it? ...
Although I try to distance myself from web-oriented work nowadays (unless I need the money) I've received a number of emails from clients wishing for me to help design and develop online solutions for adult websites. Hell, when I was 17 I was asked to help design an adult website that I would not legally be able to view. After talking t...
I have to develop an application using C#.net that has to be run once a day. It only runs for at most one minute, so developing a Windows service is overkill and a scheduled task is the appropriate way. However, I have a few questions about how the application can communicate its results: How do I indicate to the task scheduler that t...
This is something that I have never fully grasped in .NET as to the correct application of the .dispose() method. Say I have something like Public Class someClass() sub someMethod ' do some stuff tying up resources end sub End Class public class mainApp dim _class as new SomeClass _class.someMethod() End Class In all ca...
Does anyone know of a good provider of online development servers? We're starting a new company and ideally we'd have our svn, trac and all that stuff on a hosted server. Needless to say that it has to be extremly reliable, regular (weekly) backups and ideally *nix or Xserve based. ...
There are clients of mine who are content with their VB6 and SQL 2000 applications that I have written them many moons ago. The applications run fine, require some maintenance, some bug fixes from time to time but really run OK for the client. There is no reason in their mind to upgrade (or have my rewrite these in the current version...
I've so far dabbled in Flash doing 1-man shows for quite some time, but have never done any big projects with it, where actually source management and code-reuse was truly necessary. However I'm considering Flash for a new project, but this time around it's won't be a 1-man show, that's when it struck me that I had no experience of how o...
You can structure a C++ program so that (almost) all the code resides in Header files. It essentially looks like a C# or Java program. However, you do need at least one .cpp file to pull in all the header files when compiling. Now I know some people would absolutely detest this idea. But I haven't found any convincing downsides of doing ...
I'm currently a student (Applied Information Technology) and we do most of our programming in C# and Java. I was wondering how can I as a developer, make money with open source. I know there is the story of give support, or provide services, but I'm not a sysadmin and I don't like sysadmin work. Actually I would love to get my hands on s...
I'm a contractor that is often looking for subcontractors, but I feel like there is way too much trial and error in the process. How do you screen talent, and what are effective ways for discerning between those that talk the talk and walk the walk? Talent is hard to determine from just code samples and an interview - what innovative wa...
I was given one big JPG of the HTML interface. Now I need to break it down into pieces and assemble them with html table. Without a slicer it's pretty arduous and error prone. I do not have photoshop or firework, does anybody know of any free utilities that I can use? ...
What are some possibly unique development standards in your country? In general Information on the internet is focused around practices, standards and current programming tendencies in western countries, specifically the U.S.A. However that tends to be "biased" as one might say. So it'd be fun if developers overseas could compile some s...