As I have discovered, many developers avoid any updating (automatic or manual), because they fear it might do changes to their machine they don't understand, and the software they are developing might fail at some point for reasons they don't know. strategy A.) LEAVE THE SYSTEM AS IT IS, FOR AS LONG AS POSSIBLE. I personally like to ha...
Is there a utility/library that facilitates the coordination of tasks between multiple servers? For me, I need to run scheduled tasks, copy lots of data between servers, and restart processes (a series of dependent operations that occur on different machines in a cluster). I can go with cronjobs and batch scripts, although I can't he...
I am trying to draft up a comprehensive document to assist the maintenance group for a new Sharepoint 2007 Intranet. What I have problems deciding is what the right tool is to migrate various different elements to the customer-approval and production environment. We expect in the future to have to deal with new lists, new custom types/l...
Let's suppose there is a C# program, which is used as a windows service. Let's suppose that the service has gone wild and is consuming CPU and memory like mad. It needs to be restarted very soon, because it's a production system. So I don't have much time to gather run-time information. Maybe a quick look on the task manager ... that's a...
I'm so sorry for the awful question title, but I'll try to explain myself a bit more verbosely: I'm using Git (but I guess the particular software doesn't really matter in this case) for my software project. As many projects, I'm planning on having various releases. When there's a release, I'd probably assign a commit a tag - for exampl...
Do you have a naming convention for APIs or Classes that are being phased in to replace an older version that performed the same function / filled the same role? E.g. Windows does this by adding "Ex" to the end of the function: ShellExecute // old ShellExecuteEx // new What do you prefer, and what are you reasonings? Appendin...
What special techniques you use when modifying existing code? Eg: Say you modify a business rule inside a method. Do you mark the modified section with special comments? Any coding/commenting standards you use when modifying code? ...
Routine maintenance on a website often involves verifying that links are valid, flagging bad ones, etc. I know how to match email addresses via a script (especially in the context of a web page where they'd be in mailto: links). My question is how would I verify they're OK without spamming the address? Stripping-off the domain and veri...
This came about mainly due to answers to SQL questions. UDF's and Sub Queries are intentionally omitted because of performance. I didn't include reliability not that it should be taken for granted, but the code has to work. Does performance always come first? So many answers are provided with performance as the main priority. My users s...
Hi All, I've been tasked with maintaining and refactoring a legacy Java system. I currently do C# and .NET, although I'm familiar with Java. The legacy system uses RMI, a client/server architecture and was designed for the 1.4 JVM. It's using for the UI (as far as I can tell), Swing and AWT. My question is this: What is the best way ...
Say, you have a Rails (or actually any other kind) application running on Amazon EC2, and whenever you perform some maintenance, which might include shutting down or re-creating your instances, you might want S3 to display your "maintenance mode" page instead of your app. So, basically, that might mean: Uploading text saying when you'...
I'm starting a new job Monday and part of the job description is to maintain outsourced Flash web pages that only consist of Rich UI Forms and very little animations. I don't have any experience with Flash or Flex but being a programmer the Flex IDE appears to be much more suitable to me, which brings me to my question: Can I maintain ...
While starting a new project, we kick start it based on what is "latest" and what is "known". This includes selection of programming languages, frameworks in those languages etc. Quite a lot of time is spent on architectural design and detailed level design in terms of using specific frameworks and design patterns etc. Things go on fi...
I was put in charge of maintaining, alone, a project that I never worked on before, altough I just received this task, and just started to look around the code, management asked me how long it would take to implement some new features and bugfixes. How should I evaluate this, what´s the better approach? Should I evaluate the time to "jus...
Hi, I would like to know what are the best practices for using asp.net DataBinding, in terms of maintainability. I don't want the application to fall appart when I have to make changes to the database. Should I databind completely in codebehind ? I am planning on using ObjectDataSources for the databinding. Is there something that is ...
Hi guys, I was wondering, are you aware of any best practice for specifying absolute URLs in external javascript files? I'm looking for a maintainable solution. The basic scenario is when i need to include css files at run-time through javascript, or make ajax calls to some URL, and other situations where you would normally need to spe...
We have a really huge project with 20-30 modules, but it is mostly done. It's in a maintenance stage (mostly bug fixes and rarely new features). I am trying to come up with a number of developers that will be required to maintain the product. Is there a good way to measure this number? The project is mostly WinForm-based C# applicat...
I am maintaining two very similar schedulers - one in Java and one in C#. The C# version was originally created using JLCA and then modified by hand. The Java version has been modified quite significantly over the last few weeks by someone else (so I have to track down his changes), and I am wondering whether to reconvert it using one o...
Do all SQL server versions rebuild indexes automatically or have a default rebuild criteria? I understand statistics are rebuilt automatically but not sure if indexes do as well. ...
What is the argument for and against putting code in stored procedures with the intention of making the code more maintainable (i.e. Easier to make changes to the business rules without recompiling code)? All else being equal what makes a stored procedure better/worse for maintenance? ...