I wonder what are .NET technologies / C# language improvements you consider as breakthroughs in the .NET era for the last 5-10 years. I mean technologies that shifted developers' minds. For example DirectX made assembler nearly abandoned for game programming in the end of the 20th century and jQuery extremely simplified Ajax web develop...
I'm after a book to read whilst on holiday. Some criteria: The book has to be relatively short. < 500 pages. I'd prefer a book that changes your thinking, rather than reams of syntax to look at. So the last two years here have been my books: Last year, The Craftsman by Richard Sennet (Changed how I viewed career development, quali...
I have a service that receives an object containing all the data needed to build a newsletter. I need to be able to generate the email using different templates. I don't want to involve the whole ASP.NET stack for that, so I want a separate templating engine. Reading a lot of opinions, I have found that XSLT was not getting very much lo...
As someone who recently got a HTC Hero, I had to jump through several hoops to get root access on the phone to install custom firmware. Now, Android is open-source and fairly easy to build and hack on an emulator. It seems to be against the spirit of open-source to lock down a phone so you can't hack the phone itself. Now, often, there...
Here's an interesting question - when should you force automatic updates? I was thinking about application updates recently, how software like Google Chrome forces automatic updates, how Microsoft uses automatic updates but doesn't force them if you don't really want them, and how some leave it up to the user entirely. One one hand, for...
What are some specific[1] real-world code[2]/design examples, personal anecdotes, mistakes learned (with more emphasis on personal anecdotes, mistakes learned instead of pointing out third-party software) that best illustrate the programming philosophy of Unix? For a start, here's Raymond's summarization of the philosophy from The Art of...
I have heard a lot about "type system", "strongly typed language" and so on. Currently I am working on some .NET COM interop problem, which addressed "marshaling" a lot. And AFAIK, marshaling is quite about conversion between .NET types and COM types. In many scenarios such as programming language, when talking about types, we are conce...
I am tasked with creating a document for current and (most importantly) new developers that is a general guidelines for the department. This is not a document on what the server name is for Test, but probably more of a company philosophy document. Some of the items I currently have: Coding Standards (naming, the basics) Tiers - how t...
How do you send "commands" to a RESTful server? Use case: My server caches certain information so that it does not have to read the database every time that information is requested. I need a way to send a command from my client application to tell the server to flush the cache. Would you use POST or PUT on some URL like ".../flush_cach...
Apologies for the vast scope of question. But what is the design factor in managing memory in C++? For example: why is there a memory leak when a program does not release a memory object before it exits? Isn't a good programming language design supposed to maintain a "foo-table" that takes care of this situation ? I know I am being a bi...
How can literals be explained? Why should we use it in a language such as C# and ...? Literals are very common in C#. I want to know the philosophy and history of literals. ...
Douglas Crockford said a long time ago: Classical objects are hard. .... Shallow hierarchies are efficient and expressive. I came to this conclusion separately after years of JS development, and now I'm struggling to convince my colleagues. Arguments don't help, because apparently "classes and dozens of methods are easi...
Hi stackoverflow, First of all, I wanted to thank the community. You've been of great support lately ! Usually i don't even need to ask the questions because they're already there. Now i have an issue that's not directly related to code but programming itself. I'm working with a FTDI Chip and C# programming a communication protocol in ...
Are there any arguments out there against keyword substitution (i.e. replacing $Revision$ with $Revision: 5$) as a feature in version control systems? I'm not looking for a debate. I'm looking for well thought-out arguments by people who think the feature is a bad idea. Here is one such argument: Keyword Substition: Why You Don't Ne...