Where I work we've recently put together what we call the Development Standards Committee which is tasked with improving our procedures, processes, methodologies, tools, standards, and whatever we think would help us become a more effective team. We've got a spreadsheet of items that we've ranked and are going to start tackling from the...
Can anyone recommend guidelines for high-level documentation of Web services? This is the documentation that should allow someone with no knowledge about a particular Web service to come away with a basic understanding of its reason for being, its roadmap and examples of its usage. Such documentation should fit onto two printed sides o...
In our group we primarily do search engine architecture and content integration work and most of that code base is in Python. All our build tools and Python module dependencies are in source control so they can be checked out and the environment loaded for use regardless of os/platform, kinda similar to the approach virtualenv uses. Fo...
I'm wondering if there is a defined standard for what the default action is of various HTML elements. I've looked at the W3C's HTML specification and while they are very precise with what attributes can be used with elements (and also some behavioural stuff such as exactly what gets included with form submission) there's nothing about t...
Is there a standard way of encoding SQL queries as XML? I mean something like select name from users where name like 'P%' group by name order by name desc might encode as (my 5-minute mockup, probably bobbins)... <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <query> <select> <table name="users"> <column name="name"/>...
My question is simple: are std::vector elements guaranteed to be contiguous? In order word, can I use the pointer to the first element of a std::vector as a C-array? If my memory serves me well, the C++ standard did not make such guarantee. However, the std::vector requirements were such that it was virtually impossible to meet them i...
Hi all. In the current C++0x draft I've noticed they introduced some new explicit keywords to highlight expected behaviors (great move!). Examples: defaulted/deleted functions (= default and = delete), the new nullptr constant, the explicit keyword usable also for conversion operators, ... So I expected to see also a = pure syntax for...
In C I did not notice any effect of the extern keyword used before function declaration. At first I thought that when defining extern int f(); in a single file forces you to implement it outside of the file's scope. However I found out that both: extern int f(); int f() {return 0;} and extern int f() {return 0;} compile just fine,...
What is the Industry Standard for bugs per 1000 Lines of Code ? What is the number that your company is using ? What are the other metrics to identify code quality ? ...
It occurs to me (as I'm reviewing some old code) that there may be a standard way of rating code smells and I'm just not familiar with it. To be clear: I'm familiar with a few taxonomies of code smells, what I'm looking for is a standard rating system for code smells. (Where one would be able to fairly objectively state that one piec...
I'm buiding an API that allows me to fetch strings in various encodings, including utf8, utf16, utf32 and wchar_t (that may be utf32 or utf16 according to OS). New C++ standard had introduced new types char16_t and char32_t that do not have this sizeof ambiguity and should be used in future, so I would like to support them as well, but...
I got this basic doubt. The STL header doesn't have .h extension. #include <vector> #include <map> Is there is any specific reason behind this? Anybody knows history behind this, please share. EDIT: @GMan found Michael Burr's answer which addresses this question. ...
Over the years I have vacillated between having my project/source folders in a directory one level removed from the root (e.g. D:\Projects) and keeping them in the default location for Visual Studio. In the past, I resisted storing anything in the various "My Documents" folders established by Win 95, Win 98, and XP. I finally switched t...
Why on sites like Stack Overflow, Techcrunch, Smashingmagazine, etc. are the page titles (i.e. the text at the top of the page) clickable URLs that redirect to the same page that the user is on? Some examples: I believe that this does not effect SEO as search engines ignore internal links. Is it for usability purposes? ...
I prefer for the solution file to be in the same folder as the project files in Visual Studio. I know this is accomplished by unchecking the "Create directory for solution" checkbox. However, VS 2008 defaults to having the box checked. I am interested in other people's opinions on whether the solution file should live in the same direct...
I'm bit confused regarding iterator invalidation in deque. (In the context of this question) Following is the excerpts from -- The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference, By Nicolai M. Josuttis Any insertion or deletion of elements other than at the beginning or end invalidates all pointers, references, and iterator...
The C standard states: ISO/IEC 9899:1999, 6.2.5.15 (p. 49) The three types char, signed char, and unsigned char are collectively called the character types. The implementation shall define char to have the same range, representation, and behavior as either signed char or unsigned char. And indeed gcc define that accord...
I am on a large project, and have not really made any comment 'headers' in my program yet. I just started using SVN for the project the other day. I want to add the SVN tag $id$, but have not decided on any standard commenting. So, my question to everyone here, is how does your initial comment block look in all your programs? i.e: /...
If a form is submitted but not by any specific button, such as by pressing Enter using HTMLFormElement.submit() in JS how is a browser supposed to determine which of multiple submit buttons, if any, to use as the one pressed? This is significant on two levels: calling an onclick event handler attached to a submit button the data s...
There are international standards, which define various high-level aspects of information exchange in distributed systems. By "high-level" I mean describing how information should be organized and presented, what interfaces must be provided, how to communicate metadata etc. For example, energy utilities use OPC (DAIS), CIM; simulations ...