As an industry we tend to have a short attention span and be easily distracted by "new" things—which often turn out to be old things, effortfully re-invented. Tony Hoare said that if we could learn the right lessons from the successes of the past we wouldn't have to learn from the failures. What were those successes, in terms of techni...
Hi, I am currently using powerbuilder 6.5 In my application, i want to make a code where any change in one window should reflet another window.Two windows are using the same table. if we channge in one window it is not reflecting in another window if the other window is opened earlier. what cani do? ...
When using reference counting, what are possible solutions/techniques to deal with circular references? The most well-known solution is using weak references, however many articels about the subject imply that there are other methods as well, but keep repeating the weak-referencing example. Which makes me wonder, what are these other me...
There has been quite a bit of discussion about how to apply specific estimation techniques, or which estimation method is better than others. But it's hard to get a sense of which estimation practices people actually use. What I am interested in is an informal poll of what types of estimation techniques people typically use. Please ad...
As an artist and musician, I often want to sit down and just let the code roll like a piece of free-form poetry, but I've found that doesn't work as well as when I have a set goal in mind. I've been experimenting lately with setting up tiny, fun goals for myself, not unlike how an artist would sketch a quick still-life, but I wonder... ...
I'm programming my very first GUI app in Java using the Swing framework. I've coded a basic login system using the JTextField, JPasswordField, and JButton classes. Now, I'm writing the actionPerformed method for the button, which I want to remove these items as they are no longer necessary, but I am unsure as to the best way of achieving...
I'm looking for a fluent way of determining if a number falls within a specified set of ranges. My current code looks something like this: int x = 500; // Could be any number if ( ( x > 4199 && x < 6800 ) || ( x > 6999 && x < 8200 ) || ( x > 9999 && x < 10100 ) || ( x > 10999 && x < 11100 ) || ( x > 11999 && x < 121...
I have a question about technique and implementation, rather than an actual problem to solve. Recently I created an abstract class, let's called it A, which defines the common behaviors of its subclasses. I use this to construct several subclasses B, C, and D, which are then passed to some other method outside of the superclass-subclas...
I'm working on a new project and we're using a pretty nice stack. NHibernate, Spring, MVC... the list goes on. One thing I've noticed tho is that in the 6 months since we've started we've had a new release of NHibernate, a new release of a third party control toolkit and Windows 7 is on the horizon. We've had problems before where bein...
What are the challenges of transition a team in a corporate atmosphere from a traditional non-iterative, spec list, gantt chart, phase dependent team to a more iterative approach? Moreover, what was a successful way to gain acceptance with other groups while using a newer development strategy? ...
Say I have a super long line in the VIM editor (say around 300+ characters). How would I break that up into multiple lines so that the word boundaries roughly break at 80 characters? Example: This is a really long line This is a really long line This is a really long line This is a really long line This is a really long line This is a...
I'm having a bug in my Objective C program which causes the machine to crash hip deep in some library methods, and it's all library methods down the stack to main (Which I haven't touched from the one XCode gave me). So, I have a bit of a mystery. The error I'm getting is: Program received signal: “EXC_BAD_ACCESS”. Now, I'm sure tha...
The question of 'what is elegance?' has been asked before, and rather than arguing about that, I think we could probably all agree we know it when we see it. But I'd like to know is elegance a goal of programming (an essential aim), or merely a desirable side-effect? (or technique) If we create code which isn't elegant, have we failed...
Let's say I have a word selected in visual mode. I would like to perform a substitution on that word and all other instances of that word in a file by using s//. Is there a way to use the highlighted text in the s/<here>/stuff/ part without having to retype it? ...
RPM seems to be pretty good at checking dependencies and handling individual file updates, but what is the best practice for handling cumulative updates to, say, a relational database across multiple versions? For instance, say you have product Foo with versions 1.2.1, 1.2.2, 1.2.3, and 1.3.0. In each of these, there were database sche...
I'm trying to understand trends of the languages. This might be not a "real programming question", but i hope people will correct me promptly. Currently there are two languages/trends/technologies that i'm interested in: Java and .NET. These are two worlds. There's an opinion that: 1. Java is most often used in connection with Oracle...
Interview question- Often its pretty easier to debug a program once you have trouble with your code.You can put watches,breakpoints and etc.Life is much easier because of debugger. But how to debug a program without a debugger? One possible approach which I know is simply putting print statements in your code wherever you want ...
I am beginner.Practicing in C# 3.0. The requirement is "i have to design model in such a way that ,it should iterate through all classes which implement particular interface (in this case IExpressWords) and execute the implemented method (void ExpressWords())" I collected all classes in a List and iterated. namespace InterfaceExample ...
Here's a quick and dirty round corners technique I've been playing around with. <!-- assuming the div isn't statically positioned --> <div> <img src="box_TL.png" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;"/> <img src="box_TR.png" style="position:absolute;top:0;right:0;"/> <!-- other content --> <img src="box_BL.png" style=...
I have a table that stores various clients I have done work for, separated by Government and Commercial columns. The problem is that there could be an uneven number of clients in either column. When I do a SELECT, I end up with NULL values in irregular places because I can't think of a clean way to order the result set. For example, the ...