I've got an project management web application where any Project can be the child of zero or one other Project. Our director uses this function to group projects into Service Offerings, and our project managers use this to break projects down into tasks... but from the database's point of view, they're all in the Projects table. So the...
Like, let's say I had a tree structure, then I would use, naturally a tree control, since that GUI element maps perfectly to the structure. But what I have is a graph, potentially too wide to fit in one web page. I can't think of examples of GUIs that really match the structure. Some ideas I have that don't quite fit are, the web itse...
Say I have a class called PermissionManager which should only exist once for my system and basically fulfills the function of managing various permissions for various actions in my application. Now I have some class in my application which needs to be able to check a certain permission in one of its methods. This class's constructor is c...
I find that whenever I begin writing an app in Java/C#, things start off good, but over time, as the app becomes more complex, it just gets more and more complicated. I've become aware of the fact that I'm not very good at design and high level architecture. All my classes become fairly strongly coupled and the design isn't "elegant" a...
The issue that prompted me to ask this is a web form that was not persisting data the way I expected it to. That's vague, but the point is, what do you like to do to model state, flow of data, and so forth? ...
What is a good programming methodology for custom applications that need to be coded very fast and very customized? I realize the lack of requirements is a problem no matter what. Also how do you convince management to change their practices? Next question is how to you get people to stop writing 5000 line single file programs? ...
Is it better to write many small methods (or functions), or to simply write the logic/code of those small processes right into the place where you would have called the small method? What about breaking off code into a small function even if for the time being it is only called from one spot? If one's choice depends on some criteria, w...
I recently rolled an application that automatically encrypted a file output from another internal system using PGP and then sftp’d to a foreign target server directory where it was to be consumed by a third-party application. I have been trying to trouble shoot the whole process for about a week and was getting no response from the third...
In my database I have tables that define types for example Table: Publication Types ID | Type ---------- 1 | Article 2 | Abstract 3 | Book .... Which is related through the ID key to a publication tables which has the field TypeID. I then create a PublicationTable data table my .NET application which I want to filter based on ...
Please forgive my long question. I have an idea for a design that I could use some comments on. Is it a good idea to do this? And what are the pit falls I should be aware of? Are there other similar implementations that are better? My situation is as follows: I am working on a rewrite of a windows forms application that connects to a SQ...
Sometimes I come across this sentence "the best best practice is success" in several blog posts or podcast. Last I've heard this on some podcast; subject was Design related/architectural/security decisions. I don't believe this but it sounds right. And it may cause misunderstanding. What do you think about this? ...
When designing user table what would be the must have fields from the security/user authentication point of view for a Web based Application (.NET and SqlServer 2005) I came with with the following fields: userID username -- preferably email passwordHash onceUsePassword -- to indicate that the password should be changed after login al...
Yesterday I was having a heated debate with a coworker on what would be the preferred error reporting method. Mainly we were discussing the usage of exceptions or error codes for reporting errors between application layers or modules. What rules do you use to decide if you throw exceptions or return error codes for error reporting? ...
We've got products built both with GUI and CHUI. Going forward, we're looking at redesigning a lot of our software and mainly taking the route of going all GUI. My question to the group is, do we need to account for keeping a CHUI around? What are the advantages of CHUI over GUI? Many times in the past people have said that CHUI is faste...
We all know to keep it simple, right? I've seen complexity being measured as the number of interactions between systems, and I guess that's a very good place to start. Aside from gut feel though, what other (preferably more objective) methods can be used to determine the level of complexity of a particular design or piece of software? ...
I see little functional difference between using a property public readonly property foo as string get return bar end get end property or a function public function foo() as string return bar end function Why would I want to use one form over the other? Thanks! ...
Our application exposes queries by way of web services, and what we've found is that our clients often want custom queries, either by way of further limiting the results returned by specifying additional criteria, or by asking for things that we don't already expose. Now, we can take the approach of creating new methods for each of thes...
The user of an application wants to assign a task to a programmer. The "Edit Task" form is presented to the User. A popup (actually an absolutely positioned div) window comes up with all the programmers to choose from. The programmer is not there so the user asks for a "new programmer" screen. The popup is replaced with a "New program...
I have a website built in PHP 4 with a framework made by hand by me. The code is 3 years old and I am limited (well it requires a lot of effort to make changes). I decided to do new version of this website. My knowledge has since increased, and now I know that a lot of frameworks exist and that IOC is there and ORM too... The problem is...
Hi, Would you guys think that a master page should be part of the company's framework or it should be part of each application? Or perhaps the company's framework should only have a interface to provide the least functionality to all master pages ? Currenlty we face two problems: Firstly, the original idea was to have a common layout f...