I'm working on a large scale performance critical asp web application with a pretty much denormalized database (lots of data is duplicated across tables for performance reasons). The application is highly performance critical and large. There is almost no sense of any kind of n-tiered design. I can't touch the database, it's carved in st...
I've been thinking lately about a few practices that I have kind of adopted. Not things you see listed all the times, but patterns that you've looked back and said "I'm glad I did that", then adopted for yourself. I'm not really thinking of the ones you hear all the time, like "Refactoring" or any design patterns listed in common books...
I am building one of my first web application, and I found some problems in managing a dynamic navigation menu. In particular, I don't know what is the best way (or, almost, a good way) to set a different css class for the current navigation item when a user go to a page. I have a 2 levels menu, as you can see in this screenshot: A s...
If you read other people's source code, how do you approach the code? What patterns are you looking for (datatypes, loops, use of control flow, ... )? How long can you read other people's code without getting bored? What is the most exciting patterns that you have discovered so far? ...
I have a following object model: - Book -- Chapter 1 --- Page 1 ---- Image 1 ---- Image 2 ---- Text 1 --- Page 2 ... Resources are way down at the page level. But, I need to know the full path to resources, from the resources' point of view. One way, is to have resources be aware of their parents. So my Image object could have...
I have a linux box with a bank of modems and need to create demand-dial (outbound) PPP connections to a very large set of remote machines. Since I have far more remotes than local modems, I'd like to launch one or more instances of pppd in demand mode, but not allocate a particular modem until a connection is requested. When the connec...
Hi people, I would like to hear from you guys on how do you decide when you should be using concrete parameterized type vs. bounded parameterized type when designing API, esp. (that I care most) of defining a class/interface. For instance, public interface Event<S>{ void setSource(S s); } public interface UserEvent extends EVent<Us...
Hi, I want to float a div to the right at the top of my page. It contains a 50px square image, but currently it impacts on the layout of the top 50px on the page. Currently its: <div style="float: right;"> ... </div> I tried z-index as I thought that would be the answer, but I couldn't get it going. I know it's something simple ...
I want to design a class that will parse a string into tokens that are meaningful to my application. How do I design it? Provide a ctor that accepts a string, provide a Parse method and provide methods (let's call them "minor") that return individual tokens, count of tokens etc. OR Provide a ctor that accepts nothing, provide a Parse ...
In Java, what is the difference between the twin methods? public void methodA() throws AnException { //do something throw new AnException(); } public void methodA() { //do the same thing throw new AnException(); } I have a intuition that it has something to do with being a well-designed method (because I put methodA i...
In short: what is the best way to design and implement a factory+plugin mechanism, so that plugins can replace objects in the main application. We have a code base from which we build our applications. The code base is fine for 70-95% of the applications, meaning that in each new application we need to change 5-30% of the default behavi...
...if there is such a thing. Here's an image of two approachs for structuring DLLs/references in a .NET application: http://www.experts-exchange.com/images/t80668/compArch.png. The app can be a website (it is in this case) or a winform. Each box represents a DLL. For the winform app, just replace "webcontrols" with "winformcomponent...
When working in a big project that requires debugging (like every project) you realize how much people love "printf" before the IDE's built-in debugger. By this I mean Sometimes you need to render variable values to screen (specially for interactive debugging). Sometimes to log them in a file Sometimes you have to change the visibility...
In logging frameworks like log4j & log4net you have the ability to log various levels of information. Most of the levels have obvious intentions (such as what a "Debug" log is vs. a "Error"). However, one thing that I have always been timid on was classifying my logging as "Fatal". What type of errors are so severe that they should be c...
Hi, If you were to build a badge system similiar to how SO does it, would you put the logic/business layer in the database directly (via stored procedure, scheduled sql jobs) or put it in the server side? From what I can think of, you have to: list badges that pertain to the current user action check if the user has a badge already o...
How do you manage not being able to do what you what to do or feel is the right approach to something? Have you ever been in a situation where you are told to "follow the spec" even though there is a blatant issue (design, UI, performance, etc.) with it? Have you ever looked at a problem and recommended a technology that would solve it ...
I want to use this pure HTML/CSS template for my ASP.NET website: http://sub3.tanguay.de I copy it inside my Default.aspx page, inside the FORM element, but the form messes up the layout: http://sub2.tanguay.de UPDATE: this now displays correctly, thanks to Devio. I tried altering the style of the form tag but can't get it to stop a...
Hi, any books on project management/ design you guys can recommend? I am looking for a practical hands on approach, nothing heavy on theory. Update For 1-man development projects, what book would you recommend so I can plan the project, what needs to be done exactly, tasks, estimations, etc. ...
As we all know, when we derive a class and use polymorphism, someone, somewhere needs to know what class to instanciate. We can use factories, a big switch statement, if-else-if, etc. I just learnt from Bill K this is called Dependency Injection. My Question: Is it good practice to use reflection and attributes as the dependency injecti...
Hi, I need to build a web based email client (asp.net) I'll be using a 3rd party library for pop3/smtp/mime/etc. What challenges do you guys think there will be during development? (I don't want to overlook major components) It seems pretty straight forward, the only thing I am weary of is spam management. I am planning on using bay...