I am working in the web dept of a large legal firm, and among other things am responsible for maintaining a professional look for all our email communications (over 600 pieces per year). Right now I am in a rut. Using a lot of pressure and manipulation, a person in management got to "art direct" a couple of HTML emails working directly ...
Are the classes generated by LINQ (DBML) considered POCOs? If I add static queries to these classes, are they still POCOs? I imagine it changes once I start doing business things in the LINQ partials. Such as adding other attributes, creating collections and basically making the partials more than DAL classes. If the LINQ classes ar...
We all walked out of school with the stars in our eyes and little experience in "real-world" programming. How have your opinions on programming as a craft changed since you've gained more experience away from academia? I've become more and more about design a la McConnell : wide use of encapsulation, quality code that gives you warm fuz...
Hi there, I'm struggling with the design of a django application. Given the following models: class A(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=255) class B(models.Model): name = models.CharField(max_length=255) a = models.ForeignKey(A) class C(models.Model): val = models.IntegerField() b = models.ForeignKe...
Rules like "A parent object will have up to 2 children" could be enforced in database using triggers. But would it be a good idea to duplicate the rule if this rule is already enforced in the domain layer. In which cases duplication of such rules are justified? Are there any alternative to avoid such duplication? Is it not a data integ...
For the popular languages and libraries we use every day: What are examples of some bad design, embarrassing APIs, or generally bad usability? Design errors that we have to pay for because they introduce subtle bugs, we have to use awkward workarounds or memorize unintuitive ways to get things done. I'm especially thinking of issues l...
A lot of software frameworks, languages, platforms claim platform independence and boast it as a selling feature. However, I have failed to understand how could this such an important feature. For example, Java is said to be platform independent - but why should I care when I know that my webapp is going to run on only one platform? Is t...
Does anyone know of good, well designed open sourced Django applications? I'm really curious about different designs and I'd like to look at some good examples in order to learn about good design in a real world example. Thanks. ...
Working with Java and Java frameworks I have started shuddering when I encounter Abstract Factory patterns. In my opinion this is the most abused design pattern. Not all frameworks abuse it but there are many. It doesn't fit all models and when almost 100% of the time you are going to be doing the same thing why abstract it? Which desi...
This question is relating to a specific functionality that a client has requested for an application I am designing. Basically, the client wants the DateTimePicker to prompt a question after the date was selected. This sounds simple, however, I am having difficulties accomplishing this simple task. If I prompt OnCloseUp - Keyboard ...
I was discussing with a co-worker the other day the similarities of implementing a Software Factory for your development organization vs. using more of a scaffolding solution like active record. We both thought that implementing a Software factory may be considered by some to be a good idea when you have a larger group of developers and ...
I am writing an architecture and design document for software development at our company, that will contain the rules and guidelines for developers to follow. It is targeted at J2EE web applications, but I constantly keep mentioning the same basic 'ingredients' (for lack of a better word, and to avoid buzzwords) to introduce and defend c...
What are the topics we should pay attention while designing web site for Internet Explorer 8? Is there any new standard,we should obey for best appearance? ...
I have this big polymorphic object hierarchy, and I want to expose these objects to another language using primitive types. I'm thinking my base object will have a dictionary of properties (C++), and each sublcass down the hierarchy will add properties or modify properties, and then when i forward to the other language, i don't need any...
I'm looking for tips, tricks and resources on optimizing a website design for Android's browser. I'm building an Android app and some of the functionality will be accessible through a web interface. ...
I try to follow the SOLID principles. But every time it comes to user interfaces I find that there's an inherent friction between the clunky screenful of hybrid, aggregated data the customer requires and the nice principles of single-responsibility. Now it is possible to divide and conquer the various bits and pieces of a typical user i...
I have the following class hierarchy in C++: class Base { virtual void apply() = 0; }; class Derived : public Base { virtual void apply() { // implementation here that uses derived_specialty } virtual void derived_specialty() = 0; }; class Implementation : public Derived { virtual void derived_specialt...
I wrote a little "lazy vector" class (or, delayed vector) which is supposed to look like a std::vector and usable wherever a std::vector is used, but it loads its elements "lazily", i.e. it will load element n (and possibly a few more) from disk whenever someone accesses element n. (The reason is that in my app, not all elements fit into...
When it comes to code documentation, it is usually accepted that code should explain itself, and inline code documentation (excluding public API documentation) should only explain meta-code issues such as workarounds, explanations on why specific implementations were chosen, etc. How do you accomplish making your code more readable and ...
I am coding a small Python module composed of two parts: some functions defining a public interface, an implementation class used by the above functions, but which is not meaningful outside the module. At first, I decided to "hide" this implementation class by defining it inside the function using it, but this hampers readability and...