The Problem I recently had a problem. I am a software developer and as such I use source control. For this purpose I generally prefer Subversion. I have been keeping my source repositories on an external drive with the intention to back them up to another secure location periodically (yeah, that never happens). I looked …
Cell phones are for the most part proprietary in their platforms. Sure you can write J2ME applications for them. BlackBerry phones also have an API which you can utilize to write custom applications. It’s the actual operating system though that you really can’t get too. Don’t care? Well, then this review isn’t for you. However, …
I am in Minneapolis, MN this week for business so I’m not sure how prolific my posting will be. So I thought I’d just drop in a quick note to say, “Happy Monday!” It’d be happier if I were back in my home office, but oh well. In the mean time you can check out …
Anyone who has been in software engineering can most likely recognize the old project triangle. The basic premise to this triangle is that in software engineering you may pick only two of the tips of this triangle. You can create software quickly and cheaply but it will suffer quality. You can have high quality quickly …
Here is the situation. You are writing a program in Java. You need to access data in a Microsoft SQL Server via stored procedure and the data has an XML field. A what field? SQL Server 2005 introduces a new datatype for XML. It is essentially a blob field that you can perform XML operations …
In the original posting, Conditional Statements And Comparison Order, I brought up a coding style used by some software engineers that struck me as odd. The practice of placing a constant value first in a conditional comparison. For example: if(“Some String” == aVariable) { // Do some stuff } … Listing 1 I never liked …
I apologize ahead of time for this soap box, but I have just read the nth forum posting with a response like this. I have been a fairly flexible software engineer for the majority of my career and this means that I use many different programming languages. What language do you need? If I do …
I am working on some legacy code that is currently in VB.NET running on the .NET 1.1 Framework. I went to add a property to a class and received this error: Property without a ‘ReadOnly’ or ‘WriteOnly’ specifier must provide both a ‘Get’ and a ‘Set’. Seriously? So I have to tell you that it …
Alex Iskold over at AdaptiveBlue.com wrote a very good article for any startup companies wanting to get their feet wet in the software market. Very well written and user-friendly guide titled… well it’s the same as I titled this post. 🙂 Software Engineering Tips For Startups (the real article)
I am not a huge .NET fan, but I am mature enough to overcome my personal likes and dislikes in a professional setting and use whatever is needed. I recently ran into a situation programming in C# that I needed to create a method that took it’s parameters by reference. Why would you want to …