Hello people..I need some insight about the life of software developers working in financial organizations like Merrill Lynch, Goldmen Sache etc; particularly working hours. Actually i have an offer from Merrill Lynch for their software development office in singapore. Someone told me that software people working in financial organizations are usually "abused" as far as working hours and work load is concerned (on average 14 hours a day). I will be moving to singapore with just my wife and i dont want to ruin my family life by working so long. In my current company,i do sometimes work long hours but company in general doesnt encourage late sittings until unless its required. Do you thinks that what happens with us(software developers) in financial companies like banks etc? People plz share whatever you know in this regard. And please do mention if you work for some financial company like a bank etc. SK

If i have total markup (XAML) based workflow, how do i refer some property/variable defined in my XAML inside rule file? I know how we can do this using code, but i want to do this for pure XAML based workflows. Any hints or examples would be appreciated.

Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

Hello ppl, I want to know about the USA Software Consulting Model which usually companys follow. I am talking about the companies which outsource their consultants to other companies for projects. How do they usually pay wages to their employees? I have heard stories of people pissed off by few consulting firms; consulting firms hiring people on H1B's and then literally people waiting at bench waiting to be assigned to some project. And these companies do not pay anything untill they are assigned to some client project. Do these companies have legal status according to USA labour laws? I suppose H1-B filing process requires a hiring company to provide information regarding fixed wages against that position in the company. Anybody having any information about Prompt Technologies in New Jersey or California? I am expecting an offer from this company and need some guidance from you guys.

Muhammad Shoaib Khan

We have an application developed in Windows 2000. When we run the same application on Windows XP with exactly same environment, there is a drastic increase in CPU Usage. Say if it was 15% on Windows 2000, now its 50% on Windows XP. Application has few components communicating through DCOM and few Win32 Dlls. Any hint how can i trace which portion of code is taking too much CPU on Windows XP. Any easy to get profiling tool? any other way? Any help would be really appreciated. Regards Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

Which unit testing framework (if any) do you use for C++ applications? CXXTest, cppunit, VS 2005, any other? Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

Any good reason to migrate to VS2005 if you work in native C++? Any drastic improvements in debugger or features? Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

I would not be as much actively involved in development as before but to some extent. Thanks for your advise. I have accepted the offer. :) Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

code-frog wrote:

Where (and again be honest with yourself) did product management fit into your career path or did it? Were you thinking that's where you wanted to go all along?

i wanna be GURU both technically and in the long run make a lot of money

code-frog wrote:

How old are you? If you are less then 30 then I gotta be honest. Despite what you may think you are probably to young unless you are an extremely remarkable person.

I am just 23 ;) All other PMs are ~ 28-30

code-frog wrote:

Of the developers you will be managing how many have been there longer than you and will they resent you for moving past them?

Yup 1 of them is more senior to me

code-frog wrote:

How old is the project and is the language it was written in still the appropriate choice for it?

6 years, C++ i think still appropriate language :)

code-frog wrote:

How many developers would you be working with and over-seeing?

3 developers

code-frog wrote:

Why (and be honest with yourself) did the company choose an under experienced developer (you) to manage the product?

Because no body has more grip on that module..if i leave it will take company hell lot of time to train a new guy on that module Product is 6 years old but still not in the market, at the moment 5 ppl are managing it all having >5 years experience

code-frog wrote:

What happened to the previous manager(s)? Why are they no longer managing and are they still in the company?

So far no manager has left the company, i would be given a new module

code-frog wrote:

Is this an internal or external project?

Internal Product Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

oh you scared me man! I would love to personally meet anyone with so much experience. U must be damm good developer as well as manager with this much experience. thanks for your advice.

Hey i need comments of all GURUs out there + all experienced CPians in general!! When do u feel is the right time to jump into product management related role?? Is it always a good option no matter how much experience you have? :~ Actually i am caught into fairly interesting scenario. I planned to leave the company where i have been working for last 1.5 years due to financial reasons. (yeah i have 1.5 years of exp in total) The company offered me the responsibility of Product Manager with huge salary boast and they think i am well suitable for the job. DO u think is it good to jump into product management and it will boast my career? One interesting thing is that the product manager with least exp in my company has atleast 5 years experience and i being the only guy with 1.5 years experience :confused: Another thing just for the information, they promoted me to senior software engineer after 1 year experience though the normal time is ~3 years..And now.. [Am i too smart? ;)] Muhammad Shoaib Khan

Hey guys, any one of you working in UAE? I got a job offer from UAE for which i have to relocate. I dont know much about UAE software development market. Is it good? any recommendations. I am evaluating it from growth and opputunities point of view. I just have 1.5 years of experience and i am currently working in Pakistan. SK

usually check some random emails on my university mailing list and if inbox says "0" new mails, then cursing everyone why dont they send any stupid mails. Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

I want to perform some calculation which require extremely large floating point values i.e. > 1.7e308. I want some class for handling such large calculations. 128Bit or more. Any tips would be welcomed. Thanks! Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

I am bit concerned over the issue of fragmentation problem due to dynamic memory allocation in real time applications that have to run for long say 1 year. How to avoid it? What if in some scenario you must dynamically allocate the memory occasionaly of different block size? Any one here, who has developed some performance critical application which runs for long and have addressed these issues? Thanks Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

answer is 1 fruit. Since all baskets have wrong label, i would just pick one fruit from mixed fruit label. If it is orange then it means that the one with label of apple has mix and the one with label orange has apples. :) Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

Ghazi Al Wadi wrote: You have a one year of professional work (graduated 2004) and you still think it is not because others might have higher skills. Well others were also freshers or 1-2 year experience ppl,not gurus like you. Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

Colin Angus Mackay wrote: You do realise that "M$" is disrespectful. Companies tend not to hire people that are disrepectful about them. Yeah i know that.. i am writing this after i got rejection from their side. Before that it was MS or Microsoft. Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

yeah they considered me a fresher. But in actuall i graduated one year back i.e. in May 2004. Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

from which univ/college? Muhammad Shoaib Khan http://geocities.com/lansolution

I had my interview on 20th April at Dubai. M$ had arranged my one night stay + meals in a 5 start hotel in Dubai. Interviews started at 8:00 AM. In my session of interviews there were 6 people and among them 2 including myself had 5 interviews, 1 had 4 and rest had 3. Duration of each interview was 1 hour. The recuiter initially told that no. of interviews doesnot reflect anything.. But i think the more interviews they conduct, the more interested they are. So far max number of interviews in any of these interviews sessions was 5. My first interview was with a development manager from Windows serviceability group. He asked me about my current job project and then gave me producer consumer problem to code. i coded it using queue with linked list based implementation.then he asked to optimize for real time apps.. i did it.. then some technical questions like thread scheduling algos, interestingly, i had recently read an article on it in MSDN and i told him how windows schdules threads. So overall it went good. Second interview was with some guy Fred, again from serviceability. He asked me a bit about my Final year project, my areas of interest in CS. i told him OS, AI and computer vision. He asked me to play checker board game with him. I won and he asked me what was my strategy. He then asked to come up with algo using which a computer can play checkerboard with human. It was game playing problem of AI. and i explained him Minimax algorithm in detail. Then, he gave me a question to code that multiple threads are trying to read a file and write a file at same time, write the file writing part routine.. I came up wth design in which instead of locking complete file, i locked chunks of file before writing and then i released that lock after writing. I feel that this interview went excellent considering the kind of game playing problem he asked me. Third interview was with Maneesh. My performance in this interview was just averag. Actually he asked me to implement post order traversal of BST iteratively. I first designed my algo before coding...I was doing it using two stacks.. but he wanted to be done using one stack. He then asked me to code node deletion in a linked list based on some value. i did it. He then asked me to tell test cases for DrawLine() function. I came up with no. of test cases and this part was OK. So overall the performance in this part was just OK. 4th was with the recruiter. She just asked those typical microsoft questions like what i want to join Microsoft? why not any ot