I'd also add Application Architect to that list. Many senior engineers who contribute heavily to the design of your application and interfacing systems are partially filling that role. If you are regularly interfacing between the business and your team, designing ahead of time to meet foreseen requirements, and finding ways to reduce your app's technical debt then you may be an Application Architect depending on a company's definition. It is very dependent on the scope, complexity, and size of the solution and organization to justify these roles. A Solution Architect is overseeing the architecture of the set of applications which form said solution. I would normally think this is a dozen or more apps to qualify for this next distinction. Our solution contains 80+ applications. Someone at this level would definitely not be coding feature content. I would then jump to Enterprise Architect but I can see a Domain Architect having a place in larger organizations which have teams of architects. Then there's Systems Architect which is an ICT position. For those wondering generally an architect isn't delivering feature content because their responsibilities would cause them to be a block on the critical path. They are generally too busy interfacing between the business and engineering and while they may still write code generally it's big picture prototypes and system infrastructure. If they were to pitch in to help a team I'd think it would be limited to unit tests or basic items from the backlog... something that wouldn't interfere with the developers.

10. I still remember making the computer beep with 10 sound statements. Then I discovered the for loop. Awesome!

Me too. Been using Ditto for maybe 6 months and have had little to no issues with it. I had used ClipX before a couple years but eventually it went flakey (surely due to VS2010, a plugin, or some other sw) and needed to be restarted constantly. I've been using software with this functionality for many many years and this seems to be the fate of them all. After a few years of faithful service be it an OS upgrade or other change they eventually get constantly bumped from the ring and need to be rehooked regularly until I find a replacement.

This reply gets my vote. If you are asking this question then obviously the work isn't all that interesting anymore. In the early days of your career if you can't move up at your current firm, jump ship. It is the only way to seriously adjust your salary to what you are worth. Waiting all year for a few percentage points will never pay off, unless the work is so interesting you don't care. As far as contracting goes.. whether you go it alone or with a contracting firm... if you really love to code and want to test yourself on a regular basis it is a fantastic choice. Not to say all contacts are fun, but you get the widest variety of problems and challenges (albeit little reward for ingenuity and cleverness; but you're in control as long as you deliver on time).

Collin Jasnoch wrote:

Or take a look at MVC/MVP which lead to MVVM

While I like and use an implementation of MVP there is a flaw I can't reconcile when developing ajax web apps. That is much of what should be presenter code ends up as script which MUST live in the website (view). With the web services you can still use a presenter. But with script heavy webapps it feels like it negates the pattern.

Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:

My advice is to not fall in love with any paradigm - just use whatever is best for the problem you are trying to solve.

A software architect's answer if ever I saw one.

Nemanja Trifunovic wrote:

Nobody even agrees what "pure OOP" is.

This made me laugh. I'm afraid to say OOP in case the pedantic OOP-nazis correct me. So I "structure" my code in to logical components intead. :-D

SledgeHammer01 wrote:

This is where interviews fall apart. You are asking a "stock question" and expecting a "stock answer".

No, the probing section is opened ended questions with no set answer. I pick a selection most suitable for the role / candidate. It's completely up to the candidate to impress or hang themselves.

SledgeHammer01 wrote:

Sorry, I gotta disagree here. This is a value-add / bang for the buck situation. ... I think you'll find that you'd get in trouble with most managers for not having your priorities straight if you spent 4hrs shaving 1minute off a 60min process :) .

Ha, but remember I am the technical screener. I think it's a tell as I'm wary of people who cut corners. So your response might impress my boss but won't impress me.

I have the unhappy duty of performing many of the phone screenings at my company. I believe in the interview process we have in place, but I don’t relish the prospect of putting a candidate through hell. Whether the process is just or not, there is no joy in seeing a candidate crumble or get upset. After all, the hope is we are going to find a successful candidate and I will be working with this individual possibly for years. I am rooting for the canidate because a hire means less technical screenings I have to give. I would like to run through my screening process to this audience as, like you, I’ve been subjected to horrible interviews. I’d be interested in knowing if the following sounds fair while gathering the necessary information to judge a candidate. Personally, I too feel that I never shine in interviews but typically prove myself to be a MVP in my team or department within 6 months of starting a new job. Nobody likes being asked them, but I believe in the technical questions I ask. I’ve helped shape the technical screening process which is customized for each candidate. It is 30 minute screening which breaks down as follows: • Establish adequate place to talk; put candidate at ease (2 min) • Quick run through CV establishing levels of experience. Ask a few questions about interesting technical accomplishments. Don’t let the candidate talk about a project or company, but press candidate in to divulging details of personal contributions. If candidate persists in talking big picture, skip this step. (6 min) • Ask a half dozen probing questions from a list of 50 which assess the candidate’s soft skills. This set of questions is customized per role and experience. General questions gauge interest in various aspects of technology, pitch general scenario what if’s, and allow candidate to deep-dive on specific technical accomplishments where I encourage details. This is where seniors shine and where juniors don’t but the importance of this section is weighted based on this candidates skills and salary expectations. (12 min) • A series of quick-fire .NET / DB questions ranked by difficulty and sorted by category. Junior candidates do best at these as they sometimes cram them. But this is where they need to shine as they probably won’t have much to offer in the probing questions above. If any particular skills, say threading or Linq, are mentioned above in the CV I make sure to ask questions on that area here. I endeavour to put the candidate at ease by saying no one gets everything righ

Yeah, in VS I did File->Open on the tlb and indeed couldn't find it. Looks like we'll need a wrapper to expose static funcitons. Thanks

Hi, I have a sample project where I am using a C# library in a C++ test program. I'm doing this by COM, using the tlb and project reference. C# [ComVisible(true)] [ClassInterface(ClassInterfaceType.AutoDual)] public class Math { public int Add(int x, int y) { return x + y; } public static int Subtract(int x, int y) { return x - y; } } C++ #include "stdafx.h" #include <iostream> #import "..\\CSharpUsefulLibrary.tlb" raw_interfaces_only int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[]) { CoInitialize(0); CSharpUsefulLibrary::_MathPtr math(__uuidof(CSharpUsefulLibrary::Math)); long value; math->Add(1, 2, &value); std::wcout << "The value is " << value; CoUninitialize(); return 0; } So this works fine, I'm able to call the add method in my C# library from C++. The question is, how do I call the static subtract method?

Here is the problem, okay besides my customer's broken architecture: Backend DB uses an entity data class. WebSvcA passes entity. WebSvcB also passes entity. So what we have is: Entity.Class1, WebSvcA.Class1, and WebSvcB.Class1. Their solution? A Util.dll with convert functions that go every which way. X| I feel ill. Are there any recommendations? Such as Entity.Class1 impleneting some serialization interface such that the proxy classes are unnecessary? I'm looking in to an automated (non-reflective) way to serialize between the 3 classes as they are all the same. Still, I can't help thinking there is a more clever way (other than changing the architecture which is NOT an option so don't ask).

I've been cleaning up a C# project I inherited which is several years old. In it were loads of string concatinations which are called repeatedly. My simply solution was to add const to many of them (and stringbuilder for others where dynamic). Surprisingly, VS didn't only crash when I compiled the code the window just POOF!... and disappeared. This happened repeatedly and took a while for me to discover it was an extremely long const which caused the problem. I had to define 2 const and use string.format("{0} {1}", sPartA, sPartB) to make VS happy. Of course, I told the customer, this wouldn't have happened in VS2008.

And what about not supporting abstract base classes for forms or controls? Just try to bring up your form in the designer and see it puke all over the screen. Way to encourage good OO design there fellas.

For performance I would like to switch between https and http automatically depending on if the page content is sensitive. I am hosting on godaddy which does not allow you to turn on SSL for a directory. I'm trying to think of the most clever way to accomplish this. One idea which I am using is to have 2 master pages, default.master and defaultsecure.master. The pageload event swaps the users protocol, if necessary. This way I can simply mark a page a secure by masterpage and know that the user will access that page via https and go back to http when back to a public page. Is there a more clever way of doing this? Or some setting I missed in the web.config? I'm using .net 2 login controls and was surprised there was nothing there to support this.

Ehhh, I'm already using a httphandler (ashx). That's the problem, you can't wrap an ashx page in a web control dll. It has to be a servable page on the actual website. The point of my question is how to achieve this functionality within a seperate web control dll.

I'm using a CAPTCHA image generator from Code Project and would like to wrap this in to a web control. So I was wondering what's the best way to display a dynamic image from a memorystream? Currently I'm setting the img src to a handler which works fine. But the handler needs to be a servable page and can't be wrapped in to a control dll. I'd prefer not to write the image to a temp directory. Is there an alternative or a nifty trick like putting the handler in as a resource in the dll?

That's what I did in the second code block. Doesn't matter if you touch the dg.DataSource or set it to a local variable as its a pointer to the same dataset object. Like I said, I would see "something ASC" set the next time I would sort. The code was there to toggle so clicking it you could see it going from ASC to DESC and back again. However, it did nothing. For some reason we needed to clone the dataset and set it back to the datagrid.

I have a MyDataSet : DataSet class which contains 3 talbes and 2 data relations. This is set to a custom datagrid which can expand to show something like Users -> tickets for user -> details of ticket. I'm sure this is entirely simple, but how do I sort while keeping my dataset as the datasource? When I google they always discard the dataset and do something like: MyDataSet ds = (MyDataSet) _dgUsers.DataSource; DataView dv = ds.Tables[0].DefaultView; dv.Sort = "something ASC"; _dgUsers.DataSource = dv; _dgUsers.DataBind(); This is useless as I've just lost my dataset. I tried modifying the view of the table inside the dataset but it just gets ignored (although it remains set when I sort again): MyDataSet ds = (MyDataSet) _dgUsers.DataSource; DataView dv = ds.Tables[0].DefaultView; dv.Sort = "something ASC"; _dgUsers.DataSource = **ds**; _dgUsers.DataBind(); How should it be done? When I clone the DataSet it seems to work. Why is that?

Does anyone know how to permanently add a toolbox tab to Visual Studio such that the Ajax Controls are loaded for every project?

You'll love this: I use both, but consistently. Any variable which belong in the header file is prefixed with m_ Any control is prefixed with _TypeDescriptor such as _EditTest or _ButtonGo. It does make working with the code, especially via IntelliSense, remarkably easy. All the variables are nicely grouped. And all the controls are grouped separately and sorted by type.