I've only used a homegrown bug tracker and atlassians jira (see this page)[^]. The homegrown one was a PITA but jira is just awesome. There is a free SVN integration that lets you see all your commits to a single issue. There is also integration for Git and TFS if you like to change your SCM once. There is also a add on called "jira agile" which gives you a customizable scrum board if you are into that stuff. Furthermore you can - if you like - also host it in the cloud out of the box and hence save all your maintenance costs. If I get their licensing right it costs 10$/month for up to ten users. Regards, cmger

I have been in a similar situation like you. I had 4 years experience in industrial automation (programming PLC's and human machine interfaces). I was bored of that programming because it was very 'low level' and I wanted to program some high level stuff in C# or java. So I changed my job into finance. My then new employer wouldn't let me code for 100% but told me that I would have to learn a lot in advance. I was promised to be allowed to code 50% of my time and do customer support and system administration the other 50%... Well in the end it was 100% support and admin. After a year and a half I was at the point you seem to be right now. I talked to my boss and asked for more money (which I got) and that I liked to code 100% of my time (I already knew I could code and did not have to prove me any longer). His last words during our conversation were: "You know, I once learned a very important thing on a management seminar: Love it, change it, or leave it." I was knocked over by the clarity in this. I could not love this. I had that clear. After thinking about this a few days I figured out that I was actively trying to change it since a year or so. Then the last option was leaving - which I did two month later. I am now having a job were I can program 100% of my time and do it the way I like (TDD, scrum team, nice pair programming partners, etc.). It is not all perfect here and some tasks are just boring but I guess that's the same with every job. There is one thing I could have done better: Find a coding job in a field that really interests me in a non coding way. For example: I like aviation and music but I am working in the renewable energy sector currently. I could have done even better by finding a job in one of the above fields. My advice: Don't leave the profession entirely. Find a company that does something that you would like to do when creating your own company and then get a job there. If you do so, doing work that isn't cool (like that xml conversion stuff) is not that bad at all because it is for the "higher goal" of your company that you also share. Regards, cmger

:-) This reminds me of a message that some code of my former employer produced. It was saying "These shoes are to large for you!" every time some absurd socket implementation tried to put large data into a length limited stream and the data was to big. When the original developer returned to the company one day and the developer currently responsible for the code told him what strange error messages one customer was receiving that poor guy said "What?! That message wasn't supposed to be seen by anyone..."

We are currently DOING it the "NuGet way" and it works like a charm :-)

Well... if you mean "Fahrvergnügen" then yes, this can be translated with "driving pleasure". Why John is under the impression that it means "nothing especially interesting" is a miracle to me also ;-) Regs

Quote:

And, just like the report I read, this one will be ignored by every boss it is shown to...

Maybe... But why not just do some things mentioned above anyway? They expect YOU to not tell THEM how to do THEIR work so you can (at least IMHO) expect THEM to not tell YOU how to do YOUR work. Creating the right environment for working is damn sure part of your job, not theirs, isn't it? Regs, cmger

If you are into TBSGs I would definitely try the new X-COM: Enemy Unknown.[^] I do not want to start a discussion about whether or not it is a worthy successor of the original classic here, but I've played and loved both, "UFO Enemy Unknown" and "Terror from the Deep" and I can say that the new XCOM is slightly different but definitely a must play for fans of the XCOM series. Regs, Chris

Hmm... Prothean ruins? http://masseffect.wikia.com/wiki/Mars[^]

Don't confuse following checks lists with RTFM, sir! And about:

Quote:

[I for one find it hard to comprehend that in a $200M airbus, the nosewheel steering system and the braking system share a single hydraulic circuit...???]

Most modern airliners have at least two hydraulic circuits backing up each other. The A340 has three. If your're interested: http://pmgasser.ch/airbus_memos/downloads/A340_HYD.pdf[^] Regs, Christian

You woke up some memories there... Thanks for sharing! So long, Chris

I use VS 2008 and VS 2010 both with R# 7.0 and its' default syntax highlighting. Cheers, cmger

Well done, sir! Looks clean, tidy and modern. I like it! :cool: Regards, Chris

Quote:

To my experience: If you're honest about how they should plan a meeting better instead of wasting everyone's time and energy with pointless discussions that should be taken by a designer in the first place, you will either earn respect; or they'll will be embarrassed/annoyed and that may lead to possibly getting fired. You have nothing to gain from working under an incompetent boss, so whatever happens is fine.

That is pretty much what I would recommend, too. In a good meeting everyone tries to stay on topic and only go to a degree of detail that everyone attending the meeting is able to understand. Everything else is a waste of someone’s time. Making (mental) notes - as mentioned by someone else before - is also a practice I use to stay focused. If you’re doing not only mentally it can provide you a nice summary that can come in handy.

I didn't even see it the first time. If you hadn't metioned I might not have noticed. However, now that I do, it is quite funny!

It might be due to a change that our industry is currently facing. No other industry than ours can decorate a new version with a huge list of bug fixes and call that a feature! Imagine your car is ready from maintenance and the report says "The breaks are now working when the car drives downhill also"... Someone, sometime in some place must have realised that shipping quality software with little bugs (I don't say "no bugs" because that is not achivable) is an attribute that gives you a better position in business competition. Better testing is seen as a (or one) cure to that. For us as developers that means unit testing as a tool and practices like test driven development, pair programming and / or scrum / kanban. The point why there is so much talk about unit testing IMHO is that it is relativley new to us, it is - as others already mentioned - sometimes hard to do if it should be done right and even though the management wants less bugs, they sometimes are not willing to spend the extra money that is needed to educate us in writing (good) unit tests or allow us the extra time that is (not always) needed to write the tests. Regs, Chris

lol, that gave me a good one...

Oh, then you would really love the code base where the above stems from,... Not! :laugh:

Thanks for the welcome! :-) Nope, there was never anything more in there. At least as far as I can tell from the source control system. I found out that there is only one place where the method is used and there the return value is just ignored. I re-factored the method to return void an removed the block completely. Now there is only the code that preceded the try catch.

Hi all, I was already reading this forum when it was still called the "Hall of shame". I've got a product to maintain that was created by a developer who is no longer working for us. Even though I've already seen plenty of "hall of shame worthy" code there, I've have never posted it here, because it would have been my first post on CP ever and I thought it is a bad idea to say hello to a community while bashing an ex colleague. However, I came across a piece of code that I can't keep for myself and so I'll do what I didn't want to do and bash in my first post: At the end of a long method I found this one:

try
{
return true;
}
catch (Exception)
{
return false;
}

Cheers, cmger