I code exclusively in Demoshield!

Try: http://FreeRice.com For each word you get right, they donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations world food program.

Thanks for redirection post. Missed it..:sigh:

Excellent article regarding CD copy-protection by sony posted at www.sysinternals.com. A must read! http://www.sysinternals.com/blog/2005/10/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights.html[^]

Excellent recommendations. Item 1 and 2 was the first thing we tackled and after I was given a demo of the application, additional items was added to the list which to the developer's surprise had been previously thought to be working. Item 3 is another great suggestion. This actually came up during the demo of the application where the developer immediately saw that something was broken, but this was not obviously to me. Capturing the unit and regression test cases is very important. I need to know how to quickly detect when the application is broken. Item 5 great idea. I would have never though of using a tape recorder to capture comments of the code walk-throughs. This makes perfect sense to me that I could easily miss an important point in note taking and recording the session would allow me to go back and review the recording to pick up this information. Thank you very much for these useful suggestions!! It is greatly appreciated.:-D

Good suggestion about commenting the code myself. It makes sense to do it yourself as a method to improving the general understanding of how the code works.

Good suggestions. Here what the immediate plan is: 1) Determine what is not working and what functionality is outstanding. We spent roughly two hours discussing this. We have sat down together and I was given a one-on-one demo of the application to get a basic understanding of the general functionality of the application. During the demo, addition bugs were detected, and we added these items to the growing to-do list. 2) The next thing we did today (day 1) was print out the high level design document and we briefly discussed the functional grouping of the various classes. Tommorrow, the plan is for me to get a general understanding of the communication layer between the client and server components. This weekend, I am planning on attempting to work though the necessary code changes to implement a feature which has not yet been implemented. Hopefully, this exercise will help me gauge the extend of the work that is required to extend, support and maintain this application. My thinking is that this if I run into technical problems, with building, debugging, etc. that I will have a better idea of what questions to ask before the developer's last day..

Unfortunately, I believe this developer does not drink. Besides that, If I did by a six pack, I probably would have ended up drinking the stuff in the parking lot considering my state of mind yesterday. Today, thing seem to be more settled.

The code documentation effort sits at the top of the to do list. It is my sense that the developer was planning on doing this at the end of the development cycle, however now that this developer is moving on, their is complete understanding of the importance of completing this task now. There is a total of 60 some classes in the project and our goal is to at least attempt to document 80 to 95 percent of these classes in the next week. The source code has been backed up, so we are covered there.

I was curious what developers thoughts are on what activities are most important during a development project handoff. Currently, the lead developer has accepted an employment offer with a different company and has given their two week notice. The coding this developer has been engaged in for the pass 6 months has been exclusively their own. There was little or no documentation effort which occurred during the design phase and the code, for the most part, is fairly undocumented. My question is: If you were assigned to assume this work, what specific activities would you do engage, if any, before the lead developer's last day? :omg:

My dad has traced our family roots back 7 generations. No relations to kings or queens were found. As luck would have it, the only one famous in our family tree is the first Bozo the Clown (Pinto Colvig). According to my wife, the composer Franz Xaver Gruber, who wrote "Silent Night" is in her family tree. So my wife has a famous composer and I have a famous clown. It explains a great many things. :-D

The details are in a report that is available online at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/delivery.cfm/SSRN\_ID294828\_code020114590.pdf?abstractid=294828 It seems sad that a virtual world could have a better GNP than an actual country. Several people I know have moved on to a new game called the Dark Age of Camelot: http://www.darkageofcamelot.com

An Economist at Cal State - Fullerton has written an article proposing that the game Everquest has spawned its own economy and actually ranks as the 77th wealthiest country in the world (Russia ranks 76th). http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991847

You may want to consider another option of using Symantec Ghost to setup different OS configurations for testing. See http://enterprisesecurity.symantec.com/products/products.cfm?productID=3

Another idea for a possible article is how to create a dll in C++ which can be called by the install engine. Ideas for functions defined in the dll could be copying registry keys which is useful when upgrading an application from a previous version or detecting if a specific application is in use.

We were using WISE for previous projects, but have since switched over to InstallShield Professional 6.3. We switched from WISE mainly because we had quite a few installation requirements which required us to create custom installation dialogs and required calling external custom dll functions which is a little easier to implement in InstallShield. Also, InstallShield seem to be more reliable than WISE. If you are into pain and suffering consider using the bleeding edge InstallShield Developer 7 version.

Did you ever want to produce your own dubbed blockbuster movie? Here is your chance. This is a very cool flash-enabled web site. Must See. Have Fun!! http://www.absolutdirector.com/absolut.director.asp

Gartner group seems to always recommend expensive solutions which general require corporations to contract out the work to expensive third parties. Recently, Gartner group recommends that "Customer Intimacy" is more important that "Product Quality" which is plain stupid. The concept being that corporations should invest in customer service or help desk services rather than fund quality product development and testing. The customers I deal with expect the product to work the first time and the less reasons they have to call customer support the happier they are.

Not only did they copy the CP logo but you would think they would at least change the orange color theme of their web site. No creative element there.

Besides home prices, you probably will want to consider other expenses like medical, utilities, etc. which vary greatly between the different states here in the US. Here is an interesting link which contains a US map which compares the average electric bill in each state: http://www.msnbc.com/news/587983.asp?pne=msn