I guess I am mostly alone on this. Does anyone have any advice for what requests I should be making so I can stop wasting my time ctrl-alt-deleting and rebooting?

Are you running VS on your mac? I can certainly push for an exception to the PCs only rule to be made in my case. Also, is there any decent oracle clients for macs? As far as I know there is only toad and thats windows only. I have a friend who runs visual studio in an invisible virtual machine on his macbook but he doesn't use it anywhere near as often as I do so I'm still curious to hear from people if it still has all the same problems or even more

One who sets glass? Seriously, I would love to fix this, but its not one problem just a general crappiness so I don't even know where to start.

whoops, thought I was in the lounge

AKA, what can I do to decrease the friction. I probably spend on average 2 to 3 hours of a 40 hour work week struggling with windows-b-crazy problems. Locked up software, processes taking far too long to start-up/shut down, interminable restarts, etc etc etc. In your experience is this average? I'm really feeling the frustration and if I can do something about it I would love to. I am running Windows XP sp2, and our company sysadmin is unlikely to let me go to anything else. Either way, I am a constant user of VS2008, VS2003 (usually have 2 or 3 of those open) and Toad so even if I switched I would have to have windows open in a virtual machine which I don't think would be of any real advantage. Also I could request a computer upgrade but I know little enough about hardware that I wouldn't know what to recommend, I've already got an Intel dual core with 2.66GHz and 2 gig of RAM and my mem/CPU usage is rarely at 100%. Any ideas?

Good point about not having a base class cast itself - As you pointed out, I guess in what I was saying CheckOut() would be what is doing the casting and really the only reason I would want to do this would be for fear of someone referring to the old variable later on in the scope. Obviously there are much better ways of preventing this. So let's move this entirely into the "I'm just curious" column.

This is 50% curiousity, 50% because I might want to do this (so if this is a 'DON'T DO THIS EVER' type thing, by all means tell me) but I don't even know if its possible. Say you had something like this: class Book; class CheckedOutBook : Book; class Library ..void CheckOut(ref Book b, Person p); Is it possible for CheckOut() to transform the book input into it so it is now a CheckedOutBook? Obviously, you can return a new instance of CheckedOutBook, but I'm specifically talking about transforming the reference - my memories of C++ are that with pointers it should certainly be possible, but is it in C#? To be clear I'm thinking of something like this: Book b = new Book("Design Patterns"); (new Library()).CheckOut(b, new Person("Frank")); Diagnostics.Assert(b is Book); Diagnostics.Assert(b is CheckedOutBook);

umm...bump...not sure why I'm not getting a response

I am building an object in my domain that looks like this: DeviceMonitor ..public int Id ..public int GetCurrentValue() I created an object in my DAL that will load it up DeviceMonitorDao ..public DeviceMonitor GetById(int) Everytime I call DeviceMonitor.GetCurrentValue() it should return a frequently updated value in the database. How should I seperate this concern into the DAL so that I am not coding it directly into the the Domain object? Thanks a lot, George Mauer

After spending the last few months reading about Test Driven Development I am a complete and utter believer. Unfortunately I'm still inexperienced and need advice on unit testing a class which incorporates a timer. For example I am building an ActivityMonitor class which would be used to detect an activity timeout on a class (typically a mediator for a windows form) and reset it. I'm envisioning something like this: ActivityMonitor ..private Timer _timer; ..private EventDelegate _timeout_callback; ..ActivityMonitor(EventDelegate callback, int timer_interval); ..public Reset(); How do I test something like TimeoutRaisesCallback? I could set the timer of course and wait for the callback but that would just slow down my unit tests. Do I merely set it to something very short like a few milliseconds and take the hit? Or is there a better standard way to handle this? Also, suppose I have a class that uses the Activity Monitor: ClassThatUsesActivityMonitor ..private ActivityMonitor _activity_monitor; ..ClassThatUsesActivityMonitor() {_activity_monitor = new ActivityMonitor(new EventDelegate(Reset));} ..public Reset(); ..public DoSomething(); How do I go about unit testing that ClassThatUsesActivityMonitor reacts appropriately if the ActivityMonitor calls its Reset() function while DoSomething() is executing? I look foreward to your responses, thank you very much, Togakangaroo

(Cross posted from the c# forum) A Customer can have multiple Products and a Product can be assigned to zero to more Customers But, there are some items (such as BasePrice and DefaultPrefix) that are implicit to a customer-product relationship. In the database this can be modeled as Table Customer with Columns CustomerId, Name, etc. Table Product with Columns ProductId, Name, etc. Table CustomerProduct with Columns CustomerId, ProductId, BasePrice, DefaultPrefix, etc. How would you model this as Domain Objects? All I could think of is Customer ..CustomerId ..Name ..AssignedProduct[] Products Product ..ProductId ..Name ..Customer[] Customers AssignedProduct : Product ..Customer Customer ..BasePrice ..DefaultPrefix But that doesn't strike me as too slick (an Assigned Product has a Customer and a Customers[]???) and as this simplified example gets closer to what I actually have to model, this design starts to have problems among which is that NHibernate can't model some of this stuff

The short answer is no, multiple Customers can have instances of the same product (though in this case, different AssignedProduct) so it should be possible to navigate from Product to all Customers that are assigned it. Also, I've tried that set-up already and it has some more esoteric disadvantages. The long answer is that this is a simplification of slightly more complicated schema. Basically, imagine the relations between Location, Customer, Product, and Container for a company which has multiple Locations at which it rents out Containers for Customers to store Product in. A Customer can exist at multiple Locations and a Location can have multiple customers (again, the existance of a relation entails additional data); a Customer can have mutliple Products and a Product can be assigned to multiple Customers - which have to be at a location to have a product assigned. Finally, each Product that is assigned to a customer can be stored in zero or more Containers. The database in the meantime is not completely normalized, and since it is legacy, I cannot change it. It looks something like this:

Location
Customer
Product
Container
CustomerLocation with fk to Location, Customer
ProductCustomer with fk to Product, CustomerLocation
ContainerProduct with fk to Container, ProductCustomer

So, in addition to the set-up I postulated being a little awkward, it is actually currently impossible for me to map with NHibernate.

A Customer can have multiple Products and a Product can be assigned to zero to more Customers But, there are some items (such as BasePrice and DefaultPrefix) that are implicit to a customer-product relationship. In the database this can be modeled as Table Customer with Columns CustomerId, Name, etc. Table Product with Columns ProductId, Name, etc. Table CustomerProduct with Columns CustomerId, ProductId, BasePrice, DefaultPrefix, etc. How would you model this as Domain Objects? All I could think of is Customer ..CustomerId ..Name ..AssignedProduct[] Products Product ..ProductId ..Name ..Customer[] Customers AssignedProduct : Product ..Customer Customer ..BasePrice ..DefaultPrefix But that doesn't strike me as too slick (an Assigned Product has a Customer and a Customers[]???) and as this simplified example gets closer to what I actually have to model, this design starts to have problems among which is that NHibernate can't model some of this stuff

Thanks, I've been looking for that article for a while. Read it several months ago.

Hi,I've got a doozy. I am the only developer at a fairly large company with a very small IT department. I was asked to write a small application (sends out notifications when contracts are about to expire - slightly more complicated than that.) Our previous programmer had been in a word terrible, and since taking charge I had explained enough to my well-meaning but non-technical that he understands vaguely the benefits of OOP, doing things in a modern programming language, and library reuse. He came to me with a concern today - our VP, another well meaning guy but someone who hasn't programmed since the early days of COBOL - wants everything to be done in PL/SQL stored procedures to 'keep as much of our programming in one place' and to have 'fewer applications to maintain' (wtf, right?). My boss could not convince him otherwise and asked me to create a powerpoint presentation on the issue. I am planning on the following slides: Benefits of using a modern programming langauge: Library Reusability (domain object libraires) Maintenance Clarity Maintenance Testing (automated tests) Maintnenace People Cost (nobody programs in PL/SQL! where are they going to find people?) Tools available (debuggers, etc.) N-Tier Architecture Why People Use Stored Procedures - for each one the premise, why its not exactly correct, and why it doesn't apply to us --User authorizations to use certain ones (we have one user with all authorizations enabled) --Speed (our bottleneck is overuse of ajax, plus its not really true) --Security SQL/Injection (parameterized sql and sometimes our SPs build sql as text and then eval it - sigh) Any advice for doing this presentation? I am really worried that if I have to do this in PL/SQL this is going to become a trend and I will have to quit.

modified on Monday, August 4, 2008 8:16 PM

Really? Didn't know that, would that just be for Visual Studio bugs or for .NET how-do-I-do-this questions as well? Also, as I said, doesn't that chart imply that support ended in 2007 anyways?

I'm in the same boat, pushing for an upgrade but need to provide more compelling reasons than "it will be slightly faster and less annoying to develop". Ending support is an interesting reason, but the first question from management will be what does Microsoft supporting vs2003 get me? It's not like there's a hot-line that I can call with questions. Also, it would seem to me from that chart that support ended in 10/9/2007 three quarters of a year ago. The best that I can come up with is "you're going to have a tough time hiring good people to work with shitty tools" but since I'm the only developer and they have no plans of expanding the team that's not too compelling either...

Sure if you're talking firefox and not editpad pro, toad, radmin, visual studio, etc. Just hypothetically, what kind of hardware do you guys really think would be needed? I'd imagine a nice webcam would do the trick as far as simple stuff is concerned. I did my masters with image processing and - though I know very little about eye movements - I know that it should be not that hard to seperate the pupil, iris, and eyeball even on a shitty webcam. Since all we're really talking about is what part of the screen are you looking at, maybe a simple neural net on the angles of each would do the trick.

Perhaps its just me, but that's really the extent of what I would like, just the ability to switch applications by looking and maybe tapping a keyboard key to avoid Alt+tab ing through 15 diffrent windows. I guess it would nice to be able to focus on the google search just by looking at it too or open file menus but that's secondary. It's a shame theres nothing like this out (a google search turned up only assistance software for the disabled). Anyone up for a crazy likely-to-fail open source effort?

Has anyone seen any eye-tracking mouse replacement softwawre/hardware on the market? I ctrl+w close the wrong tab all the time just because I forgot to move my mouse to focus the correct window. I would love some software that could integrate with a webcam to track my eye movement so that I could just press a keycombo on the keybaord and have it give focus to whatever window I'm looking at. Has anyone heard of anything like this or knows what it is that I'm missing that is so difficult about creating such software?