weblogs.com.pk

Being in Software Industry; I am often contacted by people who are looking for a “simple accounting software” (or some time simple retail software) and often say they need very simple thing which might need 1 to 2 developer month time of development…Some even try this; and then come back after 3-6 months blaming software developers that they could ...

Is anyone around has worked with Microsoft Dynamics GP product? (v10) I have an integration project and some basic training work to accountants / data entry operators and management folk for adoption (migrating from another such accounting/financial/mini-ERP product). Please contact me at khurram AT sharpcoders DOT net

Belated Ramadan and Eid Greetings! I had been busy both at work and at home, could not even catch up with my subscribed RSS feeds… The other day I was watching Urdu version of “Baby’s Day Out” along with my kids on Geo. My wife had a busy vacation; house workers were off and as we have moved back living with parents and being elder she was ...

Application Development- 19 Reasons Why Microsoft Is Huge with Developers (and 1 Reason Why Not) The 1 reason why not, its cent percent true!

I am stuck in pushing a project to its “end” this month…still few more steps to do..but we are seeing the end! I had a feeling that I am giving the most and doing the kind of work which I am not supposed to do…I wanted to confirm it statistically..so I asked at StackOverFlow ...

One way to think of a software project is as a heavy block of stone. You must either move the block one day closer to the final destination each day, or you must do something that will enable you to traverse the remaining distance in one less day! Whether moving a block of stone or creating computer software, the smart team takes time at the ...

Credit:  ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 1989

Credit: ACM Software Engineering Notes, 1992

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/T4TextTemplateTransformationToolkitCodeGenerationBestKeptVisualStudioSecret.aspx

I like using application with nice user interface; but at the same time the user interface should accommodate "power" and "advanced" users. For instance how can I invoke "Find Window" without using the mouse? From where I can know its "Hot Key"?

I am looking for developer's productivity data from local software development organizations. I dont need ''complete data''; averages / max /min would work too. Any software metric being used for this would work. Anyone from CMM / CMMI appraised organization or some other doing such practice?

I have started reading Addison Wesley’s Software Engineering with Microsoft Visual Studio Team System. (SE with MSVSTS) SE with MSVSTS is overall a nice book but I would not recommend; I was looking for some material through which I can learn how one can use MSVSTS in general and Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (MSTFS) in particular in ...

As time to market is becoming important factor; we the developers usually get very low time to make things the right way. We have to rely on frameworks, runtimes and libraries to do the heavy lifting. While designing the app in such scenarios you have to do certain trade offs; at the end of the day; you usually ends up with a code that you don’t ...

Enterprise Source Control with Visual Studio Team System A very good tutorial; showing version control and related features of Visual Studio Team System! Instead of creating $Project source control root for your development; create following nodes $Project/branches; use this to create branches $Project/tags; use this to create ''read ...

When you (as a single or as a team) are done with your project and move on to the next project; what do you think about? The code you written for the previous project should remain with you on your workstation The code should remain available on some repository for yourself for future reference As a manager; I see lot of implications from ...

If you are starting using Team Builds; one very cool feature of Team System; I strongly recommend reading this post to set things up…It saved many hours of mine today; now I am looking forward to setup Continuous Integration in our current project using Team Builds.

Is anyone around using Software Metrics for estimating the project size and then at the end comparing it with actual? Recently at my work; we started using Function Points; and I am looking for secondary data of team performances of .NET projects? I am having 2.5FPs/Dev-Day of a project that had about 250FPs; it might not be very impressive ...

Today I had to work on Classic ASP; I was integrating classifieds.com.pk’s RSS feed on a site developed using Classic ASP. An interesting scenario was that classifieds.com.pk RSS feed has many posts; and we wanted to show top 5 posts only. I used XSLT to transform the RSS feed (XML) into HTML. Here is the relevant portion of the XSLT to show top 5 ...

Implementing transactions are tricky. It appears to be simple; but if you miss even a small thing; consequences can be REALLY bad. One such thing identified last night; in a system my team delivered few months back. Luckily; the loop hole was traced as someone wished all the golden eggs in a single go! I mentioned earlier about ...

Every application has certain configuration information; most of the times; these configurations are hard-coded by their developers; but it’s a good idea to have that information in some external configurable place. We had been using INI files and Windows Registry to store that information; but then we have to hard-code the name and location ...

The one problem; that is very common in team projects is existence of “zombie objects”. I weblogged about how one can trace such objects with in database layer; but what about business layer? Here is one approach that we try to follow. We establish interfaces for data access layer; say IDBLayer, if there exists multiple client application; eg a ...

Today I received a complaint for the application that I am responsible for then maintenance. Almost 95% of the code written for this application is by my own hand; and most of it was written in 1999 – 2000 The BUG reported; is funny in one sense, but first take a look at the portion of the code where it lies. I understand that HTMLEncode ...

This problem is very common; and is seen even in medium to large teams. For the small teams; its understandable; you usually don’t have enough resources (human, time, finance) and to cover this; here are few suggestions Requirement Gathering & Analysis Create a mailing list or forum for the project and make your team part of it. Discuss ...

I need to commit the payroll system after code review; which has been developed for my employer’s use by my team mate. I asked about the postmortem of this release; and he quoted that The project was boring The project was lengthy On inquiring; he could not define “boring”; after a little discussion it was pin pointed that; as he started ...

So what a good portal platform should provide you? Add new things and vote listed item on scale 0 (no need) to 10 (it will not be a portal platform if it does not have this) User Management System Security System Extendable Mobile Support Online help/documentation of portal platform[F] Community Support, Lots of controls/add-ons available ...

There has been some interesting development at my current workplace. We sit down few days back and decided not to do any hybrid development anymore; we have picked .NET as our core development platform (Bye bye ASP and PHP; we will miss you) and C# as the preferred language. Luckily our boss is abroad; and we have few days available; all those who ...

The second common problem in small to medium software development team is lack of dependency tracking. (The first problem is discussed under Naming Convention post) The implication of not doing tracking dependencies between different software components and objects is that tempo of software developers slows down on each change ...

I have often observed, that software developers and architects in small to medium teams don’t care much about naming conventions, which ends up creating lot of confusion among team members during development and testing but also increase maintenance cost. I have planned to establish a WIKI page for this, please visit them to have a look and ...

I wonder how many around consider “refactoring” a full fledge activity to consider it and allocate time for it in software project plans? I have seen people making statements, “let us complete it this way, once it will be done, we will re-factor it” and how many of them then really do it? <smile />

Most of the application needs set of configuration to work smoothly, e.g. database connection string. I am a big fan of using interfaces, one of the biggest advantages it of using them with modern compiler is that you will not be able to compile your code unless complete implementation of interface is provided. And this increase confidence and ...

One of the software engineers of my company, developed http://bolee.com.pk , Pakistan’s first auction site during his training tenure. The site received very good response and seeing that he we continued to engage for 2/3 months. The current version is what was produced back then.   There are lots of problems with the current code, and ...

Disclaimer: I am not expert on Crystal Reports or PHP, correct me if I am wrong anywhere.   I see commonly attitude of “It works here on my computer”. Many developers/programmers don’t consider limitations when their developed applications are deployed. And when the deployed application don’t work; they say what I just have ...

It’s great to know that people are doing open source work in this part of the world.       From: giki-alumni@yahoogroups.com [mailto:giki-alumni@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Umair ShahidSent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 10:41 AMTo: giki-alumni@yahoogroups.comSubject: [alumni] Introducing EnterpriseDB   Hello ...

Testing is very important. It’s the most widely used defect removal technique. An associated concept is Code Coverage, i-e your test cases should try to cover the most of the code; i-e if your code has 100 instruction; the test cases should be made so that all 100 instructions get executed (ideally) However in some scenarios testing can be ...

If you are developing application in a team; you have to adopt certain habits for better team work. And if you are working in maintenance cycles; you even have to adopt few more habits.   The first and foremost is; use Source Code Control System (SCCS); and respect the restrictions of the SCCS restrictions, e-g if you are using Visual ...

Hitting the high notes, a must read article, new at JoelOnSoftware.com   In this article Joel has discussed his theory on successful software business; his theory revolves around having the best people onboard.   ''Does it even make sense to talk about having the 'best programmers?' Is there so much variation between programmers ...

As; internet is slow here in Pakistan; and the direct browsing (no transparent proxying) is too slow at my desktop. I didn’t felt comfortable switching proxy settings; and I was lazy to add sites that I want to browse without proxy in Internet Explorer’s settings.   I opened Firefox thinking that I define proxy in it and use it for my ...

Developing first version of a new product is the simplest software engineering.   Developing version of an existing product from scratch is little difficult, you have to track that no existing feature is missed.   Maintaining existing product is tough, you need good test coverage.   Maintaining a product whose different ...

Many people believe that Web Engineering (developing web sites; particularly dynamic web sites) is way too different than typical Software Engineering; that rules, patterns and methodologies of a typical Software Engineering don’t apply in Web Engineering. (My younger brother is one of them)   For all such folk; I strongly recommend reading ...

If your tests invoke most of your code; it basically means; you have high test coverage. Having high test coverage is cool thing. Why? Read-on   Few months back I developed a small application for one of Asia’s largest gynecology hospital ;). Today my wife (who happens to work there) asked that her professor (Unit In-charge; the main mind ...

Today my colleague showcase me Prado, which basically is an ASP.NET like rich UI framework that may increase the productivity of PHP UI developer and brings other good software engineering practices like robustness and separation of content and presentation which helps a lot in team development environment and results better maintainability. ...

Should we write test plan before construction phase; during construction phase or after construction phase?   Do developers (people involved in construction phase) should have access to the test plan and test cases?   My opinion considering small teams   ·         The test plan ...

Patterns are cool!   Here is one pattern that I have found very practical; especially in integration of UI-Business layers. This pattern is mix of famous MVC; Controller; Data Transfer Objects and Martin Fowler’s Model View Presenter.   Here is the interface which defines the requirement for the UI; and on which business layer will ...

Let’s assume; we have couple of Controllers (for different business facades) and we want that certain users can access certain controllers. Using central factory approach; one might has to implement following extensions:   public class ControllerFactory {       string userName, ...

The approach introduced in my last post; have few problems. In this post I am discussing one problem which is   If you want to implement multiple controllers in the library; the code of validating the credentials will be duplicated; which is against OOP spirit   To solve this issue;   You can either have a base controller; ...

Security is critical. We as software developers and architect should take necessary steps to ensure end to end security. Security in general is a cross-cutting concern. Implementing security in the solution results changes in many places.   Consider an example of a typical user management system. For simplicity I am taking an example of the ...

I am looking for templates for the time sheets being used in local software houses. I will be glad if anyone can share it; or have any comments.   I am also looking for feedbacks about how to measure the work activities in the following areas.   Software developers doing web application development, using ASP, ASP.NET and PHP as ...

CK (Chidamber and Kemerer) Metrics are widely used to measure the quality of the design. CK metrics, generally are used on Class Diagrams. This metric gives the values of different items. The threshold values of these items are not well defined, and different people have proposed different values.   WMC, Weighted Methods per ...

For any review, we need to have an ENTRY and EXIT criteria. Same applies to Requirements review. We should define these two criteria’s. Reviews are not to pin point’s faults of any particular team or individuals, it’s an activity to detect the fault. This point is very crucial. Having metrics for reviews, help! We can use ...

Reliability is to perform its required function with stated conditions for specified time. (IEEE)   Measuring reliability of SRS (Software Requirement Specification) is very important. Engineers should know what they are supposed to do and what client is asking for. To measure reliability of SRS, here are some relevant ...