Programming

3684 Items

Sort by Date | Title

Video: The Perfectly-Formed Requirement: Aug 31, 2015; James Robertson, co-author with Suzanne Robertson of "Requirements: The Masterclass LiveLessons--Traditional, Agile, Outsourcing (Video Training)," discusses the perfectly-formed requirement, which should be unambiguous and testable. James discusses the Snow Card, focusing on the requirement, rationale, fit criterion, and supporting materials.

C/C++ Memory Management, Bit Fields, and Function Pointers: Aug 26, 2015; You're sure that your C/C++ memory-allocation code is bulletproof, but will the code work when the host platform is under stress? Consider using bit flags for applications that require low-level data access. Modern programming also routinely requires the use of complex language features such as callbacks and function pointers. As Stephen B. Morris explains, the use cases for these features are both simple and powerful.

What Software Architects Need to Know About DevOps: Aug 25, 2015; Much has been written about DevOps, but most of it focuses on the Ops side of things. This article highlights the most important aspects for software architects and engineers, which is a short summary of the book DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective, by Len Bass, Ingo Weber, and Liming Zhu. As such, the authors will cover core aspects that software architects should be aware of: DevOps, its motivation and its main practices, organizational aspects of introducing DevOps, and implications for software architecture.

New Ways to Initialize Collections in C# 6: Aug 24, 2015; Bill Wagner, author of Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#, Second Edition, shares the details of two enhancements in C# 6 for initializing collections, which read more naturally and bring associative containers into parity with sequence containers' initialization syntax.

Video: Mastering the Requirements Process: The Brown Cow Model: Aug 24, 2015; Suzanne Robertson, co-author with James Robertson of Requirements: The Masterclass LiveLessons--Traditional, Agile, Outsourcing (Video Training), discusses the Brown Cow model in the requirements process, which helps you take into account different points of view of the same problem so you can discover and communicate requirements.

Working with the PowerShell Desired State Configuration, Part 1: Theory and Initial Setup: Aug 24, 2015; Timothy Warner, author of Sams Teach Yourself Windows PowerShell 5 in 24 Hours, shares the advantages of the PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) for keeping your network configuration from being changed inadvertently (or intentionally).

Better Error Handling with the New Exception Filters in C# 6: Aug 17, 2015; The exception filters in C# 6 cut back on the cumbersome error-handling code commonplace to earlier releases. Of course, handling errors is part of the job, but new implementations in C# 6 can diminish the extra work. Bill Wagner, author of Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#, Second Edition, details the changes in the new release.

Custom Code Refactoring with VB 2015 and the .NET Compiler Platform: Aug 17, 2015; Concluding his series on the coding experience in Visual Basic 2015, Alessandro Del Sole explains how to leverage the .NET Compiler Platform APIs to build custom refactoring tools that integrate into the code editor.

Providing Location Service Using DependencyService in Xamarin.Forms: Aug 17, 2015; When your app needs to work with location information, the code that requests and then handles the user's latitude and longitude shouldn't be affected by the platform of that device. Wei-Meng Lee shows how to use Xamarin.Forms to take advantage of each platform's native features to provide location services.

Sharp Regrets: Top 10 Worst C# Features: Aug 12, 2015; Though C# has many great features, a handful could have been designed differently or omitted entirely, says Eric Lippert, who should know, because he served on the design committee. The co-author of Essential C# 6.0, Fifth Edition shares his personal top 10 (bottom 10?) C# design annoyances.

Video Q&A with Effective Python Author Brett Slatkin: Aug 12, 2015; Brett Slatkin, author of the video "Effective Python Live Lessons," talks about what makes Python a good introductory language, what's appealing about Python, and the most common pitfalls for new Python users.

Video: Java and MongoDB Rapid App Prototyping: Using Groovy to Convert XML into MongoDB Documents: Aug 12, 2015; In this excerpt from Java and MongoDB Rapid App Prototyping (Developer Talks): App Development using HTML5, AngularJS, Groovy, Java, and MongoDB, Trisha Gee shows you how to use Groovy to convert XML into MongoDB documents.

The New nameof Expressions in C# 6: Painless Conversion of Symbols to Strings: Aug 10, 2015; Translating symbol names into text is common in modern code. The task isn't exactly odious, but it still takes time, it's tedious, and it's easy to make mistakes. Bill Wagner, author of Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#, Second Edition, happily skips all that work (and the associated runtime costs) with the help of the new nameof expression in C# 6.

Upgrade Your IT Using Agile IT Organization Design: Aug 10, 2015; Sriram Narayan, author of Agile IT Organization Design: For Digital Transformation and Continuous Delivery, describes a holistic approach to improving organizational agility through deliberate organization design based on three overarching principles. This operating model scales Agile using a modern scale-out mindset rather than a conventional scale-up mindset.

Top 10 Architectural, Organizational and Process Related Failures: Aug 6, 2015; Organization and process issues sometimes create the problem and at other times stand in the way of permanent fixes. Martin L. Abbott and Michael T. Fisher, authors of The Art of Scalability, offer a "Top 10" list of the most common architecture, organizational and process related failures in small, medium and large sized product groups.

Mobilize: Rolling Out Scrumban: Aug 5, 2015; Rolling out Scrumban doesn’t have to require a lot of effort. In this chapter from The Scrumban [R]Evolution: Getting the Most Out of Agile, Scrum, and Lean Kanban, Ajay Reddy covers how framework choices influence outcomes, offers a step-by-step guide to getting started, and explains how to use Scrumban to stabilize a team before you improve.

Video: Introduction to Java Concurrency: Aug 5, 2015; In this excerpt from Java Concurrency LiveLessons (Video Training), Douglas Schmidt introduces his LiveLessons course on concurrent programming in Java, which focuses on the techniques, tools, and methods needed to write multithreaded Java programs.

A Pleasant New C# Syntax for String Interpolation: Aug 3, 2015; Does your C# code produce strings that combine text and computed values? The new features for string interpolation in C# 6 will make that code cleaner and clearer. Bill Wagner, author of Effective C#: 50 Specific Ways to Improve Your C#, Second Edition, shares his enthusiasm for this new feature's ability to let you do more with less.

Using Native Platform Features in Xamarin.Forms Through DependencyService: Jul 30, 2015; Xamarin.Forms is platform-agnostic, and your single code base will work on all platforms. But if you want to perform platform-specific operations, you need to do some work, as Wei-Meng Lee shows.

Manifestations: Scrumban Demystified: Jul 29, 2015; In this introductory chapter from The Scrumban [R]Evolution: Getting the Most Out of Agile, Scrum, and Lean Kanban, Ajay Reddy describes the true essence of Scrumban.