Recently in Programmers Meeting Category

Spot is a training tool for the UCS programming staff. It goes from basic HTML to PL/SQL and how to program for our WOU Portal.

Pros:
Very well structured.
Easy to follow and learn.
Able to continue where you left off was very usefull.
Quiz after each section tracks scores and makes you pass a certain percentage before moving on.

Cons:
Most of the Text boxes used to try examples would not work for me, nothing showed up.
After taking a quiz I could not continue. I had to return to the menu to go on, even after scoring 100%.
HTML suggested the over the method for bolding.
Menu on Integration:
Lists Intro ->Wou_UTIL Bells & Whistles -> Portal Security -> Portal groups
But actually went like this for me.
Bells and whistles -> Basic -> Tips_N_Tricks Table - QUIZ
Could not take last quiz, never went to it.
Some typos

There are many reasons that come to mind for good commented code.

Reason one: Who know how long it will be before you have to go in and fix either something you wrote or something someone else wrote. Not to mention it may have been written years ago and by someone no longer working at your location.

Reason two: It enables you to quickly glance through code and find out what you were doing in a particular section. This can be useful for updates or creating new versions.

Reason three: Comments are also great for code place holders. What I mean by this is that you can set a block of comments to represent a function/feature you would like to put into the application, and a possible location for that function.

Reason four: Code reusability, comments can allow you the ability of not having to re-invent the wheel. You can find function much faster and their purposes so that you can then copy them and reuse the function in a new section of code or application altogether. If you are doing this a lot it may be wiser to made it into a global function that is accessible everywhere.

Reason five: Comments are good because I said so!!!

We discussed various snip-its of code we could use/share with one another. Michael showed us some DOM, AJAX, iFrame code. What I noticed the most what the ability to see many areas where this code would help me, and how we all seem to be developing towards more dynamic interacting code.

We also talked more about Copper project manager and what changes we wanted to try and make in it. Like better reporting, sorting abilities, and possibly new Gant charting.

We went over the Pro’s and Con’s of both Copper and MS Project. It looked like about a 60/40 split with Copper winning out.

Copper Pros:
PHP driven with MySQL database, so it can be customized.
Progress with in Tasks can be measured.

MS Project Pros:
Task can have infinite sub tasks.
Can see and track All projects, both yours and entire dev team.

We also discused out individual take on the Developmental process we each take.