For the past few days you might have faced problems in accessing the website. It’s due to because I was upgrading the website from ASP and Windows Hosting to Linux hosting with PHP support. So now the website+forums have been upgraded to the new CMS. Also I thought to change the look and feel of the website. I will appreciate your comments and suggestions on how to improve it further.

For Forum members I would advise to login again and change their passwords as the system was changed from Web Wiz Forums to phpbb and it will require everyone to change their passwords. I will also send an email to forum member to change their passwords.

Well thanks a lot everyone for their patience and support.

Thanks

Saqib

The best thing in AspDotNetStoreFront shopping cart software is the flexibility for the developers. It’s being used by thousands of developers around the world. Austin at skycowbooks.com describes the shopping cart as”I have developed and designed with many different shopping carts over the years, and none is as easy to skin or modify as AspDotNetStorefront. You will not find as many features on any comparably priced shopping cart solution. AspDotNetStorefront is simply the best shopping cart value on the market.”

Couple of its features are worth mentioning here. One of them is the source code availability. It’s source code is available in both C#.NET and VB.NET. Another feature is SEO friendly. So if you are a web master and worry about the website ranking, then AspDotNetStoreFront is again the best choice. You can use title, description and keywords for all of your products in the catalog.

Here I am going to demonstrate a simple Quicksort demo. I have run and tested this on Dev C++ version 4.9.

#include<conio.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <ctime>
int x[] = {1,3,2,4,6,8,7,9,5};
void Swap(int i, int j){
int temp;
temp = x[i];
x[i] = x[j];
x[j] = temp;
}
int random(int min, int max)
{
return (int)((max - min) * rand()/(float)RAND_MAX + min);
}
void QuickSort(int iLowerBound, int iUpperBound){
int i, m;
if(iLowerBound >= iUpperBound)
return;
Swap(iLowerBound, random(iLowerBound, iUpperBound));
m = iLowerBound;
for(i=iLowerBound+1; i<=iUpperBound; i++)
if(x[i] < x[iLowerBound])
Swap(++m, i);
Swap(iLowerBound, m);
QuickSort(iLowerBound, m-1);
QuickSort(m+1, iUpperBound);
}
int main (void){
for(int i=0;i<8;i++)
printf("|%d", x[i] );
printf("\n");
QuickSort(0,4);
for(int i=0;i<8;i++)
printf("|%d", x[i] );
getch();
return 0;
}

The video below (Jon Bently) describes three different implementations of Hoare's classic Quicksort algorithm.You can find this implementation and discussion on quicksort in (Andy Oram and Greg Wilson's) book Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think. under chapter three "The most beautiful code I never wrote".

Design first then code

Days are gone when we use to take pen and paper and write the pseudo code first draw the flow diagrams of the program. And at the end write the code on computer. Days are changed but still we need to apply SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) on every program we create. This makes the program bug/error free as well as maintenance easy. I suggest you read Martin Fowler's excellent article Is Design Dead? which explains it in more details.

Variable and function Naming

Variable names are made up of characters and digits. There are lof of ways to name your variables and function. I will describe the way I do the naming for variables and functions regardless of any programming language.

Variables

Always start the name with the first character of the variable type or the complete variable type name. For example

To declare an integer variable: int iVarName;
To declare a character variable: char cVarName;

To declare an integer variable with variable type name first: intVarName;
To declare a character variable with variable type name first: charVarName;

Also the name should describe the usage of the variable. It should not be just iMyVar or sVar1. So if you want to declare some variables to hold the properties of a car object. Then you can declare the variables like:

int iCarNumber;  //variable  to hold the car number
string sCarName;  //variable  to hold the car  name
int intCarNumber;
char charArayItem;

Functions

Functions should also have meaningful names, and first character of each word should be capital. There are two ways to name give a name to the functions. Eiterh the first character is always in lowercase then the secod word is in propercase. This is mostly done on Linux platforms, but in Microsoft technologies functions are mostly declared with first character in capital.

int GetCarHeight();  //One way of naming the function
int getCarHeight(); //another way

Always write Comments

Comments describe what’s happening and how the specific code is being done. There are certain ways to write comment in C/C++ program.

int MyVariable = 0; //Single  line comment here

/*
Multiple line comments
Line of the comment
*/

I would advise to use single line comments for statements and multiline comments at the start of a class or a function. So you could write

/*---------------------------------
Function to return height of a car
Parameters: None
Return type: int
-----------------------------------*/
int GetCarHeight(){
int iCarHeight;  //variable to hold the car height
...
}

Common coding standards

There are lots of ways to declare variables, functions constants, write statements and give comments to a block of code. You can write very good code with proper indentation, comment the code and write the code in a correct syntax. The actual bottom line is that, whatever the coding standard you use, it should be followed throughout the program development. If you use initial character of every variable type name at the beginning of each variable then it must be the same for all the variables declared in the program.

Keeyp an eye on this blog as in the next few days I would be posting more tips on making your program more memory efficient and processing efficient.