legacy-code

I am assigned to maintain a bunch of legacy apps with heavy stored procedure usage built before '05 when there was no ORM. The developers who work with me don't know Entity Framework nor LINQ and are not eager to learn. Is there any ORM on .NET that provides a simple object interface to existing database tables and perhaps stored procedures? I am quite happy if it enables me to code a few lines to get a class to each table, and it has properties corresponding to data in each column and some methods or properties to resolve foreign key relationship / many-to-many relationship - forward and

I got assigned to work on some performance and random crashing issues of a multi-threaded java server. Even though threads and thread-safety are not really new topics for me, I found out designing a new multi-threaded application is probably half as difficult as trying to tweak some legacy code. I skimmed through some well known books in search of answers, but the weird thing is, as long as I read about it and analyze the examples provided, everything seems clear. However, the second I look at the code I'm supposed to work on, I'm no longer sure about anything! Must be too much of theoretical

Given some library that implements some widespread protocol or something similar (for instance FTP), how would I keep my standard compliant code separate from code that is only needed to be able to cooperate with not so standard compliant systems? A nice example where this would make sense too IMHO are libraries like jQuery that have to consider all those browser peculiarities. Projects that have to keep legacy compatibility would probably also be a good target audience for such techniques. I'm especially interested in ruby solutions but language independent patterns or good examples from

I'm using JSON.simple to generate JSON output from Java. But every time I call jsonobj.put("this", "that"), I see a warning in Eclipse: Type safety: The method put(Object, Object) belongs to the raw type HashMap. References to generic type HashMap should be parameterized The clean fix would be if JSONObject were genericized, but since it isn't, I can't add any generic type parameters to fix this. I'd like to switch off as few warnings as possible, so adding "@SuppressWarnings("unchecked")" to lots of methods is unappealing, but do I have any other option besides putting up with the warnings?

Say I have class A with class A { final String foo() { // .. computing result, contacting database, whatever .. return "some computed value"; } // ... and a bazillion other methods, some of them final. } Now I have class B with class B { String methodIWantToTest(A a) { String output = a.foo(); // ... whatever this method does, e.g.: output += "_suffix"; return output; } } How would I go about unit testing this method? The reason foo() is final is because we don't want our classes which extend A to change its functionality. But at the same time to truly unit test the method, I don't want it to