IT-Box

i’ve got two tasks for you. The first one is; you will connect to your working database, make a query to fetch all your contacts, and display’ em in a grid like control on a windows form. You bet it’s very simple, especially if you’re using Visual Studio. Now with Visual Studio 2008 by drag&drop operations i can do this without writing any code snippet and even have ability to display relational data.

Oh my, visual studio is really great IDE software, it makes all the things for me and now i could really dive into thinking the real problems of my software needs. But where is analytical thinking? Trying to solve the big picture puzzle of software is really an analytical thinking? I think the nature of computer programming is writing code that computers undertands and trying to solve problems by using innovational or existing algorithms. So the one who solves computional problems by algorithms is a computer programmer in a nutshell i think.

If you doubt, one main question have to be asked:

What is analytical thinking?

Here comes my second task for you that you have an array of digits those random positioned like this one:

int[] digits = new int[]{4, 5, 2, 7, 9, 3, 1, 8, 6};

So please give a try to sort this array ascending like this one {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 } without using Array.Sort() or any library method. This sounds very simple, is it? i can hear your laugh, saying how an easy thing this is. If you give a chance yourself to solve this problem i guess and suppose that you will find how much an analytical thinker you are.

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Here i do not advocate that not to use visual studio or framework libraries, certainly they make our life more easier, but all programmers who says that i’m a programmer and have ability to solve any kind of problems by using my favorite programming language, must do training and exercise in basic algorithms, learn historical solutions to generic problematic issues and have a look at some framework base classes how things done.

I’m neither a perfect programmer nor a expert analytical thinker, but i’m trying to do and always give myself some time to understand some basic and base concepts. I guess and believe these will make me soon a good big picture puzzler, a senior developer or solution developer.