On Leaving the Best Job You Ever Had
I don’t like to use the word “quit.” It makes it sound like you’re giving up, that you are leaving things incomplete. I write that because I am leaving Don’t Panic Labs; I’m leaving the best job I’ve ever had. This was the plan all along I suppose. During one of my first staff meetings…
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5 Security Resources for Developers
Here’s a list of great security tools, many of the open source, that came out of the April 11th Vogon Poetry Security Open Forum. H/T to Jason Wilkinson of Firespring for helping me compile this list. Qualys Labs SSL Server Test – This tests that your servers are configured correctly to support appropriate levels of…
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Securing the Docker API on Windows
As it is with most things Docker, the majority of the tutorials and instructions on securing the Docker API endpoints use Linux-based examples. Being new to both the Docker and the Linux world made this process a little more frustrating than I expected. However, I made my way through it and documented my journey which…
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Creating a Self-Signed SSL Certificate for Developing and Testing Against IIS
Sometimes you find yourself needing to develop or test on an encrypted connection. Whether it is an MVC binding forcing you to do SSL or you simply want to get rid of your browser’s mixed content warnings, a local certificate can come in handy. Creating your .cer file Start by locating makecert.exe. You can typically…
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Automated UI Testing Using TestStack.White and Continuous Integration with TeamCity
One of the things that our development approach at DPL allows us to do is to have a very low ratio of QA testers per software engineer. Our architecture designs and patterns provide for very isolatable and testable components, allowing us to reach high coverage numbers in most areas of our code. However, one area…
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Safely Stopping Windows Services
Here’s yet another post of simple code samples that provides an elegant solution to a common problem. When it comes to Windows services, I often find myself writing apps that are required to perform a task at a predetermined interval. Do this every 5 minutes, do that once a day. It’s very easy for a…
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Deploying Reports for SQL Server Reporting Services
This is the long-overdue follow up to our Developing Reports for SQL Server Reporting Services post. Today I’m going to cover how to deploy your reports to an instance of SSRS. Assumptions Here are some things to keep in mind before deploying your SSRS reports: The Reporting Services feature must be installed and set up…
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Awesome Benefits: Beyond Beer and Pinball
Just about every person that tours the Don’t Panic Labs office points out the great perks that jump out at them. The great open space concept, the stocked kitchen, the beer fridge, the pinball machines, etc. While all of these things are great, the greatest benefit we have here at DPL is not as easy…
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Posting JSON Data to an MVC Controller via Ajax
Form posts are a thing of the past. Most new interactive HTML5-Web 2.0-buzzword web apps are trending towards a one-page UI with Ajax requests used to pull and push data dynamically. So if you are doing a cool new web app that does not use any form posts, why would you make your Ajax posts…
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That Pesky “Requested Resource Does Not Support HTTP Method ‘POST’” Error When Using MVC Web API
While working on a project that involved MVC Web API, I ran into a strange issue. I created my controller, registered my routes and decorated my methods with “[HttpPost]”, but the application would still not allow me to do POST requests to my method (HTTP 405 – Method not allowed. The requested resource does not…
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