by Chad Michel | Jan 18, 2023 | Tools
It seems like we all use Git for source control. I know that since around 2012, everyone at Don’t Panic Labs has been using Git, and it has been amazing. Compared to what was there before, the difference Git made was like night and day. With Git, branching and merging...
by Chad Michel | Jan 12, 2023 | Technology, Tools
In an earlier blog post, I described how we could create an Electron tray application. In that post, we got a simple Electron application running. In this post, we will augment the application with Angular to provide structure and utilities helpful for building an...
by Chad Michel | Jan 5, 2023 | Technology, Tools
SQLite is an interesting database technology. While not a technology we would often use on the backend, it is great for mobile projects because of its lightweight nature. A feature many people don’t know about is its ability to perform fuzzy text searches (full...
by Chad Michel | Dec 27, 2022 | Tools
GitHub has released a tool called Copilot. This tool has an on-the-nose name as it is designed to be a co-pilot for developers and help them write code faster. The service doesn’t cost much, only $10 per month for a developer. This isn’t much, especially...
by Chad Michel | Dec 20, 2022 | Tools
The ability to dynamically generate surveys and store the data without writing a lot of code is pretty powerful. There are various tools to help with this, and many products are built around this as a business model. But today, I will look at SurveyJS, a library that...
by Chad Michel | Dec 13, 2022 | Tools
WPF data binding was extremely powerful and good to work with. It was robust and felt like you could do whatever you wanted with it. .NET MAUI’s data binding is pretty much the same. What is data binding? Data binding is when we take the value of a property in...
by Chad Michel | Dec 7, 2022 | Tools
.NET MAUI is Microsoft’s next version of Xamarin Forms. It has taken Microsoft a few years to get here, but with .NET 7 MAUI is finally in a usable state. Since .NET MAUI is an extension of what was Xamarin Forms, you can write a single piece of C# code that...
by Chad Michel | Dec 2, 2022 | Tools
Visual Studio may be Microsoft’s best product. I have always been impressed with it, especially compared to other IDEs. I have become a fan of JetBrains Rider in the last few years. It is a pretty impressive editor too. In some ways, it does a better job than...
by Doug Durham | Nov 30, 2022 | Leadership
What skills and knowledge are developers lacking? How do developers view their current skill sets? How do we help developers add to their toolbox of skills? How can we promote better software engineering practices? At a time when qualified development talent is at a...
by Chad Michel | Nov 23, 2022 | Leadership, Software Engineering
Some of our Don’t Panic Labs team attended Live 360 (which included Visual Studio Live) in Orlando last week. I’ve never had the opportunity to participate in a Visual Studio Live conference before, so I was pretty excited to check it out. While we were there to...
