Deploying Console Apps via MSBuild
VS2010 and MSBuild don’t provide a good way to deploy windows apps using continuous integration (especially to different environments). Over the past couple days I’ve wasted a lot of time manually deploying my apps to test them on dev. Brian Gansemer has talked about creating hooks for deploying ClickOnce apps as part of the build…
Read more…
All Work and No Play (Not Here)
If you’re familiar with Stanley Kubrick’s haunting film The Shining, then you surely remember the scene where Wendy finds what she thinks is the manuscript of Jack’s novel. Instead, she finds the following typed repeatedly over hundreds of pages: All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.1 Creepy. But at the same time,…
Read more…
Using Your Skills Outside the Office
Community service. For some, this conjures up thoughts of high school requirements or punishment for breaking the law. For us and many others around the world, it’s a way to give back to those around us. We at Nebraska Global/Don’t Panic Labs get involved in many community service projects, but we have an opportunity to…
Read more…
Our Favorite Visual Studio 2010 Shortcuts/Customizations
Our first group blog post! Here are some of the DPL team’s favorite shortcuts for saving time in Visual Studio 2010. Hopefully you’ll find these as useful as we do. Note that these work when you’re using the standard C#.NET keyboard layout, which is the same as “DEFAULT” in the Keyboard options. Andy Unterseher –…
Read more…
Running a Service as an Application
Windows services are really cool, but they can be a little bit of a pain to work with. To debug a windows service, the typical model requires you to attach to the services process. This is incredibly annoying after you do it for the 10th time, but the good news is there’s an easy alternative….
Read more…
The Steve Jobs Influence
Being part of the tech industry, it’s hard to ignore the impact that Steve Jobs had on what we do today. It was really more than an impact; he helped create our industry. For us to have lived at the same time as this titan is pretty amazing when you think about it. We usually…
Read more…
What I Love About Nebraska Global and Don’t Panic Labs
There are many things I love about working at Nebraska Global/Don’t Panic Labs, but one of my favorites is how we don’t get caught up in hype, PR, and buzz. A little while ago, we completed our capital raise of $37.3 million. We actually overshot our target of $30 million and ended up turning down…
Read more…
Load Testing in Visual Studio 2010
Have you ever wondered if your custom data access code is any more efficient than simply loading a DataTable? Not that I’d recommend using DataTables except for certain situations, but Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate makes it easy to load test your data access classes to determine performance. In order to test this out I created…
Read more…
Manually Setting Up Associations in POCO
When manually writing Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) (that is, not using the T4 template mechanism), you’ll be left with not only replicating the structure of the table itself in the object layout, but also any objects associated with said structure (foreign keys). As an example, note the following association: The SalesTerritory object, even though…
Read more…
Of Internships and New Grads
Internships are new to us. In fact, hiring people straight out of college is new to us. Historically, we have built our teams by hiring experienced (or relatively experienced) people often via word of mouth recommendations. We have always been quite protective of our culture and the impact of bringing new people into our organizations….
Read more…
Follow