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The Latest from Our Team
Upgrading Projects to SQL 2012: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Experience is always a great teacher. And if I can learn something through experience I like to share it, especially if I can save others any amount of hassle. Case in point: our recent experience with upgrading to Microsoft SQL 2012 and how it affected our projects and nightly builds. Install This process is pretty…
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Exclude Those Unit Tests!
Do you have a unit test that you don’t want to run in the nightly build? No problem. Just add the TestCategory attribute to your test and give it a “DontRunWithBuild” name or something else memorable. In Visual Studio, go to the Team Explorer, right-click on the build you want to exclude and click Edit…
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Standup? What’s a Standup?
People will sometimes ask us how we get value from our daily standups. This got us thinking about why we do standups in the first place, what we want to get out of the standups, and why we think our standups work. For those not familiar with standups, they are brief meetings (usually about 10…
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Using Lucene.NET for Searching PDFs
Note: This post was co-authored by Emily Douglas. For one of our recent projects, we developed a public-facing website that needed the ability to search through a large number of archived PDFs. This may sound trivial, but we had some unique needs and situations we had to work around (isn’t that always how it is):…
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The Upside of Being Thrown Into the Fire
During a recent one-on-one session, I had a discussion with one of our engineers about her role as “build master” for one of our companies. In this role, she was responsible for building the initial project architecture, and setting up and managing most of the TFS build definitions. But as various project components changed, she…
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Bauerwulf: The Unit Test Accelerator
The EliteForm team recently faced a tough problem, and perhaps you’ve experienced something similar. We’re currently amassing loads of athlete workout video for further refinement of our PowerTracker product. PowerTracker, in short, is a hardware/software solution that uses video to analyze an athlete’s form in real time at the rack. This provides never-before-seen athletic analysis….
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The Voodoo We Do
“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Albert Einstein In the world of software development, there are always religious arguments being made as to which method is best. Most people agree that Agile-based methods are the most appropriate for software development, but we stop short of saying this is always true. I have…
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How to Think Like a Mathematician
During our work on the hardware-based, motion-tracking side of EliteForm, we started out in a heavy R&D mode. We went through a number of possible solutions and the process was prototype, prototype, prototype. Once our current technology passed our smoke tests, we needed to put it through several rigorous testing and validation cycles to see…
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Developing Reports for SQL Server Reporting Services
A common thread that I’ve noticed in several projects I’ve been on throughout my career is that reports usually come into play at the 11th hour and the engineering team has to draw straws to see who will go “into the unknown” of reporting. I think part of this is just the nature of an…
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What Are You Doing This Summer?
It’s not too hard to imagine summer with all the spring-like weather we’ve experienced during the past few weeks (the recent cold-snap not withstanding). But regardless of what the calendar says, it’ll be here before we know it. That means it’s time to start talking about our Summer Internship Experience we’ll be hosting again this…
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