Author: Chad Michel
Firebase Emulator!
Having the flexibility to do local development is essential for successful projects. While we have successfully completed projects without a good local development story, I feel we often regret it. Without a good local development story, we often have multiple developers sharing cloud resources. When developers share cloud resources we often end with contention over…
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We Are Building on Sand
As a software community, we suffer the fate of a million little cuts. We build systems built on top of other code, layers upon layers upon layers. And, unfortunately, each layer isn’t very solid. This last week while teaching some students, I ran into a seemingly small issue with an Azure Function. Azure Functions are…
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Many Hands Make Light Work…Sometimes
The adage “Many hands make light work” is something we often take for granted. If we get a lot of people working together on a particular task, we can quickly knock it out. Think of stocking shelves as an example. The more people you have, the quicker you can unload a truck and get the…
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Saving Time with the DataTestMethod Attribute
Automated testing has come a long way over the years. I remember using NUnit back in the early days of .NET when you needed a separate application to run unit tests. Since then, support for automated testing has improved to the point where we can run unit tests right from within Visual Studio. In this…
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Making the Most of Your Design Analysis Documents
Sometimes it isn’t easy to get everyone onto the same page. Everyone on a development team can think we are all moving in the same (and right) direction. Still, we often have different underlying assumptions about how certain features will be implemented. When we don’t have visibility into those assumptions, headaches can ensue. An excellent…
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Configure SQL Server Column Encryption with Azure Key Vault
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is my favorite Zelda game. Actually, it is one of my favorite games of all time. In my opinion, it is nearly perfect. It’s not too difficult, but it also makes you work. Lots of things to do. Nice 2D graphics. Just a very enjoyable game….
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Quick Look – Mocking in the UI with Xamarin Forms
Xamarin Forms is a handy UI framework. It provides a way to create a UI that works on both iOS and Android. But it has something else that is novel: it gives us an easy way to create a screen with mock data. With Xamarin Forms, you can preview within Visual Studio (both Mac and…
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Microsoft Build 2020 Recap
Despite the virtual nature of this year’s Microsoft Build developer conference, there were a lot of great updates and news to be shared. There’s no way I could cover everything in one post, so here are some of my favorite parts. Blazor There are few things in software I am hungrier for information about than…
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Anti-Design: An Activity
When we ask someone to design something, we usually focus on the good. If you ask someone to build a notification service, it is expected to be a good one. But what about asking people to design a bad one? Asking participants to develop a poor design is what we do in our Software Design…
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Xamarin Forms Revisited
I like going back to take a fresh look at tools and technologies every once in a while. It is always interesting to see what has changed and what has stayed the same – especially mobile platforms because it feels like an area where there is a lot of room for improvement. I am very…
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