Helping Grow The Development Tree

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As I move on from Don’t Panic Labs, I thought it would be a great time to reflect on the last 6 ½ years. I realized that I haven’t really done any retrospections or reflecting as I have always been looking toward the future, and I think I may have missed out on a few…

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Knitting Your Web Code Together in a New Way: Why I Started Using Yarn

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A while back I was reading posts about the top development tools of 2016 and what to watch out for in 2017, and both of them mentioned Yarn Package Manager. I hadn’t heard of it so I read a bit more into it and it sounded very interesting. A couple months later I was getting…

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A Look Back at ng-conf 2017

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It is hard to believe that it was already two weeks ago that Andrew Tarr and I were in Salt Lake City attending ng-conf 2017. I have to say that it was a great conference and I learned even more than I had anticipated in the three days we were there. The format of the…

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Using Agents to Monitor Code Coverage in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

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A few months back we moved to running a local agent with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) so we didn’t have to worry about the number of minutes we were using each month for our build processes. We had a build server for TeamCity that was sitting idle most of the time, so we installed…

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Boxing Day (No, not the day after Christmas)

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The topic of object boxing and unboxing came up on our development Slack channel recently, so I realized that there might be a lot of developers out there who may not know or understand what boxing and unboxing of values are in C#. In short, boxing is the process where a value type is converted…

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Updating Version Information for Xamarin.iOS builds on Visual Studio Team Services

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In last week’s blog post Andrew showed us how to trigger a build from another build. The need to do that was just the first part of a bigger series of events that eventually led to subsequent builds being automatically versioned for us. After the builds were completed, we needed to ship the Xamarin.iOS build…

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Choosing a Mocking Framework

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As we neared the end of our BizSpark license term here at Don’t Panic Labs, we had to make some big choices when it came to licensing Visual Studio. Through BizSpark we were using Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, which gave us access to a lot of different features. One of which, Microsoft Fakes, was heavily…

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Creating a Custom Bundler

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We decided to use Angular on a public-facing website project for a customer. After we completed a good chunk of the front-end development, I noticed a high number of requests for markup templates were being made when our page loaded. I knew that there had to be a way to reduce this. I remembered from…

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Another Transition Story: From Desktop to Surface Pro 3

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Last week we read Curtis’s story of how he transitioned from a desktop Windows machine to a MacBook Pro running Windows in Parallels 10. This week, I’m sharing my story of moving from a similar desktop machine to a Microsoft Surface Pro 3. Choosing the Hardware When it came time for me to choose the…

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