500,000 Reps and Counting
In March, the EliteForm team celebrated a major milestone: 500,000 reps tracked by our PowerTracker system. If you’re not familiar with EliteForm, it’s a company we launched in 2012 that provides coaches a way to create workout designs in a web-based application (StrengthPlanner) and publish them to touchscreen based units mounted on weight racks (PowerTracker)….
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JSON and .NET Decimals
I recently had a problem with my controller inconsistently picking up a decimal value in my model. Here’s what the Action looked like: [HttpPost] public ActionResult SaveItem(Item myItem) {…} For simplicity we’ll say this is what Item looked like: [DataContract] public class Item { [DataMember] public long Id { get; set; } [DataMember] public decimal…
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Debugging on the Web
When we develop for Windows, we use a debugger. So why does so much of our web development follow the code refresh ”Did it work?” progression? All modern web browsers have some sort of web development tools. These can be used to check your CSS, manually manipulate Document Object Model (DOM) elements, and even debug…
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Scoping Selectors in CSS and jQuery: Working Small to Big
SS and jQuery selectors can be very powerful, but with great power comes great chances to mess things up (yes, you can quote that). One such problem I’ve seen is applying these selectors at a much higher level than is needed. This may work for some cases, but will probably end up causing headaches and…
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Exceptions: Exceptionally Slow
For almost everything you do, there’s always more than one way to skin a cat crack an egg, and coding is no exception. Ask 1000 programmers to write the same program and they will write it 1000 different ways. Sometimes this can get you in trouble and oftentimes experienced coders will see pitfalls before they…
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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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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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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…
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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 –…
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