Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks

AppSettings in app.config is great for making your app configurable without having to recompile it. You specify a key to get a value to avoid hardcoding configurations. There are two advantages to creating your own custom configuration over basic appSettings: Enumerate a list of configurations without having to hardcode each key in your code. Store…

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…

I recently needed to implement a UI that required a UITableViewCell to have an expandable “notes” fields within it, with the expansion triggered by a button within the cell itself. Getting this to work was a little tricky. So if you find yourself in this situation, I hope you can get some ideas from me,…

LINQ is awesome! It allows you to write very concise and easy to understand queries. However, it also hides the actual queries, which can make debugging a bit more difficult. I recently experienced this firsthand when I had to debug a LINQ statement that I didn’t write. But the silver lining was that I found…

At first glance, these event handlers look almost the same. You probably won’t even find a functional difference in most cases. But trust me, they are hours apart in functionality. $(“#order-details tr”).on(‘click’, function(evt) {/*do something*/}); VS $(“#order-details”).on(‘click’, ‘tr’, function(evt) {/*do something*/}); Let me tell you my story. I was working on a large project with…

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…

Note: This post was co-authored by Chad Michel. Clever == Complexity I often say this because I wonder if we would be better served by simply using “old” technology and focusing on being better software designers. I really think we can accomplish this without becoming masters of the latest frameworks (although it is hard to…

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…