Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks
Cleaning up the dirtyPath
One of our recent projects involved creating Excel functionality inside a custom application we built for a client. After a few iterations where we tried to emulate most of the basic features of Excel (including enabling the pasting of tables through a lot of parsing and basic table functionalities), it became clear that we would…
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Helpful Functionality with AWS’s Auto Scaling
On Beehive, we have been taking advantage of Amazon’s Auto Scaling functionality to control the number of instances we are running behind load balancers. The other day we came across a use-case where we needed to set up a new load balancer in order to host a separate hostname that had its own unique certificate…
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Creating a Custom Bundler
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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Getting SSL Certificates on AWS Elastic Load Balancers in Windows
Author’s note: This article was put together with help from these posts: ServerFault post, another ServerFault post, Anu Chandy post. They have great info, but lacked a full step-by-step explanation. The prompt from AWS for uploading a new SSL certificate can be a little scary: Here are some steps that can help you get an…
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Browser Debugging Between OS X and Visual Studio in Parallels
Over the last seven months I’ve been developing web applications using Visual Studio in Parallels 10, and the experience is alternatingly fantastic and frustrating, depending on the day. Some days I get the performance I want out of Parallels, and other days it’s incredibly sluggish and quirky, especially when debugging in a browser. After several…
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SQL Server Maintenance for the Full-Stack Engineer
Don’t Panic Labs is an office filled with full-stack developers. We cover all aspects of software — from JavaScript in a browser, to core business rules in C#, to performant queries and table structures in SQL Server. Full-stack developers have a vast knowledge of all technologies required to create a working system, but do not…
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Safely Stopping Windows Services
Here’s yet another post of simple code samples that provides an elegant solution to a common problem. When it comes to Windows services, I often find myself writing apps that are required to perform a task at a predetermined interval. Do this every 5 minutes, do that once a day. It’s very easy for a…
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Rounded Corners with Transparent Backgrounds in WPF
Rounded corners for a WPF app can give it an impressive look. But problems can arise when you don’t have attributes on the window set up quite right. For example, we have a white background that’s killing the corner roundness. Luckily there’s an easy way to get rid of that. First, set the AllowsTransparency property…
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Learning to Code
A lot of people have been asking recently, “How do I get into coding?” We happen to really, really love coding and are happy to share what we know. We realize that everyone’s journey is different and emphasize that there certainly is no silver bullet that guarantees success. With that in mind, we assembled some…
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Speed Comparison: Dapper vs Entity Framework
A few months ago I ran across a blog post about getting started with Dapper.NET. I had heard of Dapper before but had never actually tried to use it. Dapper is known for being fast, but I was curious just how much faster it would be in the situations I typically find myself: writing database…
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