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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The Perfect Developer Laptop?
I have been using a laptop as my primary machine since about 1998. I have traditionally bought the fastest, biggest screen, biggest hard drive, most RAM beast I could find. I started with Apple laptops and then made the switch to Wintel after a few years. I usually bought a new machine every year or…
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Dynamic Splash Screens in WPF
There’s a lot going on when an EliteForm PowerTracker starts up. Some of it isn’t our code, but some of it is. Here’s a high-level list of what happens: Load PowerTracker Load environment file Register events Initialize background workers Initialize queues Retrieve saved user options Check internet connectivity Fetch team data and icons from the…
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Sticky Sessions for Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers
One of the great features of Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) – at least in my opinion – is the ability to establish sticky sessions (or session affinity). These allow clients to connect to specific instances in the load-balancer for the life of a session. In typical situations (when you don’t use sticky sessions), calls…
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TeamCity Builds with the Visual Studio 2012 Test Runner
Since we use private GitHub repositories for our code, we needed something to easily manage our builds. When we had a new project recently start up, we decided it was time to take the plunge with TeamCity. However, we found a problem with this: we use fakes for unit testing, something that requires the Visual…
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Posting JSON Data to an MVC Controller via Ajax
Form posts are a thing of the past. Most new interactive HTML5-Web 2.0-buzzword web apps are trending towards a one-page UI with Ajax requests used to pull and push data dynamically. So if you are doing a cool new web app that does not use any form posts, why would you make your Ajax posts…
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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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That Pesky “Requested Resource Does Not Support HTTP Method ‘POST’” Error When Using MVC Web API
While working on a project that involved MVC Web API, I ran into a strange issue. I created my controller, registered my routes and decorated my methods with “[HttpPost]”, but the application would still not allow me to do POST requests to my method (HTTP 405 – Method not allowed. The requested resource does not…
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