Browser Debugging Between OS X and Visual Studio in Parallels

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

SQL Server Maintenance for the Full-Stack Engineer

by 

|

|  

in ,

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…

Read more…

Safely Stopping Windows Services

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Rounded Corners with Transparent Backgrounds in WPF

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Learning to Code

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Speed Comparison: Dapper vs Entity Framework

by 

|

|  

in ,

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…

Read more…

The Perfect Developer Laptop?

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Dynamic Splash Screens in WPF

by 

|

|  

in

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…

Read more…

Sticky Sessions for Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers

by 

|

|  

in ,

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…

Read more…

TeamCity Builds with the Visual Studio 2012 Test Runner

by 

|

|  

in ,

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…

Read more…