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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Redirecting to HTTPS While Using Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancer

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Neema Bahramzad is a senior Computer Engineering major at the Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and was one of our 2012 summer interns. He is also co-founder, along with Caitlin Bales, of Locabal – of a new company whose mission is to connect producers of handcrafted…

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HTML5 Video: Lessons Learned

We recently completed a web project for a client where videos were an integral part of the site. When the client came to us, they had already vetted their design ideas and had an outside firm create a final site design. Nearly every page of the site was to have a video on it that…

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Scoping Selectors in CSS and jQuery: Working Small to Big

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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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Upgrading Projects to SQL 2012: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

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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!

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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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Deploying Console Apps via MSBuild

VS2010 and MSBuild don’t provide a good way to deploy windows apps using continuous integration (especially to different environments). Over the past couple days I’ve wasted a lot of time manually deploying my apps to test them on dev. Brian Gansemer has talked about creating hooks for deploying ClickOnce apps as part of the build…

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Our Favorite Visual Studio 2010 Shortcuts/Customizations

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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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Load Testing in Visual Studio 2010

Have you ever wondered if your custom data access code is any more efficient than simply loading a DataTable? Not that I’d recommend using DataTables except for certain situations, but Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate makes it easy to load test your data access classes to determine performance. In order to test this out I created…

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Manually Setting Up Associations in POCO

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When manually writing Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) (that is, not using the T4 template mechanism), you’ll be left with not only replicating the structure of the table itself in the object layout, but also any objects associated with said structure (foreign keys). As an example, note the following association: The SalesTerritory object, even though…

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