Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks

All of the systems we design use essentially the same layered architecture. Our top layer is the manager layer. That layer is often consumed directly from our controllers in our ASP.NET projects. This usually results in us writing many thin methods that just call our managers. But what if we didn’t have to write those…

JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) are common in today’s web-based world. The notion of JWTs works really well inside of the SPA to Web API world that many of us are currently developing. In these systems, the JWT is created by the user when the signs into the system. After sign-in, a JWT is created and…

Microsoft’s ASP.NET framework provides a really easy way to add authentication to your applications. For a classic web application, you almost don’t have to do anything. Just check a couple of check boxes and you are good to go. But did you know it’s possible to add ASP.NET user authentication to a console application? Luckily…

I was working on a project recently where we needed to embed a Power BI report into a .NET web application. In talking with one of our other engineers, I quickly got the feeling this might be a fairly involved endeavor, and that it would take some trial and error to get everything configured correctly….

Automated testing has come a long way over the years. I remember using NUnit back in the early days of .NET when you needed a separate application to run unit tests. Since then, support for automated testing has improved to the point where we can run unit tests right from within Visual Studio. In this…

The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past is my favorite Zelda game. Actually, it is one of my favorite games of all time. In my opinion, it is nearly perfect. It’s not too difficult, but it also makes you work. Lots of things to do. Nice 2D graphics. Just a very enjoyable game….

Xamarin Forms is a handy UI framework. It provides a way to create a UI that works on both iOS and Android. But it has something else that is novel: it gives us an easy way to create a screen with mock data. With Xamarin Forms, you can preview within Visual Studio (both Mac and…

I love console applications. For some reason, the simplicity of the interaction appeals to me. But today we do a lot of web development where many of our solutions end up with some web portal. Couldn’t we have a console/terminal on the web? Yes, we can! There is an awesome project to get Xterm support…

Today we live in a world of service-oriented architecture, often with some sort of single page application (SPA) or mobile application on the front end. Those clients call to our backends running in the cloud. This is pretty much the pattern we see in many of the systems we build today. A majority of systems…

It is common for the team here at Don’t Panic Labs to use an Angular SPA that communicates with a .NET Core backend. Typically we have done so as two wholly separate projects: one for our .NET world and one for our Angular world. For a while, Microsoft has provided a Visual Studio template that…