Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks

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…

Recently we received reports that an integration into one of our applications was no longer working. This integration used an iframe to display a portion of a website, hosted in Azure running .NET Framework v4.7.2, inside of another company’s website. This process was intended to work with authenticated users. Instead of automatically being logged in…

Sometimes you just want to host an HTTP endpoint from your existing code. You may have an existing process, but you need some sort of HTTP way to interact with the running process. The advantage of hosting within an existing process isn’t obvious, but it allows us to deploy an HTTP endpoint without having to…

Having the ability to search through a folder of documents, particularly Microsoft Word and PDF files, can be an excellent feature to build into systems. But how do you go about this? Which technologies can one use to bring this to life without a ton of effort? Based on my experience, leveraging a combination of…

Visual Studio Online isn’t just VS in the cloud, it gives you a quick sharable Linux development environment in the cloud. This makes setting up something like a Ruby On Rails development environment in the cloud a pretty easy task. Here’s how to get a Rails environment set up using VS Online. Begin by opening…