Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks

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…

Setting up builds is not my favorite part of the day. It always feels like a lot of time invested in something that only takes a few minutes to run, and that few minutes of work results in waiting several more minutes to get an answer. Try something, wait five minutes, get an answer. This…

Since we build quite a few mobile apps, we’re familiar with the many hoops you must jump through to ensure the process goes as smoothly as possible. Here’s my list of things to do and consider about before starting your mobile product development. Name your product. Think through those annoying things such as bundle identifiers…

We have spent a good amount of time discussing database change control. But why should we care? Why not just let people manually deploy things to SQL? Why would we want database change control? Repeatability Trackability Maintainability Tying application code to the database code Repeatability Ideally, we want the ability to rebuild our environment quickly….

Azure Functions are pretty cool and, from the perspective of an Azure .NET developer, they are almost the perfect place to drop some code. They are basically stateless services in the cloud. What else could you want? Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s solution for hosting software projects in the cloud. We use it for almost everything…

For much of the work we do, we end up with APIs in the cloud. In the .NET world, this often means hosting a WebAPI in the cloud. With WebAPIs, we usually have endpoints that are accessible to anyone who can connect to the API. These APIs can have other requirements such as authentication, scalability,…

We all know those badges on mobile applications, the ones that show a number on application icons and, for many, cause anxiety. If you are like me and get lots of emails, you have seen 300+ of them from time to time. But what many don’t know is how those badges get their numbers. While…

We recently deployed a new feature to a website running in Azure App Services to combine multiple files uploaded by users into a single large ZIP file. After deploying to production, we started seeing “Out of Memory” exceptions for one of our users. Our first instinct was that our smaller front-end web servers didn’t have…