Category: Software Development Tips & Tricks

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…

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,…