Thoughts on ‘Generation STEM’ from the Girl Scout Research Institute
The STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) fields are important. One of the saddest realities of our field is the huge drop in the percentage of women in computer science over the past few decades. The Girl Scouts Research Institute took a good look at why that’s happening and how to change it. (PDF) After surveying…
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The Odd-yssey: My Epic Journey Chasing Down Webpage Performance Issues
No debugging adventure is boring. As a case in point, I was recently trying to nail down the cause of some weird behavior experienced by a specific customer with a specific setup on a specific mobile device running EliteForm’s Paperless application. The majority of the work on Paperless was completed by our student-lead Design Studio…
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Speed Comparison: Dapper vs Entity Framework
A few months ago I ran across a blog post about getting started with Dapper.NET. I had heard of Dapper before but had never actually tried to use it. Dapper is known for being fast, but I was curious just how much faster it would be in the situations I typically find myself: writing database…
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Deploying Reports for SQL Server Reporting Services
This is the long-overdue follow up to our Developing Reports for SQL Server Reporting Services post. Today I’m going to cover how to deploy your reports to an instance of SSRS. Assumptions Here are some things to keep in mind before deploying your SSRS reports: The Reporting Services feature must be installed and set up…
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Sticky Sessions for Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers
One of the great features of Amazon’s Elastic Load Balancers (ELB) – at least in my opinion – is the ability to establish sticky sessions (or session affinity). These allow clients to connect to specific instances in the load-balancer for the life of a session. In typical situations (when you don’t use sticky sessions), calls…
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Broadening My Horizons (or How I Moved Outside the Silo and Learned a New Development Methodology)
I’ve been writing software professionally for ten years. Primarily I’ve worked on the web, but I’ve written everything from line-of-business apps to SQL business reports to CMS-based websites. I’ve always worked in small shops with one to three developers. We’ve always been fairly siloed; each of us writing our own software that we were individually…
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TeamCity Builds with the Visual Studio 2012 Test Runner
Since we use private GitHub repositories for our code, we needed something to easily manage our builds. When we had a new project recently start up, we decided it was time to take the plunge with TeamCity. However, we found a problem with this: we use fakes for unit testing, something that requires the Visual…
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500,000 Reps and Counting
In March, the EliteForm team celebrated a major milestone: 500,000 reps tracked by our PowerTracker system. If you’re not familiar with EliteForm, it’s a company we launched in 2012 that provides coaches a way to create workout designs in a web-based application (StrengthPlanner) and publish them to touchscreen based units mounted on weight racks (PowerTracker)….
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JSON and .NET Decimals
I recently had a problem with my controller inconsistently picking up a decimal value in my model. Here’s what the Action looked like: [HttpPost] public ActionResult SaveItem(Item myItem) {…} For simplicity we’ll say this is what Item looked like: [DataContract] public class Item { [DataMember] public long Id { get; set; } [DataMember] public decimal…
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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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