Category: Software Engineering
Lowering Overhead with Fastify
NodeJS is one of the more common server hosting environments out there. We at Don’t Panic Labs tend to use .NET instead of NodeJS for the hosting of backend systems, but I like to use NodeJS for a lot of my experiments as it often forces me to learn new things. When standing something up…
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Building a Chat System – Part 6
In this series on building a chat system, we have gone through many parts that make up chat applications using Azure Chat. How all this works together may be a little difficult to follow. There are a lot of pieces, and it might not be obvious what each piece is doing. The Frontend – This…
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Building a Chat System – Part 5
So far on our journey to build a chat system, we’ve covered setting up the Ionic framework, creating a user in Azure Chat, adding the ability to store more messages, and implementing a way to censor offensive words. Now we will cover actually interacting with Azure Chat. Azure Chat isn’t a full-blown component you drop…
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Building a Chat System – Part 4
In our journey to build a chat system, we’ve covered setting up the Ionic framework, creating a user in Azure Chat, and adding the ability to store more messages. Now it’s time to clean up our language. With any chat solution, you run the risk of communication creating some points of conflict. One of those…
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Building a Chat System – Part 3
If you’ve been following my series on building a chat system inside a mobile app, you’ve seen as I set up my Ionic framework and created a user in Azure Chat. Now it’s time to build the ability to store message data. We wouldn’t need to necessarily store all messages, but by doing so we…
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Building a Chat System – Part 2
In my previous post, we discussed setting up an Ionic front end to host chat functionality in an app. In this post, we will discuss creating a user in Azure chat. We will then create a token that the front end can use to send messages as this user. It is important to note that…
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Building a Chat System – Part 1
Chat applications are very common, especially in many larger applications. Building a chat application from scratch isn’t recommended in most cases because there are frameworks that make building them easier. In this blog post series, I will create a very simple chat application using Azure Communication Services. To start, we will create a rough front…
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Build vs. Buy: How to Decide When Adding Features to Your Software Project
Creating new software involves a lot of decisions. When adding features, a common question is whether to write custom code or buy an existing product. There isn’t a straightforward right or wrong answer. Many people will tell you there is, but that is too simplistic. Many factors can influence the decision. How capable is the…
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Getting Started with Azure Media Services
Azure Media Services is a solid group of technologies you can use to host video as part of your web application. There are a lot of other solutions out there that provide similar services, but Azure’s solution may, in many cases, be a cheaper hosting option. For example, hosting 1000 videos on Vimeo will require…
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Visual Studio Live – Orlando
Some of our Don’t Panic Labs team attended Live 360 (which included Visual Studio Live) in Orlando last week. I’ve never had the opportunity to participate in a Visual Studio Live conference before, so I was pretty excited to check it out. While we were there to exhibit Tenzing, our new business alignment platform, I…
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