Category: Software Engineering
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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.NET 7 Has Arrived
.NET 7 is out, and it is a pretty significant upgrade. Performance, ASP.NET, MAUI, and C# 11 are some of the new features. Microsoft continues to improve the performance improvements of .NET. As I have discussed in a previous blog post, Microsoft has needed to improve the cold start performance of .NET for a while….
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What Type of Mistake
I am not good at drawing; I wish I were, but I am not. I got a lot of practice when my kids were younger. We spent a lot of time drawing with chalk on our driveway and sidewalks. We often drew things my kids were into at the time: cars, families, and trains. For…
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.NET Cold Starts
I love .NET and C#, and I think it is the best platform for writing software in many ways. C# was created to make it easier to write quality business software. And it has evolved to be better and better. But there is one thing that still isn’t fixed with .NET: Cold starts. In software…
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Earned Value
Tracking project progress isn’t as simple as you would think. Common questions often include, “are we there yet?”, “are we going to end over budget?”, and “are we going to end past the schedule?” These questions keep people up at night. And the answer, “we’ll be done when we are done,” usually doesn’t fly. Earned…
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Pulling Calendar Items Using Swift
In a previous blog post, I took you through how to pull contacts from iOS or Mac. In this post, I will show you how to pull calendar items. This turns out to be very similar to pulling contacts. First, we must request access to the calendar. As part of requesting access, we must create…
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Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) Basics
This post is intended to give you a swift kick from behind into a pool of CORS, without taking all day to do so, and without digging into any specific technologies. With that said, let’s learn to swim. What is CORS? From Mozilla: “Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) is an HTTP-header based mechanism that allows…
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