Category: Technology

Visual Studio Mac is dead or will be 8/31/2024. This probably doesn’t affect many of you, but this is an interesting turn of events. Visual Studio Mac has a fascinating lineage. Microsoft created .NET years ago (2001), and alongside .NET an open-source alternative was created (Mono). Developers needed an alternative editor, which begot SharpDevelop. And…

Pictures often provide more meaning than can be provided by text. You know the pain if you have ever had to explain what is happening in an application but struggled to find the right words. Sometimes it’s just easier to send a screenshot. This is where html2canvas comes in. This handy little piece of JavaScript…

Selecting the right development tools is pivotal. It’s essential not only to have a broad array of features but also to ensure those tools are user-friendly and efficient. Over recent years, my preference has strongly leaned towards JetBrains’ Rider IDE. Rider stands shoulder to shoulder with the full Visual Studio IDE, boasting features from solution…

Azure Storage tables are simple; they’re basically rows and columns. Storage tables can be used to store data much like you would with Azure SQL. While Azure SQL has more features, there is something nice about the simplicity of Storage tables. Once you get your data into storage tables, you will likely need to see…

AWS Cognito is an identity provider we can use to manage users in our systems. Cognito supports a simple oauth2 sign-in flow. Following this flow makes it pretty straightforward for users to sign in or sign up. Before doing anything else, you must create an AWS Cognito user pool in the AWS Console. For this…

Before hosting a video, you usually need to encode it into bitrates that perform well for various situations. AWS has Elemental MediaConvert, a service that generates videos for online distribution. When you first get started, a wall of options emerges. But when you walk through the wall, it isn’t that bad. First, we have to…

In my earlier blog post about Azure Media Services, we transcoded our video for better hosting on the web. In this blog post, we will host the video for playback. This starts with creating a streaming locator, which will handle the requests from our video player. One thing about streaming locators is that they can…

Building software often requires running many experiments. Some of these experiments can involve making HTTP requests to a backend. When developing a new API, I usually end up with a pretty comprehensive collection inside Postman, the tool I use to test APIs. If you’re like me, your Postman collection can be something you forget about…

It seems like we all use Git for source control. I know that since around 2012, everyone at Don’t Panic Labs has been using Git, and it has been amazing. Compared to what was there before, the difference Git made was like night and day. With Git, branching and merging are pleasant and super easy….