Developing for the LAMP Stack on Windows Using Docker and WSL

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For the past year, instead of working with my customary set of development tools, I’ve been working in the LAMP (Linux, Apache – Nginx, technically –, PHP, and MySQL/MariaDB) technology stack. This world is not new to me. I’ve spent many (many, many) hours developing software with these tools. I was going to be doing…

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network security

The Quest for Network Security at Home, Part 2

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In the first part of this series, I shared my frustrating journey seeking a better way to secure my network at home. It’s been two months since then and the main change is the release of the second generation Bit Defender Box. It’s still a little early to make a call on this device as it’s…

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How I Ignored the Haters and Bought a 2016 MacBook Pro

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In the past, we have had engineers share about their hardware of choice. From Steve’s developer laptop, to Curtis’s MacBook Pro, and Matt’s Microsoft Surface Pro, we’ve read about how each machine suited the respective users’ workflows and preferences. But now it’s time to hear from a non-engineer. Me. While I’m a technical writer by…

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Setting Up Continuous Integration with TeamCity

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For one of my recent projects I needed to set up Continuous Integration from scratch on a server. Having never done this before I found myself assembling all the required components, installing them, and configuring them (and struggling now and then through some of the gotchas that came up). To save anyone who may have…

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Visual Studio Team Services – Triggering A Build From A Build (Using PowerShell)

As of April 2016, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) does not support triggering a build from another build. This presents a problem if you want your setup to do something like start two builds from a single pull request onto a branch (because VSTS does not support starting multiple builds from one pull request trigger)….

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Initial Azure Impressions

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For about the last month I’ve had the opportunity to work on a couple of different projects that heavily use Microsoft Azure. This is my first significant exposure to Azure and its services and over this last month I’ve experienced both the good and the bad. I wanted to share some of my insights, not…

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Choosing a Mocking Framework

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As we neared the end of our BizSpark license term here at Don’t Panic Labs, we had to make some big choices when it came to licensing Visual Studio. Through BizSpark we were using Visual Studio 2013 Ultimate, which gave us access to a lot of different features. One of which, Microsoft Fakes, was heavily…

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More Than Fun And Games

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On our blog we usually write about what we’re doing around the office. It’s easy because that’s what comes to our minds while we’re in the office. But what about our endeavors outside the office? How do our hobbies and extracurricular activities affect or complement what we do at Don’t Panic Labs? In my estimation,…

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Our 10 Most Popular Blog Posts of 2015

As another year winds down, it’s only natural to look back at what we’ve accomplished. Just one part of what we do is share on our blog what we have learned and experienced. Since we’re not interested in keeping all of that just for ourselves, we hope the blog is a way we can help…

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Browser Debugging Between OS X and Visual Studio in Parallels

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Over the last seven months I’ve been developing web applications using Visual Studio in Parallels 10, and the experience is alternatingly fantastic and frustrating, depending on the day. Some days I get the performance I want out of Parallels, and other days it’s incredibly sluggish and quirky, especially when debugging in a browser. After several…

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