Easy Agile Planning with Trello

When starting a new software project, your team has a lot of decisions to make. Not the least of which is how to track the features from initial design through completion. Trello can help make the entire process easy and painless. Let’s jump right in.

Understand Your API

Whether your are creating or consuming an API, you must understand all of its implications. If you are the consumer, it’s up to you to understand what calling its various functions will do. If you are creating an API, you also have a responsibility to your consumers. I won’t go into all of the rules here, but will touch on two very severe problems that I have personally experienced in my professional life.

Introducing Park Pursuit, a visual scavenger hunt for iOS and Android.

Ionic and Electron for a Desktop App

Every few weeks or so, I find myself needing to archive my git repo. Usually it's to send code to someone who has no reason to access the repo directly. They just need a snapshot of the code, with no history information, because they won't be contributing to it.

I also have to provide a snapshot of my code for every module in my Pluralsight courses, so being able to archive my git repo into a zip file is very handy.

For some reason, I can never remember how to do this, and find myself looking it up repeatedly. So I've finally decided to write about it here, in hopes that it will help someone other than just me.

I've been wrestling with Windows on my 2014 Mac Mini for more than two years. Soon after I bought the Mac, I made a 200GB BootCamp partition and installed Windows 7. I also bought Parallels 10 Desktop and pointed it at the BootCamp partition. It was great. I had a convenient VM when I needed something quick. I also had BootCamp when I needed native performance. Not long after that, I upgraded it to 8.1. Then sometime later, Windows 10.

I don't remember exactly when it happened, but one day I fired up Parallels and my entire system ground to a halt. Shutting down the virtual machine caused everything to go back to normal, so I figured the problem was with Parallels. So I upgraded it. Same problem. I made sure Windows was up-to-date, thinking that maybe the Windows Update service was going nuts. Nothing changed. Whenever Windows was running in Parallels, the Task Manager showed the disk activity pegged at 100%.

Ionic 1.x vs Bootstrap 3.x for a Web App

Over the past few months I have been toying with the idea of upgrading my home security system. It isn't that I live in a high crime area or anything like that. We tend to get the occasional prankster youth who thinks it's funny to leave unwanted items on the front porch. Around the holidays things get a bit worse, with Amazon boxes being stolen in broad daylight. Most home security systems would do anything to prevent those types of things.

Easily Send Text Messages from a Mobile App with Ionic Framework

Background

The Problem

Teaching EDGE

Have you ever stopped to think about how we learn things?

It seems that every time I start a new ASP.NET WebAPI project, I have to go out to the web to "remember" what I want in my OWIN Startup class. Not anymore.

Note: Some of the plugins referenced in this article have had their names, and possibly their APIs, changed. The information contained herein may no longer work. Please don't rely on it until I have had a chance to review and update it. -Mike Callaghan

TLDR

Recently I received a bug report of some very odd behavior in a Windows application that my team and I had written. Sometimes the server URL, which was set during the application's installation, would be overwritten to the default value of http://localhost.

The application in question is a WPF application. I have kept up with the latest libraries and framework updates. It is installed with the WiX Toolkit 3.9, so even that is current.

When I need to unit test my code in isolation, I typically use Moq to mock the interfaces that aren't related to the methods I'm testing. Until today, that is. I wanted to test a little bit of functionality that depends on values coming back from the System.IO namespace in .NET 4.5. Specifically, if a file in a given folder was more than a certain number of days old, it would get deleted. How do you unit test that?

When starting a new software project, your team has a lot of decisions to make. Not the least of which is how to track the features from initial design through completion. Trello can help make the entire process easy and painless. Let's jump right in.

I’m a lazy developer by nature. That means I don’t like to do extra work when it isn’t necessary. Therefore, I am a big fan of MVC’s HTML helpers. One of my favorites is Html.EditorForModel().

In case you haven’t heard about it, Bootstrap is a newish set of CSS and JavaScript from Twitter that makes designing responsive web sites pretty easy. The CSS has a modern and clean look, and pages based on it scale very well, even on mobile devices.

In one of my recent projects, my view displayed a table of hardware alerts for set of monitored devices. On any of the alerts, the user had three potential actions: close, initiate a chat session, or email tech support.

The latter two actions are pretty simple, as they are just hyperlinks that open in a new window. Close Alert, on the other hand, is an MVC ActionLink that goes back to Alert/Close/{Id}.

The problem with this function is that it's not re-entrant. User testing indicated that some people are so accustomed to double-clicking that they would inadvertently try to close the same alert twice. QA asked me to come up with a solution.

The other day I was doing some validation for a few of my class's numeric properties. The valid range, I was told, was 0 to infinity. That's easy enough, I told myself. I'll just put a [Range] attribute each property and let the framework do its thing, like so...

Visual Studio 2010 in general, and MVC 2 in particular, bring the concept of code generation templates into the realm of first-class objects. Well, maybe it's not that good. However, MVC definitely makes tremendous use of the code generation template system, called Text Transformation Template Toolkit (or T4 for short). A fantastic introduction to T4 editing can be found in the January 2010 issue of MSDN Magazine,

You have many choices when you set out to design a new web site. Some people might say that you have too many choices. For the purposes of this article, I'm going to assume that you've already decided that you're going to use ASP.NET in one form or another, so won't presume to debate the merits of Windows versus Linux hosting. Instead I'm going to focus on a real project where we chose MVC Release 2 for a redesign of an existing ASP.NET WebForms site.