Debugging on the Web
When we develop for Windows, we use a debugger. So why does so much of our web development follow the code refresh ”Did it work?” progression? All modern web browsers have some sort of web development tools. These can be used to check your CSS, manually manipulate Document Object Model (DOM) elements, and even debug…
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Our Experience with Telerik Reporting
The Beehive team recently had the opportunity to improve the quality of its reporting. We came to the conclusion that our current implementation too slow, difficult to keep configured, and too difficult to maintain. Our original implementation used SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), which is a server-based solution from Microsoft. This choice made sense in…
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Upgrading Projects to SQL 2012: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Experience is always a great teacher. And if I can learn something through experience I like to share it, especially if I can save others any amount of hassle. Case in point: our recent experience with upgrading to Microsoft SQL 2012 and how it affected our projects and nightly builds. Install This process is pretty…
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Load Testing in Visual Studio 2010
Have you ever wondered if your custom data access code is any more efficient than simply loading a DataTable? Not that I’d recommend using DataTables except for certain situations, but Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate makes it easy to load test your data access classes to determine performance. In order to test this out I created…
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Manually Setting Up Associations in POCO
When manually writing Plain Old CLR Objects (POCOs) (that is, not using the T4 template mechanism), you’ll be left with not only replicating the structure of the table itself in the object layout, but also any objects associated with said structure (foreign keys). As an example, note the following association: The SalesTerritory object, even though…
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Feature Builder Power Tool – Introduction
This post introduces Microsoft’s Feature Builder Power Tool (Feature Builder) and describes its major components. Feature Builder is a Visual Studio Extension that allows a developer to quickly create a feature extension for Visual Studio 2010 (VS). By introducing a new framework, developers are now able to easily integrate templates, add-ins and documentation in a…
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Enforcing Architecture Rules with Visual Studio
Visual Studio Modeling Projects allow you to quickly generate useful documentation for your design: class diagrams, sequence diagrams, dependency diagrams. All are very nice to look at and useful for getting to know the system. An additional, somewhat hidden feature of Modeling Projects is the ability to enforce architecture rules. In this post I’ll go…
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March Madness with Infer.NET
As a “joint venture” (over a few drinks) with our friend from Hudl, Kyle Deterding, we decided to use the Halo-style matchmaking algorithm to predict the NCAA tournament. The algorithm uses Microsoft Reasearch’s Infer.NET framework to handle the math and statistics that go into these models. Kyle wrote a great introduction post explaining it at…
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