VS2010 and MSBuild don’t provide a good way to deploy windows apps using continuous integration (especially to different environments). Over the past couple days I’ve wasted a lot of time manually deploying my apps to test them on dev. Brian Gansemer has talked about creating hooks for deploying ClickOnce apps as part of the build process, but I wanted to keep my apps as regular console apps. Here is the solution I came up with to automatically deploy my project. More...

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. More...

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). More...

A few weeks back while getting Mako XRM ready for launch, I was working through an issue involving ClickOnce build and deployment. I was attempting to isolate a 32-bit COM component so it would not need to be registered on every end-user’s computer upon ClickOnce install. MSDN has a decent article describing the process (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms165432(v=vs.80).aspx) and it seemed simple enough to carry out. I isolated the reference as suggested and everything seemed fine on my machine. Issues arose when attempting to build the solution out on the TFS build server. I repeatedly ran into this error: More...

This summer we are hosting 23 interns at the Don’t Panic Labs office. These interns are placed into four separate teams, with each team tasked to develop a product based around a specific need. Alec Johnston, a member of the Planhandler team, wrote this internal blog post based on his experiences in developing a product that allows users to find and collaboratively create events that fit their interests.

Object-Relational Mapping

While creating our backend I ran into some issues regarding Object-Relational Mapping (ORM), especially in relation to WCF serialization. Our project uses the fairly new Entity Framework (EF) Code First approach. We originally created an object with a fairly straight-forward Parent-Child relationship. More...

This summer we are hosting 23 interns at the Don’t Panic Labs office. These interns are placed into four separate teams, with each team tasked to develop a product based around a specific need. Andrew Gaspar, a member of the Moriarty team, wrote this internal blog post based on his experiences in developing a product that provides an interactive entryway for businesses.

On June 17, Microsoft released the official non-commercial Software Development Kit (SDK) for its powerful Natural User Interface (NUI) tool, Kinect. The Kinect uses an array of depth sensors, microphones, and cameras to allow the user to interact with an interface using gestures and voice commands, making for a more natural approach to interaction with content. Previously, the only official support for Microsoft Kinect development was on the Xbox 360, and required certification from Microsoft. However, the hacker community pulled through and produced unofficial drivers, as well as a number of development tools, such as OpenNI and NITE. More...

​Below is an example of how I like to use properties to access HTML items from code-behind.  It allows you to have strongly-typed objects and a single point of access to HTML items. More...

TFS has always provided great ways to build your projects and solutions:

• Builds are easily started and reviewed by different members on the team
• Builds are automatically versioned and backed up
• Work items and bugs can be associated with individual builds

Deploying a web application is a slightly tricky matter. These apps are easily deployed from an individual developer's machine, but it would be nice to publish them with the scheduled build. More...

This post introduces Microsoft's Feature Builder Power Tool (Feature Builder) and describes its major components. More...

Recently we’ve received a couple comments on my blog post ClickOnce Publish and Deploy from Team Foundation Server 2010 so I thought we should do a follow-up post to share what we’ve learned. More...