I Did My Job

02/11/2019

What do you do when somebody "pulls rank" on you and decides the way forward is something you deem sub-optimal? Check It Out →
Tags: Career

Running A GitHub Pages Dev Environment On Windows

02/04/2018

Running a GitHub Pages dev environment on Windows used to be prohibitively difficult for a person who did not have working knowledge of each piece involved. Now that Windows can run Bash, this is no longer the case. Here are step by step instructions on how to do exactly that, written for a primarily Windows-based user. Check It Out →
Tags: GitHub Pages

Protect Yourself Online

02/16/2014

Another day, another security breach. Today Kickstarter announced that hackers obtained unauthorized access to customer data. Are you watching your e-butt in this era of identity theft and shady internet practices? This will give you an intro to things that you are probably doing wrong and get you set on the path to being safer on the web. Check It Out →
Tags: Security

2014 BarCampCV

02/09/2014

The 2014 edition of BarCamp Cedar Valley was here and gone. Here are my thoughts on the event, my talk, and helping coordinate another successful BarCamp. Check It Out →
Tags: BarCampCV, User Groups, and Cedar Valley

Entity Framework 6 New Features

01/09/2014

Entity Framework 6 was RTMed a few months ago and boasts a metric crap-ton of new features, including asynchronous query support, testability improvements, logging enhancements, stored procedure support in Code First, and general performance improvements. Check It Out →
Tags: Entity Framework

Entity Framework: Reverse Engineer Code First

11/21/2013

One barrier that developers face when trying to use an ORM on their project is supporting legacy databases, some of which may contain numerous tables and pre-existing relationships. It can be difficult to build your domain to properly fit the existing database schema and even if that's not an issue, it still would take a lot of time to manually generate all of the classes. Here's some information to help. Check It Out →
Tags: Entity Framework

Entity Framework Migrations

11/07/2013

One thing that has always bothered me is how difficult it is to easily deploy database changes with your application updates. The classic approach is to use a tool such as Red Gate SQL Compare to determine the differences in the schemas between your testing and production environments and create a DDL script to manually deploy. If you have data changes, you'll either need to keep track manually (error prone) or use a tool like Red Gate SQL Data. Even with the costly tools you can still have issues that require human interaction, which adds a ton of "ceremony" to your deployments. To have a fluid Continuous Integration environment, you must find a way to tackle this issue. Check It Out →
Tags: Entity Framework

Entity Framework Model Mappings

10/10/2013

Some of Entity Framework Code First's defaults are very well thought out, while others are terrible and you'll definitely want to override. I'll show you two different methods of taking control of the database schema generation. Check It Out →
Tags: Entity Framework

Entity Framework Query Optimizations

09/26/2013

Entity Framework is Microsoft's recommended data access technology for new applications. It's very easy to set up, eliminates a ton of cumbersome plumbing code, and is extremely powerful. But like my old pal Spiderman says, "With great power comes great responsibility." Check It Out →
Tags: Entity Framework