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01/Feb/2019
END TO END (E2E) TESTING WITH ANGULAR CLI IN 5 EASY STEPS
This guide displays how to quickly get a new Angular CLI project running, some of the important files for E2E, basic E2E language and syntax and some simple tests that can be expanded upon.
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23/Nov/2018
API TESTING WITH POSTMAN - EVERYTHNG YOU NEED TO KNOW!
There are several API testing tools available including Soap UI, Insomnia but in Dataworks we use Postman. The API testing tools allow us to test the response based on passing a specific set of data to the API allowing us to verify is as expected.
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21/Nov/2018
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION – UNLOCKING PRODUCTIVITY, QUALITY AND CULTURAL IMPROVEMENTS
Everyone is talking about Digital Transformation, along with IoT, Analytics, Big Data and many more such trends. If you are a manufacturing company, you can add Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT to the list.
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26/Jun/2018
HOW TO USE MICROSOFT POWER BI DASHBOARDS TO FIND THE VALUE IN YOUR DATA
Your existing data holds insights that can help you to make more informed business decisions. In this article we will show you how Microsoft Power BI allows you to create professionally presented dashboards quickly from several data sources.
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20/Jun/2018
7 EASY STEPS TO MAKE VISUAL STUDIO WORK WITH ANGULAR CLI FOR .NET CORE PROJECTS
The Angular CLI tool is a great utility for getting an Angular project off the ground and running – read the following 7 easy steps to make Visual Studio work with the Angular CLI for .NET Core projects.
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14/Mar/2018
IoT: A STEP BY STEP GUIDE ON HOW TO CONNECT DEVICES TO THE CLOUD
If you are intereseted in IoT this article provides a step by step guide detailing an internal proof of concept (POC) where we selected an off the shelf embedded system set it up to stream its sensor data to the Azure cloud.
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17/May/2016
OPEN SOURCE:USE GLIMPSE TO TROUBLESHOOT YOUR .NET APPLICATION
Glimpse is an open source collection of NuGet packages which can be used to provide detailed performance and debugging information.
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16/Feb/2016
RAPID RUNDOWN: HOW WE APPROACH BEHAVIOUR DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
In a previous blog post we outlined how we arrived at Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). This post is a short outline of what BDD means and some tooling for developers using Visual Studio as their IDE.
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07/Sep/2015
HOW AN EVER EVOLVING APPROACH TO OUR SDLC LED TO BEHAVIOUR DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
Some years back we started to see the need to unit test our code. This practice is now universally accepted as an approach to improving the quality of software applications.
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23/Mar/2015
EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO CREATE A SIMPLE SET UP PROJECT IN WIX TOOLSET
WIX (Windows Installer XML) is the replacement for the traditional windows setup projects that was available prior to Visual Studio 2012
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11/Nov/2014
MEF .NET FRAMEWORK 4: START A SAMPLE PROJECT IN 5 SIMPLE STEPS
MEF stands for Managed Extensibility Framework and was introduced to the .Net world in version 4 of the framework.
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21/Jul/2014
ARE THERE ANY MAJOR BENEFITS TO USING AUTOMATIC INVERSION OF CONTROL TOOLS?
Dependency Injection as a design pattern has been around for a while now…and it’s one I quite like. At a very simple level it makes changing components (dependencies) easier. I have also found that applying the design pattern to our code makes it’s easier to test and improves the overall maintainability.
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01/Jun/2014
DON’T PANIC! READ ON TO SEE HOW YOU CAN USE A SQL SERVER TABLE VARIABLE TO SOLVE YOUR QUERY
There are times when a temporary table can be useful for particular data tasks that need to be performed in SQL Server….however sometimes a table variable is a better option.
This short post will detail two sample scenarios where a table variable provides a better solution when working within certain constraints.
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09/Apr/2014
CONNECT BY LEVEL CONDITION: HOW TO CHART DATA OVER TIME WHEN MISSING VALUES USING ORACLE
As most of us software engineers know occasionally a situation will arise where data needs to be charted over time. However problems can arise where there are intervals for which no data exists.
The following looks at an Oracle based solution to writing such queries.
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02/Mar/2014
WHY YOU SHOULDN’T OVERLOOK DESIGN BY CONTRACT AS A COMPLEMENT TO UNIT TESTING
During a recent discussion between two developers here at the Dataworks office a scenario arose on a project where there was a need to validate the parameters being passed to particular functions.
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11/Nov/2013
CODE CONTRACTS
Following on from last month’s blog on Design by Contract, this month we take a look at Microsoft’s implementation of this which is called Code Contracts.
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10/Oct/2013
NET ASYNC AND WAIT
One of the new features with the .Net framework 4.5 that looks particularly useful are the new asynchronous features.
This promises to make asynchronous programming far easier. (At least for relatively simple tasks) Let’s try it out and see.
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03/Sep/2013
INVERSION OF CONTROL REVIEW
The quality of a software system is determined by how easily and efficiently it can be updated.When designing a software system we should take in consideration following principles: Maintainability Testability…
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24/Jul/2013
ENTITY FRAMEWORK 5 WITH AUTOMAPPER AND REPOSITORY PATTERN
Entity Framework 5 is the latest release of Microsoft’s ORM for .NET. It’s an object-relational mapper that enables .NET developers to work with relational data using domain-specific objects. Entity Framework allows you to work with one of three different workflows but each give the same end result.
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27/May/2013
SELF HOSTING A WEB API SERVICE
ASP.Net Web API is a relatively new set of technologies from Microsoft for creating web services. You can find more information on it here http://www.asp.net/web-api
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20/May/2013
Automated Web UI Testing
WatiN (which is pronounced “what-in”) is an open source framework for web application testing in .NET.
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01/May/2013
A RESTFUL APPROACH TO WEB SERVICES
The phrase REST (Representational State Transfer) was first coined as a pattern for developing web services in Roy Fielding’s doctorate in 2000. This paper followed on from his earlier work in the standardisation of the HTTP protocol.
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22/Feb/2013
AGILE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT IN REGULATED ENVIRONMENTS
The adoption of agile software development methodologies has been a development that Dataworks have watched with particular interest. Agile has gained wide acceptance in various domains within software development and this is being reflected with some of our customers.
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05/Feb/2013
AUTOMATED BUILDS AND TESTING IN NET WITH TEAM CITY
Recently we have moved from using the Build server that comes bundled with TFS to JetBrains Team City. TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers and build engineers www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/
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13/Dec/2012
IMPROVING THE QUALITY OF SOFTWARE SYSTEMS THROUGH AUTOMATED UNIT & ACCEPTANCE TESTING
The following is a brief overview of automated testing and why it contributes to higher quality software. Automated testing can be broken down into two areas, unit testing and acceptance testing.
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26/Jul/2012
ASP.NET MVC 4.0 RC
The Microsoft ASP.net MVC 4 RC is available for installation via Nuget. The following is a quick look at some of the new features included.
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05/May/2012
4 Simple Audit Trail Strategies to Track Data Changes in Relational Databases
There are times when we will need to keep track of changes made to data stored in a database. There are several strategies/methods for doing this. We will outline some of the more simple options available to use here.
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12/Mar/2012
RETURNING A DATASET FROM AN ORACLE FUNCTION
I recently had an issue where I needed to retrieve a list of values from a PLSQL function and include the returned list in a SQL “where in” clause.
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29/Feb/2012
Custom SSRS Reports in CRM 2011
CRM 2011 provides users with the ability to define custom reports using the CRM interface.These reports can then be saved and surfaced through CRM itself- a feature that was also available in a previous version of CRM.
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23/Feb/2012
Convergence of IT & Engineering
Traditionally within the Manufacturing sector, system implementations focused in Financials & MRP, and more recently full blown ERP systems.
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12/Oct/2011
INTELLIGENCE SHOULDN’T BE MISTAKEN FOR DATA
Is MI just another buzzword by the industry to help sell MI or BI software solutions? Or does it really benefit manufacturing facilities and help them reduce costs and increase efficiencies?
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12/Oct/2011
HTML5 – TIME TO JUMP IN?
HTML 5 is not something new anymore but for those yet to jump in, what’s the best way to get your feet wet? First off it helps to see HTML5 as a collection of individual features. Approaching it in this way allows an incremental approach. These new features are a combination of new mark up and a DOM API which tells us how these new elements interact with Javascript through the DOM. So where to start? Let’s take a look at some of the basic features that can be adopted.
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11/Oct/2011
WHY ASP.NET MVC ?
In the late nineties developers on a Microsoft stack would have been using Active Server Pages (ASP) for server side scripting and would have had to have a reasonable understanding of web development i.e. the stateless nature of the web and use of the HTTP protocol in general.
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01/Sep/2011
TEST DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT – UNNECESSARY OVERHEAD?
At a first glance TDD can seem to be an overhead that developers could do without. The idea of writing more code to verify the code providing the functionality could be viewed as a non-productive or non value added activity for developers. Primarily a developer’s focus should be on writing code and not testing.
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