The Joy of Excellence

  • Dynamically Load Bootswatch Themes

    This post shows how I dynamically load a user’s selected theme in an MVC 5 application that’s using Bootstrap and Bootswatch. App_Themes Folder I didn’t use use that… So you can skip this section if you like. In the past, different themes were placed in different folders and you could just enumerate the subdirectories in…

  • ClaimAuthorizeAttribute

    Headline: Here is what I use for authorizing controller and actions in an MVC application that uses the new Claims based authorization. Some Great Resources Before I even begin, let me point people to some great resources I found today on this topic. The first has so many posts on the topic and they are…

  • Team Building

    This is an excellent post by Christopher Avery that I frequently use when building a software development team: 5 Easy Steps That Will Make Any Team Better The “WIIFM” or What’s In It For Me is always interesting.

  • UPPERCASE Menu Items in Visual Studio

    I felt the tension go out of my shoulders today when I found this option! Not sure what caused them to think all caps for the menu options would be a good idea.

  • My Daily Scrum Routine

    Headline: This describes my daily routine as I participate on a virtual team scattered about the globe as we work on a project using the Scrum template. The Situation Currently I’m working with a team where no two people are in the same time zone! We’re using Visual Studio Online (VSO) with the Scrum process…

  • Related Work Items to Reinforce Good Process

    Headline: Always associate related work items to your changesets upon check-in. This post shows an easy way to do that using a Query that also reinforces the process. Scrum Sprint Board Overview Most projects I work on with Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server use the Scrum process template. I also do some work using…

  • What is a phone?

    Headline: Seems the old telephone is going by the wayside… Some observations. Calling from the desktop For several years now I’ve not used a phone in the office. Instead I used other audio communications like Microsoft’s Lync or Skype. I have an excellent microphone and speaker setup… Or, if needed, I have some good headphones…

  • Batching Items with EF 6.0

    Headline: It’s not too hard to batch items with or without async capabilities in Entity Framework (EF) 6.0. Here I have a large number (ok… not in the sample test, but in real life) of items and I’d like to pull them in as in batches rather than wait for all of them to be…