Why Aren’t There More Women in Technology?

While doing a search on being my own roadblock, I recently stumbled up this video, entitled, “Overcoming My Biggest Roadblock, Myself” by Sabrina Farmer (a Site Reliability Engineer at Google responsible for Gmail), and was speechless. It’s so raw, so real, so honest. You can feel her vulnerability. Every word she spoke resonated to my […]

List<ExpandoObject> to Excel Export

I’m writing this to share a quick solution I implemented to solve a need on a small project. It works, but feels dirty. If you have a cleaner reco, PLEASE let me know. Handler: (My apologies for screenshots. Git Gists were not keeping the formatting when I selected c#)   Extension Method: HEADS UP This […]

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helpers prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 600 people reached the top of Mt. Everest in 2012. This blog got about 12,000 views in 2012. If every person who reached the top of Mt. Everest viewed this blog, it would have taken 20 years to get that […]

What’s Bothering Me About This Birthday

Skip to post-birthday update As the eve of this major birthday approaches, I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching lately I’ve been having a hard time pinpointing what is bothering me so much about it. Yes, everyone knows how disturbing it is in our society for a woman to turn 40. Fortunately I was never […]

Entity Framework 5.0 & Upgrading Project to FW 4.5

I was listening to a recent .NET Rocks with Julie Lerman on Entity Framework 5, and she was asked if EF5 worked with both .NET 4.5 and .NET 4.0. Around minute 26, she briefly mentioned it’s tricky because the dll that gets installed via NuGet is determined by the Target Framework the project is set […]

System.Web.Helpers.Chart Custom Themes

I am in the process of moving some reporting I built in 2004 using the WebChart Control for ASP.NET from CarlosAg.net in a WebForms  site that used .NET FW 2.0 to a .NET FW 4.5 MVC4 site. As you can see from this Tweet, I was pretty excited to see Razor Chart Helpers built into […]

Entity Framework Circular References

One of the first issues I encountered returning serialized, nested (“deep”) entities using EF5 with the (MVC4) ASP.NET Web Api was the “Self Referencing loop” exception* For any property you don’t want exposed, make the Getter: Internal & Setter: Public. Doing this on the navigation properties that reference the parent that reference it will prevent […]

ASP.NET Web API: Always Set Content-Type

I lost a few hours on my project one night last week because of this. Backstory I have been really enjoying my latest project using Asp.NET Web API & EF5. Although I’ve had a bit of a (mostly EF) learning curve, it’s gone swimmingly, and I’ve been blown away at the parsing magic performed by […]

Git as an Environment Discovery Tool

I love discovering existing tools that can be used in new ways. This way to use git in a way I had not heard of is so badass (and by badass, I mean it’s going to save me an insane amount of time) that I have to shout it from the rooftops. Background I work for a marketing firm with many clients. […]

ThatConference 2012

Developer Parent As a working parent of two young children, it is not easy for me to attend conferences. Thankfully, I have an unbelievably supportive spouse, without which (as you know if you have kids & have voluntarily attended an OOT dev conf), the thought of attending a conference would not even be on the […]