Programming Articles

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SEP Wins TechPoint’s 2024 Innovation Service Partner of the Year Mira Award

SEP Recognized as Indiana’s Top Innovation Service Partner, Winning TechPoint’s Prestigious Mira Award Westfield, Indiana - SEP has been named the Innovation Service Partner of the Year by TechPoint at the 25th annual Mira Awards. The Mira Awards, Indiana’s largest…
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My Favorite Line(s) of Code

Onwards to Round 2 in our current blog battle here at SEP. This time I’ve been asked to write about my favorite line(s) of code. Unfortunately, I don’t have some fancy Ruby, Haskell, or Clojure to dazzle you with. My recent tenure spent managing projects leaves me with little time to focus on the latest […]
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What Mobile Platform Should We Target?

We often get clients interested in mobile solutions to their problems. One of the biggest questions they have for us is “what platform should we even target?” iOS? Android? Windows Phone 8? What about BlackBerry? Symbian? Firefox OS? How about Ubuntu Mobile? Do we even want something native, or is a properly tested and designed […]
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Android UI/X – don’t go overboard with your list views

The Android ListView is one of the simplest UI widgets to implement.  There are plenty of ListView tutorials and examples, so I’m not going to talk about how to implement a list. Instead, I’m going to focus on the User Experience and ways to improve your lists. To see a really well implemented ListView, take […]
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Android AsyncTasks, for updating your UI

Last time, I talked about how to use Android Handlers for handling a blocking task in the background.  While Handlers are very powerful, they can easily get too complicated for larger tasks. This time, let’s take a look at the Android AsyncTasks. AsyncTask enables proper and easy use of the UI thread. This class allows to […]
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Get a List of Months by Locale in Android…

I was working with a client trying to decide on long and short DateFormats for an international mobile application.  (Yes, that’s a mouthful.) I wasn’t able to quickly find any documentation on the Java SimpleDateFormat strings by locale…so I did what any Passionate Programmer would do, and I wrote a method to do it for […]
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Too many options for Android threads? Let me help!

As smartphones continue to gain popularity, the demand for mobile applications also continues to grow.  The increase in usage of smartphones elevated the issue of “multitasking” on mobile devices.  (I’m not going to go into details of my opinions on the myth and illusion of multitasking.) Ultimately, users want to have multiple applications running, syncing […]
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Never implement INotifyPropertyChanged again

I hate every time I am working on something and I have to implement INotifyPropertyChanged.  My DRY-dey sense tingles*.*  Not only am I forced to not use auto-properties (1st DRY violation), I’m forced to fire the event in each setter (2nd DRY violation), and specify the name of the property that is getting set, inside […]
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Syntax Highlighting for Technical Presentations

Ever wanted a quick/easy/automated way to get syntax highlighted code from your editor of choice into PowerPoint? EVERY time I do a technical presentation I need this.  Usually I resort to taking a screenshot, or finding an “export to html” type plugin for the editor I’m using at the time (Visual Studio, Vim, IntelliJ IDEA, […]
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Teaching StructureMap About C# 4.0 Optional Parameters and Default Values

This week I ran into wanting to use C# 4.0 optional parameters, but wanted StructureMap (my IoC tool of choice) to respect the default value specified for those optional parameters. The Problem In this example, we’ll be pulling a command out of the container.  The important part is the optional constructor parameter (level), and it’s […]
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