February 3rd, 2012 by
Patrick Lioi For about half a year, I’ve been using git for personal projects. My use case, though, has been atypical and simplistic: a single user committing locally, treating GitHub as little more than a backup. It suited my needs to date, and at least it exposed me to a few of the advantages of git over subversion, but I knew I was missing out on a lot of the power available.
Now I’m working on a project that uses TFS for source control. We are mitigating supplementing TFS with git-tfs, a tool that allows you to work with git locally and then push your finished feature branches up to TFS. Again, that’s a little atypical and a little limited compared to a git-only project, but it’s exposed me to a lot more of the concepts and commands that I have been missing out on.
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February 2nd, 2012 by
Mary Chauvin
When Steve Donie was hired as a Principal Consultant at Headspring in early 2011, he hit the ground running. His first day on the job, he started as the project lead for EPA Systems, designing a system for tracking greenhouse gasses for a large oil and gas company. He encompasses the solutions based approach that we covet so much at Headspring and in life. At home, Steve and his father worked on a massive project digitizing hundreds of family photos from their original slides onto an online portal for their entire family to share. He is also the webmaster for his local high school’s swim team. And when he is not plugging away on a computer, he can be designing and building furniture, or enjoying the company of his two brilliant daughters.
Basically, getting to know Steve meant getting to know how diverse his background truly is, and his desire to really involve himself in the world that surrounds him. Here is some of what we talked about:
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February 1st, 2012 by
Dustin Wells You have probably, at least once, ended an email with this statement:
“If you have any questions or feedback, please feel free to contact me.”
How effective has this attempt at quarrying feedback ever been for you? My guess is that this sentiment probably does not move far pass pleasantries. It’s nice. It’s open. But is it really welcoming?
In account management, honest and timely feedback is of utmost importance. This is the case not only to achieve project goals but also to secure long-lasting relationships. Selling to existing accounts is often characterized as “low–hanging fruit,” but reality speaks much differently. Twenty-four percent of custom software projects are cancelled before completion or never used. I can only imagine how a healthy dose of careful account management in these cases could have changed the failed outcome. Client retention is actually very hard work and depends on the careful attention paid to feedback given to a trustworthy account manager. Read more
January 31st, 2012 by
Tim Thomas In April 2011, the jQuery team announced development on the popular jQuery Templates plugin would be delayed indefinitely. In need of a replacement, I began investigating alternatives and soon discovered Underscore, the “utility belt” library behind the awesome Backbone.js framework. The Underscore library includes an easy-to-use templating feature that easily integrates with any JSON data source, so read on to learn how easy it is to create JSON-backed templates.
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January 30th, 2012 by
Kurt Schindler In my previous posts (part 1, part 2) I showed you how to create external tools and add them to a custom tool bar. In this post we will go the next logical step and add them to the context menu, so when you right-click on a file in the solution explorer (or other places) you’re tools are right there for use.
If you’ve been following along, you’ll have noticed that customizing Visual Studio in these ways is a bit cumbersome. Creating context menus are no better considering there are a ton of different menus depending on the context that you’ll have to independently configure.
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January 27th, 2012 by
Mary Chauvin 
Justin Pope began his career working on standardized test score reporting systems and data warehouses for K-12 teachers. These project teams designed applications that help teachers spend more time in the classroom teaching and less time learning how to use confusing new technology. He joined the Headspring team in 2010 looking for opportunities to enhance the user experience on projects across several clients each year. When I have talked to other consultants, they all say Justin is really relied on for his unique ability to empathize with the client. Here is how our conversation about web development went: Read more
January 27th, 2012 by
Patrick Lioi I’ve been writing software professionally for 9 years now, and unprofessionally for 18. My recent focus has been on C#, but I’ve worked with many languages over the years.
When I was in the 7th grade, one of the other students made a Myst clone with Hypercard using photos taken around the school. That seemed like pure magic, so I wanted to find out how software is made. Like most people who get into this subject at an early age, my goal was to make games.
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January 23rd, 2012 by
Kurt Schindler In my previous post I showed you how to configure your own External Tools in Visual Studio, such as a command that opens up the current document in an external text editor, or a tool that launches a custom deployment executable. External Tools by default are accessed through the Tools menu, but this is lame. In this post I’ll show you to create your own toolbar to contain your tools so they are no more than one click away. Read more
January 20th, 2012 by
Mary Chauvin 
This week I spent some time getting to know Pedro Reys, one of our Senior Consultants at Headspring. We had a great time talking about consuming technology, and what that means in the past, present and the future. While we both agreed that invention of indoor plumbing (originally my suggestion) was an important milestone in technology, the internet has ultimately surpassed any and all twenty-first century technical advancements. Here’s how the rest of our conversation went:
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January 19th, 2012 by
Patrick Lioi I got my feet wet with unit testing during a summer internship, before the term was officially on my radar. I was writing a number-crunching library in C, and my tests took the form of short C programs using that library. They would run through several related examples and print to the console when something went wrong. It’s a shame that I was a senior in college before the concept even came up, but at least I got exposure to it before graduating and entering the workforce. This approach actually helped me to catch a pretty serious and subtle error that I wasn’t explicitly looking for. Read more
