Web Development

5 Considerations to Help Choose a Custom Software Firm When you choose a custom software firm, you’re making a decision that can have lasting effects on your business. Whether you’re building a custom application or integrating new technology into existing systems, the firm you partner with will shape the project’s success—or failure. A well-chosen development partner brings not only technical expertise but also valuable insights that can steer your project

Refactoring legacy code can be daunting. While trial by fire is a great way to learn most kinds of programming, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for getting better at it (at least not quickly).  When trying to hit a deadline it is often difficult to take a step back, try different techniques, and learn a few keyboard strokes to automate some of the more mundane tasks. Coding katas

Welcome to AgileKit – an interconnected framework of Agile tools designed by agile coaches, scrum masters, and product owners to support Agile teams in product planning and construction. AgileKit is an internal project we’ve been developing over the past 2 months. While developing core concepts for the applications as a whole, we started to notice the same ideas pop up: Simple Easy Functional When it came time to Brand, we

The Problem When building large-scale Angular applications, most people eventually need to provide their application with environment-specific variables, which doesn’t seem like a very big deal on the surface.  After all, Angular provides us with the “environment.ts” file, right? It should be as easy as filling in your environment settings and then using the environment variable throughout the site, but this method introduces a level of uncertainty into the build

I’m excited to share that a project we worked on, the TexasYouth2Adult Transition Tool, with BridgingApps is nearing launch. Texas Youth2Adult is a resource for young adults with special health care needs (and their families) as they transition from youth to adulthood. This is an important program that will help a number of families in Texas, and BridgingApps hopes it will eventually expand to other states. If you’re interested (or

I’m excited to announce that we have an amazing new Dynamics 365 client. We were contacted this last week from a representative of none other than Santa Claus himself. It seems that Old Saint Nick is a bit of a tech nerd and has really wanted to streamline his mail room floor operations. Recently Santa and Mrs. Claus came across WordPress and thought it would be a great platform for them to use to build a letter writing system to help more children to easily send letters to Santa. 

I’m excited to have the opportunity to speak at SQLSaturday #652 in Atlanta, GA on July 15, 2017. SQLSaturday #652 will be my fourth SQLSaturday to speak at, and I’m loving getting engaged with the SQL community through SQLSaturday and PASS (a not-for-profit organization that supports data professionals who use the Microsoft Data Platform).  SQLSaturday Atlanta is a large event with over 60 sessions and a host of wonderful speakers from all over. Topics will range from the administration and maintenance of SQL server to indexing and advanced T-SQL all the way to topics like mine, CosmosDB and NoSQL databases.

In this post, I highlight the first Sigao Studios Academy video, a new YouTube offering from Sigao Studios. In this video, I summarize CosmosDB’s Graph API. CosmosDB uses Apache’s TinkerPop and its Gremlin language to add graph database functionality to its massively scalable data as a service offering. TinkerPop can be found in a host of other graph systems including Blazegraph, ChronoGraph, Hadoop Giraph and others. Its powerful graph traversal language, Gremlin, allows you to quickly traverse a database and derive information from the underlying data.

Here at Sigao, we’ve been working with the Microsoft’s Dynamics platform for quite some time. We’ve often had situations where we have some custom action that we want to use to activate one of our custom plugins. Here, I’ll walk you through how to trigger one of your plugins automatically as a user progresses through a business process flow. The overall flow of this process is described below.

In the final post of this series, we will integrate Azure Search into our DocumentDB collection and allow users to search our Jeopardy Questions in our app.

In part two of our series, we will use Angular and Electron to connect to an Azure DocumentDB repository through a .Net Core API.

The concept of NoSQL or schema-less databases refers to systems that store data in a schemaless fashion using some form of document notation such as JSON. Examples of NoSQL databases include: MongoDB, CouchDB, RavenDB and, as we will discuss in this post, Azure DocumentDB.
In this series, we will be creating an application that allows users to quickly browse and search a repository of over 200,000 jeopardy questions. We will use Azure DocumentDB as a data repository, Azure Search to implement full text search functionality and will use AngularJS and Electron to create a desktop client that users can use to browse these questions.