ASP.NET Core

Fighting File Downloads and Dinosaurs with NSwag

Technically it was the dinosaurs, approximately 240 million years ago, that first solved downloading files from web servers. So doing it with a modern tech stack with an auto-generated client-side proxy should be easy, right?

ASP.NET Core

Be a Hero on Day 1 with ASP.Net Boilerplate

ASP.Net Boilerplate is a web framework you've likely never heard of, but probably should have. Fortunately, I just published a new episode of Code Hour where I give an overview of it.

DevOps

Code Sharing Part 2: Automatic Semantic Versioning of NuGet Deploys

How to automatically incorporate semantic version information into NuGet libraries during building, packaging, and publishing of .Net libraries to private NuGet feeds.

DevOps

Share Code Like a Boss Part 1 - Private NuGet Feeds in Azure DevOps

If you've ever tried to share code like an API proxy, math calculations, or validation logic between multiple projects, you'll know there are many options. In this post I'll summarize the most common, then dig into the most versatile for .Net projects: private NuGet feeds

Visual Studio Code

Sharing developer sessions with electron and VS Live Share

Are you working on an Electron app with a team? If so, then there's a good chance you've been working together and told your team members to hang on while you grab their changes and test locally.

Video

How to Create Printed Circuit Boards (PCB's) 101

I just posted Episode 18 of Code Hour. In this show I demonstrate how to build a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) from prototype, to design, to manufacture.

CI

Code Coverage is Finally Easy in .Net Core

A couple of months ago calculating code coverage on the command line was quite challenging in ASP.Net Core. Fortunately, as of last month and Visual Studio 15.8, generating the metric is easy.

Best Practices

How to Increase Quality with a Code Coverage Hack

In this post I'll summarize what code coverage is, how it can be abused, but also how it can be leveraged to gently increase design and architecture quality, reduce bug regressions, and provide verifiable documentation.

DevOps

Why Cake? 4 Reasons.

When building a devops pipeline you can go two main directions: put logic into a text-based make-like tool such as Cake [https://cakebuild.net/], or embed your logic exclusively in a Continuous Integration server like Team City or Visual Studio Team Services.  The CI route provides an incredible amount of

Announcing UsgsClient Library 1.0

After the DC Earthquake of 2011, I became intrigued by the earthquake data exposed by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).  During this time, I wrote my first app for the Windows Store that used USGS's earthquake data, Rumble Radar [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/rumble-radar/

Windows IOT

How To Push Updates to Raspberry Pi UWP Apps In Prod

Updating Raspberry Pi apps in the field can be tricky. This post covers the general problem and address some specific side-loading problems you are likely to run into.

UWP

Securing Communications via Certificate Pinning in UWP

If you're writing an app, your risk of man-in-the-middle attacks isn't limited to curious developers willing to install a Fiddler root certificate in order to hide all HTTPS snooping errors.

Development

How To Get Back Tizen Studio 1.3 and TV Extensions 3.0

UPDATE (Oct 16, 2018): Since this post was published, there have been 5 more minor updates to Tizen Studio 2.x and a few weeks ago I was able to successfully get everything working on the current latest (version 2.5 released in August). Based on early comments, we know

Tizen

Building Tizen Web Apps with the Tizen Emulator

Some of us around the InfernoRed (home) offices have recently been working with Tizen. We found convincing the emulator to run your HTML5, CSS and JavaScript Hybrid Web Apps takes a few clicks.

Xamarin

Integrating Visual Studio Mobile Center and Trello using Azure Functions

I'm pretty excited we're using Mobile Center to automate the app builds and releases for this project. But there was one thing I was still having to do manually - updating the Trello board after each build. Clearly this must be automated as well!

Best Practices

Your Code Sucks, Get Over It

Horrifying. That about describes my first art class. As a computer science major with virtually no art experience I was surrounded by students who had devoted nearly every waking moment to drawing, painting, sculpting, and bending metal into non-functional shapes. The second class was the worst. Our assignment was to

Xamarin

What is the Xamarin platform?

We love tools that help our clients save time, but some of them are easily misunderstood. Here's the scoop on Xamarin.

UWP

Crossing the Windows Desktop Bridge

Choosing the right tech stack for a project can be difficult. There are many factors that weigh in on which tools to use. Your team's proficiency in a language, available frameworks, hardware requirements, existing components, and many other variables help shape this decision.

Xamarin

Introducing ELXF: A UI Framework For Concise, Maintainable & Fast Programmatic UI's For Xamarin.Forms

EasyLayout.Forms - or ELXF - is a new UI framework to replace XAML with clean and concise layout code.

Xamarin

Going Native: Using Android Views In Xamarin.Forms

We previously walked through how to get started with a cross-platform Xamarin.Forms project, but what if we started with an Android app built in Android Studio? Here's a way to re-use a lot of our Android code and layouts with Xamarin. In the previous post, we customized

Xamarin

Six Disastrous Mistakes for Cross-Platform Mobile Projects

"I'm starting a cross-platform mobile project.  What problems should my team solve before we begin?" What an enlightened question, I thought. The individual standing next to me at a local developer conference had a software architecture background.  He clearly understood that laying a solid foundation at

Xamarin

Xamarin.Forms: A Fire TV Quick Start

How hard is it for a .NET developer to build a Fire TV app with C#? With the right tools, it's pretty easy

Android

Customizing the UI for Fire TV (and Android TV)

Why would you want to build apps for Fire TV? Well, Roku may be the current leader in the market for streaming TV boxes, but Amazon Fire TV's share of the market isn't too far behind at 2nd place based on data collected from comScore as

Android

Obfuscating Shared Preferences in Fire TV Apps

What's the best way to keep secure data in our local Android or Fire TV shared preferences? Well, don't do it. If someone's curious enough, it's not too hard to dig into the Android file system to look at a particular app&

Fire TV

Abstracting Analytics: RxJava Observers in TV Apps

Sometimes analytics are nice to have. Sometimes they're critical, like in our Fire TV apps we just published on Amazon. Content providers and distributors are always negotiating who can show what content (and for how much). However, I imagine it's much harder to turn down the