TheCodedWorld

I thought Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio would be a mature and stable development environment for developing apps for Android, iOS and UWP. I was wrong. First, as I wrote in the previous post, it does not work to start the Android Emulator from within Visual Studio. I filed a bug report towards Visual Studio and was informed that the development team is aware of the issue and are planing to release a fix on the 15.8 branch of VS. Not very prioritized to fix apparently. Second, Xamarin.Forms defaults to using a shared project for the common, not target specific, source files. Shared C# projects uses the new .NET project system by default. The support for XAML and code behind files still has problems in the new system. So, adding new XAML files to your project will not work from within Visual Studio, manual editing of the project files are needed. Also the static code analysis does not work well with XAML files in the new project system so you will get a lot of false errors. Thir...

Today I started on a mobile app for my common-law wife. She is starting a workout program and I thought I could code up a simple Android app that she can use to keep track of the different exercises and the number of repetitions or duration to do them for. As I have been working with C# for couple of years now and I feel comfortable with it I thought I would try using Xamarin . I discussed the functionality for the first version with my partner and sketched up a simple model of the entities. Then I figured it would be a good idea to try out a simple tutorial to get a feeling for it and ensure I have all the needed tools installed. In the Visual Studio Installer there is a check box for mobile app development so I checked that and let everything install. Then in Visual Studio I created a new Android project, built it and pressed F5 to see what would happen. No go! The Android emulator wants virtualization to be enabled in order to run in hardware accelerated mode. So I had to rebo...

This week I was asked, without any preparation time, to explain something that I have coded that I feel really proud over. To me this was a really tough question. I don't normally look back on my coding projects and feel proud over what I have done. When I code things at home I do it for learning, trying out new things or improving my skills in certain areas. And the things I code at work they are, well, just work. I do, however, take pride in my work. In the sense that I put a lot of effort into making good, carefully considered decisions, try to master my craft, and write the best code I can. However, to me this is the base line, not something I only do on selected projects. So it is hard to look back and point out a single project, or piece of code, that I feel really proud over. I can however, think of a couple of projects that didn't turn out so good. Not because we didn't put a lot of effort into them, but because they weren't that good ideas to start with.