getBoundingClientRect on Xbox

Sunday, February 19, 2023

I learned something interesting at work the other day. We use getBoundingClientRect to find the position of a movie poster and then blow it up slightly. Well the blown up image is supposed to be on top of the existing movie poster, but on Xbox (and some Samsung TVs) this was not the case. The blown up image was in the top left corner. After a lot of investigation I found the issue was that we were expecting to have getBoundingClientRect.…

Reading RSS Feeds

Thursday, January 19, 2023

Happy New Year everyone! I am writing this at the beginning of 2023. Yes, that’s right, 2023 and we are talking about RSS. RSS for those young enough to not know, stands for Really Simple Syndication. It was used a long time ago to allow a user to read a blog or news article from a software tool called a Feed Reader. These days I feel there will be a comeback as it is used pretty extensivly in Mastodon.…

Project Volterra

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Last May we were introduced to a sizzle video for Project Volterra at Build 2022 Day 1 . Back then we were greeted with a small form factor box that runs an ARM64 chip and an NPU. This October they came out for purchase and I snapped one up. Windows Developer Kit 2023 Previously announced as Project Volerra the ARM64 kit from Microsoft is now known as the Windows Developer Kit 2023.…

.NET MAUI Services

Friday, June 17, 2022

Okay so we have our separation of concerns, but this app isn’t really an app yet. It doesn’t really do anything. We want to be able to write our own action items and save the state for the next time we launch the app. Well how we do that is with Services. Services allow us to add storage and external APIs to our app. In this blog post we will wire up a database to store the action items and their state.…

.NET MAUI Dependency Injection

Tuesday, June 14, 2022

Dependency Injection (DI) is a pattern that we use in continuation of separation of concerns. A class should only be interested in what it is doing, not newing up some other class. Just inject foreign classes into the constructor and be on your way. It’s that simple. Why? Our app is fairly small right now but as it gets bigger we’ll be thankful for dependency injection. If you look at the MainPage.…

.NET MAUI MVVM

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

So we have a pretty nice start to our app. We can display some data, but that data is not only hard coded, it’s hard coded in the XAML file. There’s a clear separation of concerns when it comes to data and presentation. We should follow that. In this post we’ll focus on a pattern of programming known as Model View ViewModel or MVVM for short. This is in the family of patterns as Model View Controller (MVC) and Model View Presenter (MVP).…

.NET MAUI Main Page

Friday, June 3, 2022

So we’ve got the demo running on Windows and Android as well as on Mac and iOS. Next is to turn that demo into something worth using. Granted we’re only doing a simple to-do app, but the basic concepts are here to make a great application. First thing we want to do is open our application from last time. It should just be in the Open Recent area on the left when you first open Visual Studio 2022.…

.NET MAUI on Mac

Wednesday, June 1, 2022

Up to now we’ve installed .NET MAUI on Windows and got the Android emulator running. .NET MAUI’s brilliance is that it is Multi-platform. That doesn’t mean just Windows and Android. We can target Mac Catalyst and iOS too. Let’s look at how that is setup. First, download the Visual Studio 2022 for Mac Preview. Find it in your Downloads folder and run it. Once it starts up make sure to check the Core and CrossPlatform options.…

.NET MAUI Android Setup

Monday, May 30, 2022

Android Setup Okay, this took me a while and I’m not even sure what all I did to get it working. All I can say is be patient, wait for screens that require your approval, and good luck. Before you start you should enable Hyper-V and the Windows Hypervisor Platform. To do that From the start menu search for “Turn Windows features on or off. Then select Hyper-V and Windows Hypervisor check boxes.…

.NET MAUI

Monday, May 30, 2022

.NET MAUI Welcome to the first of what I hope to be many blog posts on .NET MAUI. MAUI stands for Multi-platform App User Interface. It is a framework that allows a developer to write one run many (WORM). To be clear it is a framework that allows a .NET developer to write an application in one solution and target Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android. In practice it’s amazing and it does just that.…