In my last post, we looked at Aurelia’s dependency injection library and how you might be able to use it as a standalone library in your vanilla JavaScript application. Now, however, I want to take a look at how you might be able to wire it into your React application, and then finally how you might hook it into React/Redux application.
Using Aurelia’s Dependency Injection Library In Non-Aurelia App, Part 2
February 27, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Adding Amazon Alexa Voice Services to Your iOS App with Swift
February 6, 2017 by 3 Comments
Major thanks to the MacLexa project out on Github for providing motivation, source code, and a great starting place for this blog post.
Amazon Echo is an always listening device which acts as an always available assistant. Thanks to the deep integrations that the Amazon Echo has to online services you can issue a wide variety of questions and commands via voice and get real world responses.
Using Aurelia’s Dependency Injection Library In Non-Aurelia App, Part 1
January 23, 2017 by Leave a Comment
If you are anything like me then you like to try to keep your code loosely coupled, even your JavaScript code. The ES2015 module spec helped solve a lot of issues with dependency management in JavaScript apps, but it did not really do anything to prevent having code that is tightly coupled to the specific imports. When Aurelia was originally announced, one of the things that first caught my eye was that it included a dependency injection library that was designed to be standalone so you could use it even if you were not including the rest of the Aurelia framework. Now that Aurelia has had some time to mature, I decided to see how exactly it might look to use the dependency injection library in a variety of non-Aurelia applications.
In this two-part blog series, I will unpack a few basics about the library itself, and then show how it might be used in three different apps: a vanilla JavaScript app, a React app, and then a React app that uses Redux for its state management.
Virtual Reality vs. Augmented Reality – Impact on Your Business
December 19, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) have come out of nowhere to become ‘the next big thing’.
With the failure of Google Glass as an augmented reality platform for consumers, the seeming success of the Oculus Rift as a gaming-based virtual reality platform, and the weird novelty of Microsoft HoloLens as a resurgence in the augmented reality realm, it can be hard to understand the scope, purpose, and worth of these new ‘worn on the head devices’.
Increase Local Reasoning with Stateless Architecture and Value Types
December 8, 2016 by Leave a Comment
It is just another Thursday of adding features to your mobile app.
You have blasted through your task list by extending the current underlying object model + data retrieval code.
Your front-end native views are all coming together. The navigation between views and specific data loading is all good.
Git Commit. Git Push. The build pops out on HockeyApp. The Friday sprint review goes well. During the sprint review the product manager points out that full CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) functionality is required in each of the added views. You only have the ‘R’ in ‘CRUD’ implemented. You look through your views, think it just can’t be that bad to add C, U and D, and commit to adding full CRUD to all the views by next Friday’s sprint review.
The weekend passes by, you come in on Monday and start going through all your views to add full CRUD. You update your first view with full CRUD; start navigating through your app; do some creates, updates, and deletes; and notice that all of those other views you added last week are just broken. Whole swaths of classes are sharing data you didn’t know was shared between them. Mutation to data in one view has unknown effects on the other views due to the shared references to data classes from your back-end object model.
Your commitment to having this all done by Friday is looking like a pipe-dream.
Practical Data Cleaning Using Stanford Named Entity Recognizer
November 28, 2016 by Leave a Comment
I enjoy learning about all of the events in and around World War II, especially the Pacific theater.
I was reading the book Miracle at Midway by Gordon W. Prange (et. al.) and started to get curious about the pre- and post- histories of all the naval vessels involved in the Battle of Midway.
Historically, so many people, plans, and materials had to merge together at a precise moment in time in order for the Battle of Midway to be fought where it was and realize its radical impact on the outcome of World War II.
I got curious as to the pre- and post-history of all the people and ships that fought at Midway and wanted a way to visualize all of that history in a mobile application.
Writing Node Applications as a .NET Developer – My experience in Developing in Node vs .NET/C# (Part 3)
November 1, 2016 by Leave a Comment
While the previous posts described what one needs to know prior to starting a Node project, what follows is some of my experiences that I came across while writing a Node application.
How do I structure my project?
The main problem I had when developing my Node application was figuring out a sound application structure. As mentioned earlier, there is a significant difference between Node and C# when it comes to declaring file dependencies. C#’s using statement is more of a convenience feature for specifying namespaces and its compiler does the dirty work of determining what files and DLLs are required to compile a program. Node’s CommonJS module system explicitly imports a file or dependency into a dependent file at runtime. In C#, I generally inject a class’s dependencies via constructor injection, delegating object instantiation and resolution to an Inversion of Control container. In Javascript, however, I tend to write in a more functional manner where I write and pass around functions instead of stateful objects.
Coping with Device Rotation in Xamarin.Android
October 19, 2016 by 1 Comment
You think that you have your Android application in a state where you can demo it to your supervisor when you accidentally rotate your device and the app crashes. We have all been there before and the good news is that the fix is usually pretty simple even if it can sometimes take awhile to find.
This has always been an issue for Android developers, but I have found that, due to the unique interaction between your C# classes and the corresponding Java objects, it seems to be a little more sensitive with Xamarin.Android apps. In this post, we will discuss what happens when you rotate your device and cover the different techniques that you might choose to use to manage your application state through device rotations as well as the ramifications of each of them.
Writing Node Applications as a .NET Developer – Getting Ready to Develop (Part 2)
August 10, 2016 by Leave a Comment
In the previous blog post, I provided a general overview of some the key differences between the two frameworks. With this out of the way we’re ready to get started writing an application. However, there are some key decisions to make regarding what development tools to use as well as getting the execution environment set up.
Selecting an IDE/Text Editor
Before I could write a line of code, I needed to decide on an IDE/Text Editor that I wanted to use to write my application. As a C# developer, I was spoiled with the number of features that Visual Studio offered a developer that allowed for a frictionless and productive developing experience. I wanted to have this same experience when writing a Node application so before deciding on an IDE, I had a few prerequisites:
- Debugging capabilities built into the IDE
- Unobtrusive and generally correct autocomplete
- File navigation via symbols (CTRL + click in Visual Studio with Resharper extension)
- Refactoring utilities that I could trust; Find/Replace wasn’t good enough
Writing Node Applications as a .NET Developer
July 27, 2016 by 1 Comment
As a .NET developer, creating modern web apps using Node on the backend can seem daunting. The amount of tooling and setup required before you can write a “modern” application has resulted in the development community to display “Javascript Fatigue”; a general wariness related to the exploding amount of tooling, libraries, frameworks and best practices that are introduced on a seemingly daily basis. Contrast this with building an app in .NET using Visual Studio where the developer simply selects a project template to build off of and they’re ready to go. [Read more…]
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