Universal Windows Platform – The Undiscovered Country for Windows Desktop Apps

July 5, 2016 by Leave a Comment

It is unfortunate, but I think Dr. McCoy from Star Trek: The Original Series said it best: ‘Windows 10 Mobile is dead, Jim“…. and just to pile on with one more.

Buried underneath the red shirt like death of Windows 10 Mobile lies the amazing Universal Windows Platform (UWP).

The developer capabilities of the Universal Windows Platform have been documented in many a location.

UWP provides:

  • Full developer parity at the API and framework level across all flavors of Windows 10, Xbox One, HoloLens, and Windows 10 Mobile devices.
  • A simplified install model via APPX bundles.
  • A per-app separation of registry and file systems.
  • XAML controls ‘just work’ across all Windows 10 / UWP devices.
  • Targeting the UWP API set ensures that your app works across Windows 10 / UWP devices.

In my experience, there is nothing weirder than seeing your Windows 10 / UWP app just work on an Xbox One,  in a virtual projected rectangle via a HoloLens, and via mouse and keyboard on a standard Windows 10 PC.

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Filed Under: Best Practice

Mobile App Services

June 3, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Starting on a mobile app can be a daunting proposition.

Your stakeholders at Rex’s Gym really need this app to help drive customer retention, promote the business, and make payments a breeze.

Getting the development environment set up, learning a new language, understanding a wholly different API for screen layouts per-platform, having to go to the Apple Store and buy a Mac (which is the absolutely last thing you thought you would ever do).

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Filed Under: Maintainability, Mobile, Performance, Testing

Apple WWDC – The Worth of Being There

May 20, 2016 by Leave a Comment

In this era of travel budget crackdowns and higher than normal oversight into technology budgets, the iOS software engineer can get lost in the shuffle when it comes to training time and opportunities to talk with other members of the iOS development community.

Due to the rise of the popularity of Apple’s iOS platform, Apple WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) has become the central rallying point for iOS developers. It seems that the entire iOS community gathers in San Francisco over the week of WWDC. Many developers go to San Francisco over the week of WWDC even if they don’t have a ticket to the conference.

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Filed Under: Best Practice

C# vs. Swift – Iron Man vs. Captain America

May 11, 2016 by 2 Comments

In Captain America: Civil War we get to see the ultimate battle between Iron Man and Captain America.

It is a battle of simple gutty defense vs. smart weapons and flashy offense, humility vs. brashness, down in the dirt vs. up in the clouds.

To totally geek it up, the same kind of battle exists in the languages that software engineers use today and I believe this is especially true in the battle of C# vs. Swift.

Don’t worry, this really isn’t a versus type write up. If anything I seek to point out each language’s unique strengths, then show how software engineers can get into the right superhero mindset to really use those strengths, and be aware of the weaknesses, to create great solutions.

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Filed Under: .NET, Best Practice, Mobile

A Dive into SystemJS – Production Considerations

May 5, 2016 by Leave a Comment

Previously we have looked at the basic configuration of SystemJS and what happens when you attempt to load modules. What we have covered so far is good enough for a development system, but things are different when you try to push your code to production and performance is much more important. It might be fine for a development system to make XHR requests for each individual script file, but that is not ideal for most production systems. This article will attempt to evaluate the production setup that is needed to attain good performance. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Frameworks, Javascript Tagged With: , ,

My Trek Through MinneBar 11

April 29, 2016 by Leave a Comment

minnebar.logoOn April 23, 2016 I attended my first minnebar conference: minnebar 11

I am amazed that content of this quality was presented by community members for free. It was totally worth being inside and roaming the maze-like halls of Best Buy Corporate Headquarters on one of the few sunny Saturdays we get up here in the frozen tundra of Minnesota. The exposure to new technical topics was great, but more importantly experiencing the energy of the people who are active in the Minnesota tech community was the real core of the experience.

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Filed Under: Best Practice

A Dive into SystemJS – Loading and Translating

April 14, 2016 by Leave a Comment

In the last article we took a look at some of the basic configuration options of SystemJS and also the high level workflow of what happens when you attempt to import a module. This article is going to walk through what happens from when a script has been fetched by the browser until a module instance is returned, as well as provide some information on creating plugins for SystemJS. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Frameworks, Javascript Tagged With: , ,

Implementing HAT​EOAS​: One Team’s Journey

April 1, 2016 by Leave a Comment

hateoasHATEOAS stands for “Hypermedia as the Engine of Application State” and it is one of the possible constraints that you can place on a REST compliant API. Essentially what it means is that your API is as navigable as a normal website, with hyperlinks leading to other resources.  The focus of this blog is not HATEOAS itself – instead focusing on an implementation of it our team recently used for our project’s API.

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Filed Under: .NET

A Dive into SystemJS – Part 1

March 16, 2016 by 1 Comment

The ECMA2015 module syntax for JavaScript was a much needed addition to the language. For years now the JavaScript community has tried to make up for the lack of a standard module format with several competing formats: AMD, CommonJS, and then UMD which tried to wrap both of the others. The introduction of an official module syntax, details of which can be found at the MDN imports documentation page, means that there is going to be a new module loader required to load the new format. Unfortunately the ECMA2015 specification ended up not including a module loader, but there is a proposal with the WhatWG team to add a module loader to the browser. SystemJS is a module loader built on top of the original ES6 module loader polyfill and soon to be the polyfill for the WhatWG module loader. This series of articles is going to take a deep dive into SystemJS and see what all it has to offer. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Frameworks, Javascript Tagged With: , ,

Managing Process Efficiently: Intro to the Disruptor Pattern

March 11, 2016 by Leave a Comment

The Disruptor is, essentially, a scheduling strategy builder for multithreaded code. It stands out in the world of concurrent programming because it offers both great execution speed and easily readable and debuggable code. Yes, it does have a weird name. According to the original whitepaper, it was coined “Disruptor” because

it had elements of similarity for dealing with graphs of dependencies to the concept of “Phasers” in Java 7…

Of course, it is much more than just a Star Trek joke. The pattern was developed by the LMAX exchange to build a competitive, low-latency trading platform that could handle millions of transactions per second. Luckily for us developers, they have opened the source code to the public. The reference implementation is written in Java, but there is a C# implementation as well.

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Filed Under: .NET, Data, Performance
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