Posts

Running certain tasks in a scheduled manner may be an easy solution for many problems. One might be refreshing the application cache when the data needs to be fresh and warm no matter what the actual traffic is. Other could be the synchronization or periodical clean-up. There are obviously few good architectural patterns to do it in more elegant and efficient way - distributed queues, publish-subscribe models, enterprise service buses etc. But the simplicity of scheduling still might be an important decision variable.

An error Failure INSTALL_PARSE_FAILED_MANIFEST_MALFORMED appears from time to time in world of Android Java developers. However among Xamarin devs it seems to appear much rarely. Today I came across one and the standard Android solution did not work for me. Curious about the solution I found (with a little help of my friends)?

If you ever encountered the error AAPT: Unknown option '--no-version-vectors' during the Xamarin build you probably found this page looking for a solution. Like I did. Then you probably first tried setting AndroidSdkBuildToolsVersion to the latest you have. Just like me. Or uninstall all the older versions. If this didn’t work (like in my case) stay with me.

If you are using Azure Active Directory services you probably at least considered using ADAL as a client library in you application. It’s easy to setup, use and it offers a unified API across the most popular platforms - iOS, Android, UWP, web - both .Net and native. Unfortunately sometimes things just does not work out of the box without deeper understanding how some features are implemented. This post is about one of them - credentials cache persistency on iOS.

Working on a bug fix in MVVMCross-based mobile application I noticed a strange behavior. The navigation to other view model I put in async Init<TInit>(TInit parameters) which as executed on the first view model in my app was running twice. After a short debugging session it turned out that MvxViewModel<TInit> Init() is called from the view controllers ViewDidLoad() method. Obviously there was something I was missing in terms of ViewDidLoad() semantics.

Considering Xamarin there can be many reasons for need of screen resolution detection in mobile app. You may have more complex logic of loading your resources possibly split between PCL and Android/iOS projects. Other might want to send this information with REST request for reporting. Whatever your reason is, here is a very short text on how to do it in IoC-friendly way.

Working with mobile can be quite challenging for a developer with a web dev background. At least that is my experience so far. Comparing to typical HTML web elements with CSS styling some features might be missing.

Those of you who enter this blog from time to time probably noticed that there was not update since 4 months. I hope this will change due to my intensive learning in mobile development area.

It’s always good to have static code analysis in your build process. I guess no one these days argues with this statement. This usually forces developer to make conscious decisions on code-level performance, reliability, security, design etc. Few times CA warnings saved me from producing a quite nasty bugs. Sometimes however FxCop yields some really strange stuff.
This post will describe the one I stuck with some time ago. But more interestingly it shows that sometimes .Net developer must look deep under the hood of high-level language abstraction to solve certain issues.

Recently leafing through my notebook (yeah, I’m still using old-time paper) I found some ideas, quick-notes, self-brainstorming diagrams related with search systems. An original idea for this blog, at least for few first posts, was to present them. Still this requires introducing some of the basics of enterprise search and search systems in general (so I could spare some time in future just referring to those). This is what this post series is about.