DEV Community: Rob

The long and winding road

Rob — Sat, 25 Sep 2021 06:48:35 +0000

Hi everyone, this is Bertha.

Bertha, meet everyone.

She'd beep at you, but now I think about it, I haven't added any speakers or sound capability yet.
Bertha is a side-side-side project of mine. You see, I have a dream of building autonomous sailing boats en-masse to do ocean research and protection.

Say, what?

There is a significant amount in there to unravel. I first dreamed this up as the Sea Shepard organisation was jousting with Japanese whalers in the Pacific. It seemed that there must be a more effective (both result and cost) way of doing this.

The cost of putting a single vessel to sea for the conservation group is monstrous. And that's for one boat, that can only be in one place at a time, and has to take on significant risk.

So my idea of a small fleet (big would be better) of autonomous boats was born.

They could do all kinds of ocean research with a few sensors added and report in periodically. They can be positioned as requested or be left to go where they decide based on factors like weather conditions, proximity to other vessels (including each other) and even just investigate things they find interesting.

The cost of these would be minimal compared to the existing fleet and have far more capability while they are at sea.

How again does this help whales?

Well, surely there is a sound or something they could produce to scare whales if they are in danger; imitate a pod of Orca's or something.

But that's the least of my worries. I had no idea how to have code interact with the physical world, nor did I understand autonomous drones.

Launch of Aurora for GitHub!

Rob — Wed, 10 Jun 2020 03:43:58 +0000

I made it.

I had to cut the MVP down to make the #Launch2020UWP deadline of June 9 but I made it.

There will be many updates to add the power features, building upon this base.

Looking at the positive; there will be much room for feedback in the future direction of Aurora and that's exciting!

The Launch article can be found here

A direct link to get the free, non time limited no advertising version is here in the Microsoft Store.

Rob.
Valley Software.

Project Aurora - It's Alive!

Rob — Thu, 09 Apr 2020 11:06:23 +0000

We are //cooking now!

The get, post and patch are all working so we are not just listing issues like before, but editing, opening and closing them, and submitting new issues!

And there's more.

We're doing all that with Repo's too!

Project Aurora Status Update March 21st

Rob — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 23:27:13 +0000

Progress has slowed considerably, as my other work has become a bit crazy with all these Covid-19 preparations; day job taking up 12 hours a day doesn't leave much room for anything else after being a parent and husband...

It's not too bad though; end of the day my family is safe and well so I can't complain. Hopefully soon I will see some of that time-to-be-bored I keep seeing plaguing people on the internet!

So, I have fixed the sign in, but I had to drop the GitHubApp auth and go back to standard OAuth. It's working well and I have left the code base in there so I can change it later on when I have more time.

Further I have repo's listing, and the details are all there behind the scenes ready for a more detailed listing. Repo's and Accounts have web links to open in browser, which is particularly useful right now.

I have some UI work to do, but as a test bed it is working well with multiple accounts etc, so I am pretty happy with that!

Here's some progress shots:

Project Aurora Update V00.01.02

Rob — Mon, 09 Mar 2020 01:05:07 +0000

It has been a slow start for Aurora; basically the dreaded WebAuthenticationBroker, which is the standard way in UWP of performing OAuth, struck again.

If you know this control, you're already cringing.

The unreliability of this particular control has led me to halt development before, as trying to maintain with it and keep it going is to the most part not worth while.

But this time, I needed to figure something out.

In this particular case, the issue was with it using Internet Explorer under the hood.

You read that right; in 2020 it uses Internet Explorer. Not edge, not some form of Chromium, IE11.

This isn't supported by GitHub (Hilarious that Microsoft's development environment focusing on Microsoft operating systems doesn't work with Microsoft's code repository, no?)

So I found some code which would help me use Edge engine. Woohoo!

Of course it didn't work. It got kinda close though and gave me what I needed to write my own.

That took me a week.

Then I continued to find little issues which needed ironing out. The last of which was clearing it's local data so it would permit log on from multiple different accounts.

With that done, and a spanking new icon added, here are some progress screenshots:

New Icon and Purple app theme

Multi Account List and main layout

OAuth

User Home Account tab, only just started

What you don't know can't help you part 3; RequestedTheme

Rob — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 18:48:35 +0000

Dark is the new Light

As UWP developers, we are accustomed to our apps being displayed in both light and dark modes.

It still seems to be a Wow! Look at this! on other platforms, but we've been doing this for years.

The next level is enforcing a light or dark theme. You can set it by using the RequestedTheme property.

The most common use I've seen of this in the has been setting whole pages at once to one theme or another using the Page xaml like this:

<Page
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006"
    mc:Ignorable="d"
    Background="{ThemeResource ApplicationPageBackgroundThemeBrush}"
    ...
    RequestedTheme="Dark">

This will set all controls within the Page XAML element to Dark theme. Which is cool because it shows us that it is inherited from parent controls

   <Page RequestedTheme="Dark">
       <TextBlock/> //Will be dark theme without us having to explicitly set it
       <Button/> //Will be dark theme without us having to explicitly set it
   </Page>

But wait, there's more!

So, how is it that it can apply to all these different elements like that?

Well, RequestedTheme is part of the FrameworkElement; which in UWP/Xaml is a very powerful base class used in (almost) every visual element you use daily.

Why is this important?

Well, now that we know this we start to understand that we can use it in many more powerful ways.

For example, want to make it dark in your whole app, regardless of whether the user's OS is in dark mode or not?

Well, set it in App.xaml.cs!

<Application
    x:Class="My.App"
    xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
    xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
    ...
    RequestedTheme="Dark">

Or, you can go the other way and set it at the individual element level, by applying it to single FrameworkElements:

<Button
    Content="Press Me"
    TooltipService.Tooltip="I'm not saying the world will explode, but it might..."
    ...
    RequestedTheme="Dark"/>

...and any combnation of the above.

Namaste,
Rob.

GitHub from the beginning, in Visual Studio

Rob — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 23:24:50 +0000

Who's this for?

Visual Studio users who want to start using Source Control in their projects, new or existing, but have no experience with source control.

Pre-work.

OK, you will need a GitHub account. They're free and fast to setup! I doubt I can explain that any better then GitHub do.

Go get setup, I'll wait.

Open your Project (in Visual Studio)

Oh, your back!

Let's continue. To get your project into GitHub, you want to open it first.
Alternatively you can start a brand new project to experiment with.

Either way, get a project open in Visual Studio.

Get version control for your project

With your project open, right click on the solution. In the (rather long) list is a magic option Add Solution to Source Control.

Click it and a new repository will be added to your solution. Yay! You now have source control.

But...

It's only local to your PC. Not on GitHub or anywhere else.

Get your project into GitHub!

Don't be disheartened though, you're actually almost there.

Next, get the Team Explorer tab open. If it is not currently visible, you can get it from the View menu.

With the Team Explorer open, click the Sync button (You can always find these buttons again by pressing the Home button)

You'll be prompted to chose between Azure DevOps, GitHub or other remote repository. Choose GitHub and then sign in with your shiny new GitHub account.

You'll notice that in the example, I tick the Private check box. As that particular project of mine is not open source I have ticked it so only I, and others I select, can view it.

Press Publish, and up it goes to GitHub.

Now what?

Now you start making changes to your project like normal.

As you do, you'll see the icon next to each file change. If it's red then that file has changed compared to the repository.

If you're working alone on your project (the easiest way to start and the way I'm limiting this article) then you need only push your changes up to the server.

Note: do this only when you're happy with the changes you've made.

To sync up your changes, go back to the Team Explorer and select Changes.

This will list for you all the changed or added files.

Add a note to explain what you've modified and then press Commit All. I tend to always use the Commit All and Sync option to make sure everything matches.

Well done!

Welcome to the world of professional source control.

There is much more to learn, but this is just to get you started.

Enjoy!

Rob,
Valley Software.

A late night binge to replace the Microsoft Ad Control

Rob — Mon, 24 Feb 2020 00:41:36 +0000

So, last night I couldn't sleep, thus I got up, turned on my trusty Dell and sunk my teeth into something I had ben putting off: Replacing the Microsoft Ad Control in my UWP apps which do ads.

I sort of knew what I wanted.

While it looks like the ad SDK component, it has a different intention; I will NOT make advertising revenue from these (boo), but it will point existing customers to my other products (yay!).

Minimal change to the apps workings and licensing (1-1 swap). I don't want to have to go back and re-create and re-think the revenue models.
I want it to rotate through my own ads.
Should be able to click an ad to see more/go to the store.
Stand alone: I want it to be possible to copy it from one app directly into another and have it still work without reliance on the rest of the app being a certain way.
No database or other configuring: some apps use SQLite, others plain text or JSON, some none of the above. This needs to work completely independent of that configuration
fast, lightweight so as to keep the UI snappy (of course, the existing MS Ad Control was not fast or reliable, so my bar here is fairly low).

After 60-90 minutes of sleep deprived work, this is how far I got:

First; the XAML. I don't expect you to be copying all this from here, as it is incomplete and you can't see it all anyway.

Secondly, the code behind. There isn't much but you can see some of the code to load in the ads automatically.

This is how it looks. Note the progress bar (shows how long each ad will be displayed for before rotation) and the start of a clickable interface to go forwards and backwards through the ads.

What's happening here?

Well, like I said above I don't want to have to ship XML/JSON/Text/SQL configuration of the ads or maintaining them could get messy. I want each app to look or what ad is available and rotate them.

To do this made a folder for the images (InHouseAdImages) and in it I dump as many images of the right size/aspect ratio as I want it to display. By naming the files the store ID of the app it represents, I can easily open it when clicked!

It loads each image into an ObservableCollection and acquires a full size image, a thumbnail (placeholder), and a link (from the file name).

The XAML is effectively a 3 row grid as follows:

Header message for ad control.
Ad rotator.
Remove ads (purchase) button.

In the middle row, is a standard UWP FlipView with a WinToolkit ImageEx in it. On top of that is he manual ad select and a progress indicator at the bottom.

The indicator is actually just a 30 second animation from 1-30. This means there is no timer behind it and it's much smoother.

What am I happy about?

I love that I can just dump images into the directory with the correct name and the app controls the rest without input.
The animations are smooth by using standard controls (FlipView and transition animation on the ProgressBar)
I can just drop this into any of my apps and it will replace the existing Microsoft ad control.

What's missing/broken?

The 'ads' are just solid colours at the moment. Red, Green and Blue to make the animations obvious.
The collection doesn't save it's 'Current', it just rotates.
I hacked much of the MVVM in an effort to avoid cross-contamination with the resto of my app structure, but it needs a significant clean up.
The manual ad select is very wrong, but it's there. The title row isn't respecting the aspect ratio of the other controls, making it stretch it's width.

Future enhancements?

Well, just one. It would be better again if the ads were just hosted somewhere and the app would automatically pull down the latest ones rather than needing to be shipped with the deployable package itself. Not a big deal, yet.

Also I am considering opening it up to other devs. Kind of an ad-share, if you like.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with the progress so far and looking forward to cleaning it up.

Update

Here is the semi-finished product with the fixes added.

Back of the Project Aurora napkin

Rob — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 02:47:20 +0000

Ever hear of a project being drawn up on the back of a napkin?

Well, here's the basic starting 'napkins' for Project Aurora showing what I am and am not interested in.

And the plan from now until the release date in June with the #Launch2020 crew:

You can see I have left room for Spoons, Onesie (Another concept) and a major feature update for Kanban Ink

Plus all the other maintenance, of course!

Stop procrastinating and do the thing!

Rob — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 23:17:51 +0000

Ok Rob, it looks good enough.

There is no way to put it off any longer.

STOP MAKING IT PRETTY AND ADD THE AUTHENTICATION CODE!

What does a basic project look like for me?

Rob — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 06:03:46 +0000

So, what was my basic app starting point look like in February 2020?

Sort of like this:

There is some stuff added and removed from standard for me; for example I have stripped out the Settings view I normally have (I'll re-add that later).

But it gives you an idea.

I have dreams of having base ListViewModels setup, as they tend to work in VERY similar ways 90% of the time, but I have never worked that out how I want it to be.

There is significant room for improvement and reduction of duplicate load/delete/startnew code in those view models. I've moved on though for now as you can spend a lot of time "collecting underpants", so to speak, while not getting on with solving problems.

Chao,
Rob.

Project Aurora Begins

Rob — Mon, 10 Feb 2020 05:32:13 +0000

I've decided to move my development blogging to hear, from my companies own blog.

The idea is to separate customer facing entries from dev and community facing ones.

So, what is in the lab at #ValleySoftware?

Well, my Launch project for 2020 is Project Aurora. It's a GitHub client aimed at the NON-CODE parts. Being #Launch, it's a Microsoft Store UWP app.

So not managing merge conflicts, etc.

It's all about pull requests, contributor management, issues and project management via a Kanban interface.

I've had a few false starts at this, but at least my knowledge is building up.

I've got a very good base app ready now and have started fleshing out the low level stuff.

As of right now it doesn't look like much, but the plumbing underneath the hood is fairly well built out and ready to go.

I'll try to post regularly here in the open as I go for the amusement of others and to kick myself into gear and actually get on with it!

More soon, Rob.