This is part 3 of an ongoing series on Azure for Developers, based on a set of forthcoming videos from LinkedIn Learning
In Part 2 of this series, we looked at creating an application in the Azure Portal. More common is to create your application in Visual Studio and then to deploy it to Azure. We’ll look at that now.
This is part 2 of an ongoing series on Azure for Developers, based on a set of forthcoming videos from LinkedIn Learning
In Part 1 of this series, we began to look at some of the ways to “chunk” the various parts of Azure, and focused in on PaaS (Platform as a Service). Let’s get started on our first App Service.
Open the Portal and log in as described in Part 1. On the left, click App Services. At the moment, you don’t have any, so click Create App Service. This opens a long menu of App Services. Scroll through and see what is available.
Click on ASP.NET Starter. That brings up a review “blade.” click Create This will bring up the ASP.NET Starter Web App blade, where you can configure your starter app. Fill in a name. To avoid conflicts I typically begin my application names with a couple letters followed by a dash, followed by the name. For example, here I might use jl-firstApp.
This series begins with an overview here
This series is based on my forthcoming Pluralsight Course: Building Your First Mobile Application with Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio 2017
Xamarin.Forms has a number of “Layout” controls that can contain other controls (views) and help you with positioning those views on the page. There are a number of different layouts available to you, including:
For the first number of blog posts in this series, we’ll be using the StackLayout (one view on top of another or one view next to another) and the GridLayout (similar to an HTML table)
This is part 1 of an ongoing series on Azure for Developers, based on a set of forthcoming videos from LinkedIn Learning.
…really big. There is so much to it, that getting started can be totally daunting.
Let me start by saying that there is a lot of literature, documentation, videos, etc. on Azure; much of it free on the Azure home page
The problem is that there is so much documentation that again, it is hard to know where to start. In addition, Azure is a moving target. It seems that each week brings new features, or changes to the existing interface to Azure (for example, the Portal, discussed below).
Because Azure is so big, it is terribly difficult to drop into the documentation, where you will see sentences like this: “Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to build, package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices.”
Say what? (Don’t get me wrong, the documentation is fantastic, and incredibly well written… it is just that it can be difficult to understand anything until you understand everything. That is why I’m going to take a very narrow, developer-oriented, step by step approach.
This series begins with an overview here
In Part 2 we considered MVVM
This series is based on my forthcoming Pluralsight Course: Building Your First Mobile Application with Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio 2017
Just about any serious mobile application will have two or more “pages.” (We’re going to refer to pages throughout this series, though that is less meaningful in mobile apps than it is in, for example, desktop applications).
The starting point for Xamarin.Forms navigation is with the Navigation service. To see how this works, let’s create a new Xamarin.Forms (blank) application named NavigationDemo.
I think many would argue that discussing MVVM is premature in part 2 of a discussion on Xamarin.Forms. My counter argument is that it is important to start out with best practices, and MVVM is the pattern of choice for Xamarin.Forms
MVVM was created (or more accurately, it evolved from previous patterns) along with the development of WPF and later, Silverlight. Projects that use XAML for the development of a User Interface are particularly good candidates for this pattern.
MVVM is nothing more (and nothing less!) than a way to create a clean separation of concerns among the various classes of your app, and to ensure that your app is testable and that dependencies are minimized or eliminated.
MVVM stands for Model – View – ViewModel. This implies a separation of your code into the domain-relevant data (the Model) and the representation of data (the View) and finally, the logic (sometimes called the business logic) of your program (the ViewModel)
This post begins a series in which I will introduce Xamarin.Forms, put it in context and then teach all you need to know to go from absolute beginner to intermediate/advanced Xamarin.Forms programmer. I assume no prior mobile programming experience, though you will need to know C#.
This series is based on my new Pluralsight Course: Building Your First Mobile Application with Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio 2017 (due out this week)
My guess is that if you are reading this you probably know, so I’ll be brief:
With Xamarin.Forms you write to a common set of “controls” or “views” and these are translated to native controls when the program is created. Xamarin.Forms applications are indistinguishable from native applications because, by the time they hit the phone, they are native apps.
(Click on image to go to course)
Talking with James Montemagno, Principal Program Manager for Mobile Developer Tools at Microsoft
This is from my Help! page, but I thought it might be worth blogging here as well…
Creating a Question That Is Likely To Be Answered
There are a few techniques that make for a question that is likely to be answered quickly and well. While none of this is a surprise, take a look at the questions that are posted, most don’t follow these simple guidelines:
Summarize your question in the topic
Most folks are more likely to open a question with the topic “How Do I sort a column in a datagrid” than one with the topic “Help, Urgent!” even though the latter may, in fact, be more urgent
Be Brief, Be Precise
A long rambling message whose point is hard to fathom is hard to answer.
Write Down the Exception or Error Message
It is far easier to help someone if they way “when I click on the button the second time I get a an exception saying that I’ve tried to access a null object,” than it is to help someone who writes “Sometimes my program blows up and I get an error.”
Provide An Example
The single most effective thing you can do to get help is to write the smallest and simplest example that shows the problem. It should be so small it fits cleanly into your message – not as an attachment (many folks are reluctant to open attachments). It should do only one thing, and that is: illustrate the problem; and it should be self-revealing.
Topic: When I add data to my listBox I sometimes get an “Index was outside the bounds of the array”
Message: I have a program that adds strings to a listBox based on the user pressing a button. Here is a stripped down example. In the Xaml I declare a button and a list box:
using System.Windows;
using System.Windows.Controls;
namespace Error
{
public partial class MainPage : UserControl
{
string[] data = new string[] { "a", "b", "c", "d" };
public MainPage()
{
InitializeComponent();
AddFieldToListBox.Click +=
new RoutedEventHandler( AddFieldToListBox_Click );
}
void AddFieldToListBox_Click(
object sender, RoutedEventArgs e )
{
for ( int i = 0; i <= data.Length; i++ )
{
ListOfText.Items.Add( data[ i ] );
}
}
}
}
The error happens on line 22 (adding the data). I don’t see how it is out of bounds.
This is a fairly plausible error for a newbie to run into and it is an inviting question to answer: the topic tells me what I’m dealing with, the message is very short but tells me what I need to know and the example, while short, makes obvious where the problem is.
Key here is short – the shorter your message and the smaller your example, the more likely you are to get an answer; don’t make the people who want to help you work harder than necessary.
For those of you who attended my session on Advanced C#, here is a zip of the examples. Thanks
Talking with Matthew Robbins, creator of MFractor. MFractor is a set of extraordinary tools for Visual Studio Mac.
