I recently had a client who wanted to create simple reports that consisted of a variable number of columns, followed by a “more” button that takes you to a page with the full details. 
The problem was that they didn’t want to hard-code anything. They wanted the ability to add reports without sending out a new version of the software, and they wanted to be able to pick which columns were visible. Yikes!
Jeffrey T. Fritz is a senior program manager in Microsoft’s Developer Outreach Group that works with the community on open source projects and the new Microsoft .NET Core 
framework. As a long time web developer with experience in large and small applications across a variety of verticals, he knows how to build for performance and practicality. More recently, he has worked closely with developers to teach them to succeed with new tools and frameworks from Microsoft and Telerik
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In a recent project, I found myself needing multiple, seemingly unrelated databases. 
It was crazy to copy and paste the code for such basic operations as getting all the data, etc., so the obvious alternative was a generic repository, and a database with tables for each set of data.
The first step is creating the SQLite repo. We begin by creating the class:
public class GenericSqliteRepository<T> where T : IEntity, new()
Laurent works as Senior Global Azure Advocate for Microsoft after almost 10 years spent working for IdentityMine and Valorem, two leading firms in Microsoft technologies. He is one of the foremost experts for XAML and C# based development. He codes in 
Windows, WPF, Xamarin (iOS and Android), Unity, ASP.NET. On his free time, Laurent writes for technical publications such as MSDN Magazine, and his blog is on blog.galasoft.ch. He is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Microsoft MIX, Build, TechEd, VSLive, TechDays and many other international events. Prior to joining Microsoft, Laurent was a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional for Windows development from 2007 to 2017, a Microsoft Regional Director from 2013 and a Xamarin Most Valuable Professional from 2015. He is also the author of the well-known open source framework MVVM Light for Windows, WPF, Xamarin, and of the popular Pluralsight reference course about MVVM Light.
It is fairly easy to display a PDF file that is local to your phone. For example, see this article from Xamarin.com.
A bit trickier is to get a PDF from a server and then to display it. 
Here’s how I did it (note, this blog post offers snippets of code, rather than a complete solution… I will reduce my larger program to something manageable asap)
The first thing I did was create a model object named ReportItem. Its primary goal is to help group all the items in my list of pdf’s, but it contains the all-important URL to the pdf itself.
Next, I created a page named ShowPDFPage. In the XAML part of this page I just have a CustomWebView:
<local:CustomWebView Uri="foo.pdf"
HorizontalOptions="FillAndExpand"
VerticalOptions="FillAndExpand" />
The CustomWebView was taken from an article I found on the web.
public class CustomWebView : WebView
{
public static readonly BindableProperty UriProperty = BindableProperty.Create (propertyName:"Uri",
returnType:typeof(string),
declaringType:typeof(CustomWebView),
defaultValue:default(string));
public string Uri
{
get { return ( string ) GetValue( UriProperty ); }
set { SetValue( UriProperty, value ); }
}
}
This performs the magic of showing the PDF file, but how do we get it?
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Part 1 is a general introduction to Azure for developers.
Part 2 focuses on working with Data in Azure
His passions are deploying and teaching modern web technologies, and enjoying everything Disney with his family. John is a co-host of the popular Adventures in Angular podcast, author of the Angular Style Guide, and many popular Pluralsight courses
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