Xamarin Forms – App Center: Show BuildID on iOS App

3rd of January, 2018 / / No Comments

Introduction

App center helps us to connect support git repositories (i.e GitHub, Bitbucket or VSTS)  and build the app for us either on every code commit or manually. It also sends notifications to users that are registered to it. It will also help us to run tests on the actual device and runs any unit tests in the project.

iOS and Android

App Center can be set up to build individual platforms projects.

Scenario:

Required to show BuildID on iOS APP during the development phase, as shown below.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin Forms – App Center: Show BuildID on iOS App”

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment

15th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

I have been working on an Azure Pass Project recently and try to leverage VSTS DevOps CICD features to automatic the build and deployment process. Thanks to my colleague Sean Perera, he helped me and provided a deep dive on the VSTS CICD process.
I am writing this blog to share the whole workflow:

  1. Create new project in VSTS, create Dev branch based on the master branch

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  1. Establish the connection from local VS to the VSTS project

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  1. Push web app codes to the VSTS dev branch environment

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3.1

  1. Set up the endpoint connections between VSTS and Azure:
  • Login to the Azure tenant environment, create new registration for VSTS tenant.
… [Keep reading] “Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment”

HoloLens – Spatial sound

15th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

The world of Mixed reality and Augmented reality is only half real without three-dimensional sound effects to support the virtual world. Microsoft deals with this challenge by leveraging the ability of their audio engine to generate Spatial Sound. Spatial sound, as a feature, can simulate three-dimensional sounds in a virtual world based on direction, distance, and other environmental factors. Spatial Sound is based on the concept of sound localization which is a popular topic in the field of sound engineering.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Spatial sound”

HoloLens – Understanding depth (Spatial Mapping)

15th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

Building smart applications which can work in a three-dimensional space has many challenges. Amongst these, the one that tops the list is the challenge of understanding and mapping the surrounding 3D world. Applications usually depend on the device and platform capability to resolve this problem. Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality devices ships with built-in technologies to measure the depth of the containing world.

Scenarios of interest

Mapping the world around a device is critical to enable powerful scenarios in this field.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Understanding depth (Spatial Mapping)”

Xamarin Forms: Mircosoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite issue with Physical devices

13th of December, 2017 / / 3 Comments

Introduction

Building Xamarin Forms apps using .Net Standard 2.0 is still pretty much new to industry, we are just started to learn how differently we have to configure Xamarin setting to get it working when compared to PCL based projects.
I was building a Xamarin Forms based App using Microsoft’s Entityframeworks SQlite to store app’s data. Entity framework using sqlite is an obvious choice when it comes to building App using .Net Standard 2.0

Simulator

Works well on pretty much on all simulators without any issue, all read/write operations works well.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin Forms: Mircosoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite issue with Physical devices”

Xamarin forms using .Net Standard 2.0

9th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

Introduction

All Xamarin developers, please welcome Net standard 2.0. This is the kind of class library we were waiting for all these years. The .Net standard 2.0 specification is now complete and it is included with Net core 2.0, Net framework 4.6.1 and up to latest versions. It can be used using Visual Studio versions 15.3 and up. Net Standard 2.0 obviously supports C# and also F# and Visual Basic.

More APIs

Net Standard 2.0 is for sharing code via various platforms.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin forms using .Net Standard 2.0”

Azure AD Domain Services

4th of December, 2017 / / No Comments

I recently had what I thought was a rather unique requirement from a customer.
The requirement was to build Azure IaaS virtual machines and have them joined to a managed domain, while also being able to authenticate to the virtual machines using Azure AD credentials.
The answer is Azure AD Domain Services!
Azure AD Domain Services provides managed domain services such as domain join, group policy and Kerberos/NTLM authentication without the need for you to deploy and  manage domain controllers in the cloud.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Domain Services”

HoloLens – Mixed Reality Toolkit

28th of November, 2017 / / No Comments

Game programming is an entirely different paradigm for an enterprise application developer in terms of the tools, processes and patterns used. But like any other development engagement, to kick start the development phase and to reduces the learning curve, it is always helpful to have a set of pre-baked tools handy. In the world of HoloLens application development, Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Toolkit is your best companion.
The Mixed Reality Toolkit is an open source project driven by Microsoft.… [Keep reading] “HoloLens – Mixed Reality Toolkit”