Building Applications with Event Sourcing and CQRS Pattern

16th of November, 2015 / / 4 Comments

When we start building an application on cloud, like Azure, we should consider many factors. Those factors include flexibility, scalability, performance and so on. In order to satisfy those factors, components making up the application should be loosely coupled and ready for extension and change at any time. For those considerations, Microsoft has introduced 24 cloud design patterns. Even though they are called as “Cloud Design Patterns”, they can be used just for application development anyway.… [Keep reading] “Building Applications with Event Sourcing and CQRS Pattern”

Google Cloud Messaging using Azure Notification Hub

8th of November, 2015 / / 3 Comments

The Xamarin team have provided a very helpful tutorial to get started with setting up Android notifications – I suggest using this to get the basic implementation working, and ensure you’re using the GcmRegistrationIntentService version, and avoid using the depreciated GCM Client.

To get a complete end to end solution up and running there is a fair bit of additional information required.  Here’s a guide for using Microsoft Azure Notification Hub.

Set up Google Cloud Messaging service

Log into the Google Developer Console (https://console.developers.google.com/… [Keep reading] “Google Cloud Messaging using Azure Notification Hub”

Taking Advantage of The (iOS 9) Universal Links on Xamarin iOS apps

3rd of November, 2015 / / 3 Comments

What is Scheme URI?

In the context of mobile apps, Scheme URIs are used for communicating between mobile apps. Mobile developers can register a unique URI for each app in the application manifest (info.plist). The operating system would then use that to launch your application once the user clicks on a link that matches your uri. For instance, I could have my-cool-app:// as my scheme uri. I could then generate links (should start with my-cool-app://) to send in my email to my app’s users and once clicked, my app will be launched.… [Keep reading] “Taking Advantage of The (iOS 9) Universal Links on Xamarin iOS apps”

Azure Security Fundamentals: Azure SQL Database

27th of October, 2015 / / 2 Comments

Microsoft Azure has many Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) features, with one of the oldest being Azure SQL Database (which has had many variations on that name in it’s time!)

Over the last few months Microsoft has released a raft of updates to Azure SQL Database that bolster its security chops. As a result I thought it would be good to cover off some basic best practices along with an overview of the new features and how they can help you improve your security stance when implemented.… [Keep reading] “Azure Security Fundamentals: Azure SQL Database”

Creating Service Contract with AutoRest, Swagger and HAL

26th of October, 2015 / / 10 Comments

According to Richardson Maturity Model, REST API level 3 should provide hypermedia within responses as metadata, so that users can easily navigate to other resources. This is particularly important if Microservices architecture (MSA) is considered for your service or application. Because MSA is a collection of small REST API services, each API server should provide complete set of documents or manuals for others to consume it properly. In order to provide document automation, Swagger is one of the best choices, and HAL, in order to provide hypermedia within the response, is also yet another option.… [Keep reading] “Creating Service Contract with AutoRest, Swagger and HAL”

PIN Number Password Fields for Windows XAML

22nd of October, 2015 / / No Comments

In Windows XAML world, a bad design decision was made to have PasswordBox and TextBox as different objects, meaning that the PasswordBox does not inherit common properties from the TextBox. As a consequence, you cannot do many of the things that you normally do with a textbox such as customising the appearance of the password textbox (say you want to make the text centre-aligned, or you want to bind the number keypad instead of the alpha keyboard).… [Keep reading] “PIN Number Password Fields for Windows XAML”

Handling Complex Object Persistence and Messaging on Mobile

21st of October, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Data persistence and messaging is a very common task that you almost certainly need in your apps. Mobile platforms have come a long way in supporting data persistence mostly through the SQLite engine which has become the standard on all mobile platforms. However, SQLite is (as it’s name suggests) a lightweight engine and does not offer as many features as a full RDBMS.

This should not be a problem on a mobile device where persisting data is intended mostly for caching until the data reaches its ultimate destination on a backend server.… [Keep reading] “Handling Complex Object Persistence and Messaging on Mobile”

Connecting to MS SQL Server with MuleSoft

9th of October, 2015 / / 14 Comments

MuleSoft provides an extensive list of connectors which come in handy when implementing integration solutions. In many integration scenarios, we need to connect directly to a database to get or update data. MuleSoft provides a database connector which allows JDBC connectivity with relational databases to execute SQL operations such as Select, Insert, Update, Delete, and Stored Procedures.

However, the database connector only provides out-of-the-box connectivity with Oracle, MySQL, and Derby databases. To connect to Microsoft SQL Server, additional steps are to be followed.… [Keep reading] “Connecting to MS SQL Server with MuleSoft”

Programmatically interacting with Yammer via PowerShell – Part 2

14th of August, 2015 / / 15 Comments

In my last post I foolishly said that part 2 would be ‘coming in the next few days’. This of course didn’t happen, but I guess it’s better late than never!

In part 1 which is available here, I wrote how it was possible to post to a Yammer group via a *.ps1 using a ‘Yammer Verified Admin’ account. While this worked a treat, it soon became apparent that this approach had limited productivity rewards.… [Keep reading] “Programmatically interacting with Yammer via PowerShell – Part 2”

Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS

7th of August, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Azure Application Insights (AI) is a great instrumentation tool that can help you learn about how your application is doing during run-time. It is currently in Preview mode, so bear that in mind when developing production ready apps. It gives you the ability to log lots of different kinds of information like tracing, page views, custom events, metrics and more.

Azure AI supports multiple platforms, but unfortunately they have not released a Xamarin package yet. There is one library which is for Xamarin.Forms… [Keep reading] “Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS”