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Showing posts from July, 2017

Its the little things...

In the history of C# we have been spoiled by every version having excellent new language features in. We had Generics, Linq, Tasks, async/await which were massive hitters and transformed the way we worked and wrote code. C#7 however I found has given us lots of little improvements that make things smoother and easier which has been great. One feature I hadn't really used yet though was the new Pattern Matching , this wasn't because I hadn't wanted to but more I hadn't seen a time to really use it. That was until tonight. A year or so ago I had a scenario where I had to take a base type and then1 return the appropiate mobile view to render. Prior to Pattern Matching I ended up with something like: if (value is HoldingPage) return new LoadingView(); } var listingPage = value as ListingPage; if (listingPage != null) { return new ListingView(listingPage); } Tonight I needed to add a new view into this code and decided it needed tidying up. Pattern Matching

Fixing a Quirky "Xamarin.Forms ListView Bug" That Led Me Back to Basics And How Most Bugs Are Written By Users!

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For the last two evenings I've been chasing what seemed a random bug. The crux of it came down to scrolling large lists within a ListView, 1000's of items, which were grouped, would muddle up the items and often duplicate an item a couple of times. An example output: First page of results: Test 1 Test 2 Test 3 Test 4 Test 5 Test 6 Test 7 Test 8 Test 9 Test 10 Test 11 Test 12 The second page would then render: Test 13 Test 14 Test 1 Test 15 Test 16 Test 4 Test 17 Test 18 Test 19 Test 20 Test 6 At first glance this looked like a random error. I considered that maybe my list parsing code (the app takes HTML and makes in easier to use) but my unit tests checked out. So I went over these again with a toothcomb. All checked out. Next I considered the code that grouped the items, again unit tests all good, toothcomb said still good. So I sat pondering. Was there something similar about all of the duplicated items. There was, they were all items that

A First Foray into Alexa Skills Using AWS Lambda's with C#

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Tonight I decided to try out something new that I had been meaning to for a while rather than continue poking around on my app. Since Alexa's release I've been itching to play with it, I decided whilst I was learning one thing why not learn three things so decided to use AWS Lambdas with .Net Core as well. I've used AWS extensively with work but never used Lambdas although I was aware of them and knew they were similar to Azure Functions,  Ben Godwin 's show on .Net Rocks also convinced me it was time to give them a proper look. .Net Core I've also played with and had some great training from the .Net Core guys at NDC London from this year but I've never published anything. Tonight this was all going to change :) A quick note before I continue, I'm writing this as I go so a few things might feel disjointed but hopefully it will all make sense. First Steps - 1st Hour In order to get going I set my self up a personal Amazon account, you can go do