Michael James - Developer

Today I had a random issue following changing one of my .Net Core projects. Usually I run these AnyCPU but this one needed to be X86 due to a third party library. I've done this before and had no issues but today VS seemed to launch the app and then immediately quit with an error exit code but no useful information! So far whenever I hit something like this I always try and run it via the console using dotnet run in the project directory. Fortunately this showed the issue straight away: It was not possible to find any compatible framework version The specified framework 'Microsoft.NETCore.App', version '2.1.5' was not found.   - Check application dependencies and target a framework version installed at:       C:\Program Files (x86)\dotnet\   - Installing .NET Core prerequisites might help resolve this problem:       http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=798306&clcid=0x409   - The .NET Core framework and SDK can be installed from: ...

This morning I had a very frustrating time. It started off well and I was continuing my drive to convert alot of our hardware services from .Net Framework over to .Net Core. Phase 1 is simply .Net Core running on Windows but then Phase 2 is true cross platform. To date its gone very well and I'll probably write about it further another time. This morning I was continuing to port code across, mainly making our libraries .Net Standard 2 or .Net Standard 2.0 with .Net 4.5 multi targeting. All worked fine until I converted my final library. The app built, it ran and seemed to be working fine however all of a sudden none of my breakpoints in Visual Studio worked. During this entire process I have found I've hit many build / compile issues when switching between branches and have often had to nuke my obj folders or do a git clean -xdf but this was not the case. Everything worked bar the breakpoints. The usual tricks didn't work, I even reboot my machine and then checked out t...

As I've previously mentioned I've been porting an existing Xamarin.Forms app over to UWP and tonight I've had to tackle an annoying bug which was quite difficult to overcome and I thought worthwhile sharing. The bug occurs when loading WebViews with HTML directly rather than a URL. I found that roughly 1 in 5 page loads ended up a blank page being rendered. As this is now the third platform for the App I was fairly confident the html and everything was correct. First of all I suspected a layout issue and maybe the width/height was being messed up so I added a background colour to the control but this always rendered. So not a layout issue. A quick Google led me to Johan Karlsson's post on events needing to be added on the main UI Thread  this seemed better at first but i ended up still hitting the issue 1 in 10 page loads.  More googling led me to a Xamarin bug with the issue  but no resolution :( Taylor Buchanan comments on the bug with a work around howeve...

Recently I've been migrating a Xamarin.Forms application which works on phones and tablets over to UWP so that its compatible with Windows 10 and available on the desktop. Most things have ported well and after a few tweaks most things are running. However during testing I noticed something odd. I use a master detail page to provide a navigation pane and then a details pane. On phones the navigation page is shown and hidden as expected. On tablets if landscape the menu is always open and if portrait it pops up over the details. Now on UWP it behaves as the tablet however I also expected if the window became small or docked to the side of the screen the menu would again turn into a pop over, but Xamarin.Forms doesn't support this by default. It is however quite easy to support this via a custom renderer. We can override the elements size changed and determine the size of the element. If the size is less than the minimum we want the menu to be automatically opened for we can ...

Tonight I spent some time continuing my port of a Mobile Application I developed a few years ago over to UWP. As it was built in Xamarin.Forms , which also supports UWP, so far its been a fairly straight forward process. During testing tonight however I kept getting an uncaught exception every time I tapped a list item. Specified argument was out of the range of valid values - Source Xamarin.Forms.Core Nasty Exception Now first I double checked the code and found UWP, iOS and Android all run the same code and nothing had changed, so I hadn't accidentally broken anything. What I did note was the pages that didn't have grouped list items worked fine, where as grouped lists always crashed. This lead me to take a look at my ItemSource code for the listview. My ListView ItemSource Now those observant might notice in the pic I'm inspecting the listingNavigationItems, and like I might have realised the potential issue. Dependent on whether grouping is enabled I eith...

In January at my new(ish) user group Momentum Meetups , I presented on "Reaching out beyond the Chrome" (although suffering from food poisoning so I was definitely going green at points!). It included  WebUSB and WebBluetooth . I was excited by how powerful it was and even had a colleague present something we had been prototyping in out work place. During the talk I mentioned security and how it had been designed so it only works on https and there's a permission model where you have to approve the device before it can be used. Unfortunately this week it came to light that Authentication devices could be bypassed via USB. These devices are a great way of proving you are who you say you are on the web beyond basic 2FA text's or applications. So being able to be able to bypass them via WebUSB is a big deal :( My Original Security Slide A few days later Google then disabled WebUSB by default effectively killing it off until such a time where its made secure...

Recently I started working on a small tweak to an existing web project, its a small internal dashboard sort of thing nothing complicated about it. However after I started working on it I found I could no longer build the project it came up with: ): error CS1525: Invalid expression term 'throw' ): error CS1002: ; expected  error CS1043: { or ; expected  error CS1513: } expected : error CS1014: A get or set accessor expected : error CS1513: } expected  When I looked at the location of the build errors I could see some perfectly valid code, all be it C#7:  public IEnumerable<AttemptResult> Attempts { get => _attempts; set => _attempts = (value ?? Enumerable.Empty<AttemptResult>()); } Why would it not like the C#7 code, i'm in VS2017 it should all be correct, when I double checked the language setting under Advanced Build Settings it correctly had C# latest major version, so it wasn't a case the project had got pinned to a lan...

Recently I've started experiencing weird build errors when switch branches on a product. Error : Your project.json doesn't have a runtimes section. You should add '"runtimes": { "win": { } }' to your project.json and then re-run NuGet restore. It's a weird sounding error and the fact it mentions project.json makes it sound like a hangup from when .Net Core and Standard were using project.json files before they became .csproj files again. My first thought to resolve this is always try a clean and build, particularity when swapping branches things could get left hanging around but this doesn't work. I took a closer look at the projects affected and the cause is to do with one of the branches of our product. It's an early development branch of a new feature where the project has become .Net Standard 2.0 but also targets .Net 4.5, where as the support and main dev branch are still the full framework class libraries.  The cause is mos...

So today I was looking into an odd issue our CEO experienced using a website. He would get a password reset email and upon following the link and entering a new password it would fail to change with a cryptic message. I said I'd have a quick look and see what I could see. I signed up and triggered a password reset and found no issue. I was using Chrome and assumed he had but it turns out he was using Safari on his Mac not Chrome. So I loaded up Safari on my Mac and used my link to again find no issue. To be thorough I asked him to send me his link, in Chrome no issue however this time in Safari I hit the issue. My first thought led me to then check what was posted to the server and sure enough in Chrome I could see an encoded access token sent but in Safari I saw my email address sent. I tried this on my CEO's machine and his machine posted his email address, it looked like Safari was autofilling hidden form fields as well as visible ones! This is crazy! So I performed ...

Recently in work we've been monitoring the data usage of one of our main products. In today's modern age as developers we often think of bandwidth as cheap and usually have nice fast internet connections and don't overly worry about the *bloat* of our pages and applications. Our application is often used on 4G connections and whilst they are fast and performance of the application is overall acceptable we found that its data usage was higher than expected and caused us a few concerns over the amount of GB consumed per month. We've benefited from GZip compression for many years now and most people don't even think about whether its enabled or running as well as it should be. Turning it on and off is usually as simple as turning on the feature in Server Manager and then enabling Static Compression (for your static files, CSS, Javascript etc) and then enabling Dynamic Compression for the generated HTML etc. So it was assumed all was well. As I'm paranoid abou...