BillTalksTooMuch

Dart Failure Handling

I write these notes for myself so I don't forget the more complicated stuff I come across. In a great video series, Matt from ResoCoder shows how capturing exceptions at the repository and returning failures to the layers above it a better approach than trying to capture exceptions everywhere in

Sub queries in LINQ

Writing these damn queries always makes me feel stupid. Here's a sample where we need to filter on the values in an object and other values in a list contained inside the object, but need access to the parent object and associated child object when we're finished. var location = userAccountSummaries

Trout Lake Deer Hunting Catastrophe ~ November 1933

This is the accounting of a hunting trip that nearly ended badly. This document was found during a cleaning up exercise and has been reproduced here in its entirety. Some of you will know these individuals.

Crap I always forget...

Using Enums Always declare a zero value, valid enum Use ResourceDictionary to localize them. For flags, remember there is a limit of 31 for an int and 63 for a long. Microsoft docs To create a normal Enum, use the attribute below so that serialization and deserialization values are maintained.

The App: Identity Set Up

I have officially lost my mind. I've never run into so many roadblocks in my life on a single concept. Everything seems to be about halfway there, nothing works completely out of the box. And since the effort crosses so many platforms, frameworks and concepts, and since nothing holds still

core

Some Bits On Reflection

There are some hard to find solutions for reflection issues that work on both .NET 4.61 and .Net Core 1.1 I'm just putting there here so I can find them again. Turning a collection of objects into a List of objects List<object> entityList = (objCollection as

The App: Token Flow

I thought I'd write this all down before I forget it. Really hard to remember it after stepping away for a second. I'm using the Microsoft Azure Mobile App platform and I want to support a number of different identity providers and platforms. This is basically how it works: My

app

Setting Up with Zapier

This shouldn't have been that hard, but it was. I mostly blame pronouns. I'm documenting this here just so I'll remember how to redo it all again later. As usual. To be clear, an App is what a developer creates so others can use it. A Zap is something a

movies

Stuff Worth Watching

When I run into friends these days they often ask what I've been watching. Not that they think my opinion means all that much, just that I might have caught something they missed. So I decided to put together a page that lists some of the stuff I found (or

The App: Security Compromises

After all this work, it appears that we're at a bit of an impasse with regard to MS products and identity. This is beyond frustrating. At the heart of this is Azure B2C which must be the foundation of our identity. Nothing else is affordable or as secure. There are

app; development

The App: Logging In/Out User Experience

It seems that every supplier of identity libraries has their own idea about controlling the login flow. Of course, none of them seem to match ours. The problem is, they automatically want to refresh the tokens against their own identity stores when they expire. And they all expire at different

app; development

The App: Security Selection and Considerations

This has been far more difficult than it ever should have been. None of the pieces of the puzzle ever seemed to fit. But here's what happened and what we're doing: Constraints: The client (device) side has to run in Xamarin Forms as this is the basis for all non-web

The APP: More Pesky Security Setbacks

So for more than a month I've been working on figuring out how to finally get my security model in place. And failed. It wasn't a complete waste, I'm quite sure I headed off a number of surprises that would have been more costly later. But... Microsoft's Azure DocumentDB is

The App: Great Ways to Debug Azure Mobile Apps - Part2

In Part 1 of this I showed how to connect up Azure Mobile Apps to ngrok.io and make it work. But if you want real performance data on your server side, you can add Prefix from Stackify. Simply modify the project's web.config as shown below. Note, you have

The App: Great Ways to Debug Azure Mobile Apps - Part 1

The problem with developing cloud based services, especially those involving authentication, is that at least some of the logic lives in the cloud. Attaching a debugger to that process in the cloud works, but it's a little slow and it would be faster if you could run the server and

Suggestions for a Xamarin Client SDK Login

Adrian, Thanks so much for listening to these suggestions. I think some of them might be a little bit of an edge case (multiple users on a single device) but others seem to get a lot of play on various forums which suggests lots of folks are wrestling with them.

Working with the IoT and Windows 10

So I decided a long time ago to use the Raspberry Pi 2 for a little home experiment regarding humidity in my crawlspaces and basement. It's already costing me thousands, so putting $50 into it wasn't that painful. It got parked a while ago, but the problem is back. I'm

Cable and Internet

Our internet situation is a challenge. When we bought the house, there was a Uverse router in the basement. I figured that was sub optimal, but it would do. Trying to activate the service prior to moving in AT&T informed me that I was eligible for "lightspeed&

The App: Security. Jesus. What A Mess.

You can't build an app these days without building security in from the start. Whatever choice you make, it ends up baked into everything. So I decided to take a one-and-done approach to this. Figure out the best and just wade in and get it done. Not happening. At. All.

The App: Really Cool Test/Debugging Setup

Trying to host a local site on your local machine while communicating with other hosts can be a huge pain. But it's really important for debugging and seeing the traffic and what's going on. If you're trying to do that, here's a series of steps that make it much easier

app; development

The App: Shifting Gears - The Database

So I thought I would just use Azure Table Storage for everything, given the fact that it's about $0.12 per gigabyte per month. Pretty awesome. But Storage Tables only allow one index. Which means that I have to decide about how I want to query the data right up

app; development

The App: Shifting Gears - The Gateway

So, just when I thought I had this figured out... I had selected Authorize.NET as our gateway to allow people to charge credit cards. They have a nice .NET library to connect to them and that makes it easier. But their architecture made some of our objectives harder. For

app; development

The App: Modelling Heresy

In developer blogs over the last year or so, I’ve seen a drift away from a single data model that describes the solution and that every aspect of the app uses. Used to be if you had a customer object, that was it. You used that object and it's

app; development

The App: Data Storage Choices for Scale

Pro tip: If you are cutting and pasting using Edge and Ghost, be sure to copy and paste instead. Just lost an entire post trying to split one post into two. sigh I come from an old school relational background. We made line of business medical billing apps.[^n] Scale

The App: Client Tool Selection

I was out for bit on a sailing vacation with my sister and her family. Really awesome bit of time off. Just before I left, I'd built some projects (very small ones) with Xamarin to see if it lived up to its advertising (and to make sure I could do