development

Dec

2020

Goodbye, 2020!

In the beginning of 2020, I was polishing up the app for my personal blog as well as my WordPress reader library. I started to write a series about my experience on implementing push notifications with Azure which I still must finish.

During the spring lockdown, I also started a new project, which is now in the MVP (minimum viable product) state. I started to improve the overall performance by moving parts of the application to the cloud (ongoing process). I hope I will be able to share more on this project soon, but here’s already a screen shot:

Besides working on my personal projects and trying to get some fruit/vegetables from our garden, I was contacted by my new employer (dormakaba AG, starting 2021) in summer on StackOverflow. As I haven’t done any interview for close to 6 years at that time, I decided to “play the game” to gain some refreshing experience. I went through the entire process (which was also different due to COVID-19) and was offered the job – in the end, I accepted it.

Since I am changing my employer, I was quite busy in the last three months of the years to finish the work I started in my daytime job – which is the reason I was so quiet during that time.

2020 was a challenging year (mostly due to COVID-19). Overall, my family and I went through it and did handle most challenges quite well. My biggest personal achievement in 2020: I finally freed myself from the slavery of nicotine and became a non-smoker. Besides that, Santa did an excellent job again this year and upgraded my computer to a MacBook Pro:

2021 will still be a challenging year due to COVID-19. We will still need to keep distance, wear masks, and wash our hands (and stay at home as much as possible). I am sure there will be other challenges and hopefully plenty of chances as well.

Let me close this post by wishing you all a Happy New Year and more important: stay safe and healthy!

Title Image by iXimus from Pixabay

Dec

2014

Review of a geek’s 2014

We are close to the end of this year 2014, time for a little review.

At the beginning of the year, I was mostly busy with working on my UserVoice library that makes it easier for me and other developers to integrate UserVoice into Windows Phone apps. I also launched Voices Admin, the companion app for the library. I will start to rewrite this library in 2015 to make it a true Universal library for Windows, Windows Phone as well as Xamarin (and make it return objects instead of naked JSON strings).

I also had some troubles with my former hoster, which lead to a total domain chaos and finally ended in January, too. Thanks to Azure Websites, the transition should have been without problems. At Telefónica, I was busy finishing the internal App “Friends & You” for Android and Windows Phone. I learned a lot using Xamarin for the Android version, and even more about corporate rules and requirements. In the beginning of December, I also finished the iOS variant of the app (using Xamarin.Forms) – which is sadly set to be not launched for the moment (mostly because of my departing of Telefónica).

During the year, we also received the Windows Phone 8.1 Developer Preview. It removed the ability to cross post on social networks on Windows Phone. As this was one of my most used features, I decided to solve this problem for myself and started to write my own cross posting solution. As some of my followers recognized this, I continued my efforts to a more public and polished version, the result is UniShare for Windows Phone.

Since the first WP8.1 Developer Preview, we also have Cortana. Cortana is an awesome piece of software – if you are willing to use your phone with English and US region settings. I tried the UK version as well as the Italian and German version, but was only satisfied with the US one. I truly hope that the other countries will be on par in 2015.

I also updated my very first app ever (Fishing Knots +) to a Windows Phone 8 only version, leaving the old version for WP7 users. Also my NFC Toolkit received some love (and will receive even more in 2015). On top, I started to work on a Universal library for WordPress, which I will also continue to work on in 2015 to make it even better.

One of my saddest geek moments was when the screen of my Intel developer Ultrabook broke shorty before Christmas. As I need to be able working while on the go, I needed a replacement. I found it in the ASUS TP300L Transformer Flipbook, which is an awesome piece of an Ultrabook. On top, Santa (aka my wife) gifted me an HP Stream 7 tablet, that perfectly fits my needs for a tablet use (reading, surfing, playing some games). And so this part also turned well.

The most significant thing happened in September, when I read about a job as a C# Junior developer in Switzerland. I am truly happy about the fact I got this job (read more on it here), and already learned some new things in WPF. Currently, I am also working on my first WPF application, that is a practicing project for my new job I am going to start next year. Which leads me to the end of this short review.

2014 was a year with ups and downs like every year. I had some trouble in “first world” that we were able to solve as family (and friends), but made some good success in my geek and dev world. I am looking forward to 2015, where I am starting a new chapter in my dev story (with becoming a full time developer). But there are also some nice side projects, like maybe porting some apps to Android as well as the Internet of Things, which I am looking forward to dive in deeper. And of course, like any other MS fan, I am looking forward to the next evolutions of Windows 10!

What are you all looking for? How was your 2014? Feel free to comment below.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Dec

2014

Goodbye Telefónica (Germany), Hello ShareCommService (Switzerland)

Yes, you read that right. Today was my last work day at Telefónica, where I worked since June 2007. During that time, I learned a lot about how good customer service should be, and even more about mobile networks and mobile devices (phones, tablets and more). During that time, I also started my dev story in my spare time – all because there was not a single fishing knots application available for Windows Phone (read more here).

This lead to get recognized also within Telefónica as a developer, and so I was asked to concept and develop the application Friends & You (nope, you can’t download it as it is an internal app). I learned a lot about how corporate apps aren’t that easy to concept and build during that time, as well as as how restrictive corporate rules can be. After all, I had a few challenges to complete. Thanks to Friends & You, I was also able to dive into the world of Xamarin, where I learned a lot about the application structures of Android and iOS (which will be helpful for eventually porting some of my Windows Phone apps to those two).

I want to say thanks to my colleagues, you´re awesome! Keep up the great work you´re doing in Customer Service.

Back in September then, I opened up my Twitter app and the first tweet I read was this one:

I opened the attached document and read the job description. As an self-thought developer, I first was about to close it and put it aside as “read and done”.

Due to the head count freeze at Telefónica after acquiring e-Plus from KPN, there are no chances to become a real full time developer within Telefónica for the next time. But that is what I want to do. After reopening the document and reading it again, I decided to get in contact with Roman Mueller (who I knew from Twitter already).

We talked about the job itself and the circumstances behind the announcement. After a few talks and a visit in Switzerland, the decision was made. I am starting the next chapter of my developer story in January, moving to Switzerland, where I will add deeper SQL knowledge, WPF and a lot more to my development knowledge.

At this point, I want to thank ShareCommService and especially Roman for all the help I received already to make this all happen and get started.

It is going to be an exciting journey for me (and my family), and we are ready to go.

Happy coding everyone!

Aug

2014

Book review: iOS Development with Xamarin Cookbook (Dimitris Tavlikos)

I love to learn and expand my knowledge. Because of this, I was absolutely happy when I was asked for a book review about Dimitris’ iOS book.

The book is a huge collection of iOS recipes using Xamarin. The first three chapters are going deeply into the UI of an iOS application, looking on a lot (almost all) possible aspects of UI elements. What I like very much is that the author shows the code, usually with a step by step guide, and after that delivers a detailed explanation why something works in the way it does.

The next two chapters are all about creating and displaying data, files and sqlite, providing the same experience as the first chapters.

The sixth chapter is all about consuming services, such as web services, REST services or even WCF services (I wasn’t even aware of this being possible). Very good starting point for so many app ideas.

So far, the book shows already a lot of what we can do with Xamarin. But modern apps often contain media content: videos, photos, capturing media – this is what chapter 7 is all about.

Like all modern Smartphone operating systems, iOS provides some methods to let our apps interact with the OS. The 8th chapter is all about those interactions, like contacts, mail and more and has the matching real world scenarios.

The most usable apps use a device’s sensors, touch and gestures. Of course, with Apple being the leader in this space for a long time (we just need to be fair in this point), iOS has a lot of APIs for these. Chapter nine has some good recipes to help us with improving our app’s UX.

If your app needs location services and maps, chapter 10 is your friend. It shows you how to interact with Apple’s map services, add annotations and a lot more.

Users love when apps have some nice animations when something changes in an app. iOS provides a lot of options, and chapter 11 explains a lot about animations and drawing methods.

One of the most important parts when developing an app is lifecycle handling. As with any other OS, also iOS has its specific methods to handle the lifecycle. Background operations are part of this handling. In chapter 12, Dimitri tells us a lot about handling the states of an app as well as background operations.

Chapter 13 consists of tips and recipes for localization of an iOS app.

One of the most important steps when creating an iOS app is deploying the app. Apps should of course be tested on real devices, and this what chapter 14 is about – but not only. Also the required steps to prepare and app for submission as well as the submission to the store are explained.

The final chapter contains some additional recipes that can make your app more valuable like content sharing or text-to-speech.

Conclusion

I only began with Xamarin.iOS a few month ago. This book provides a great insight into development for iOS using the Xamarin IDE. As I said already, I like the approach of showing code first and then explaining what it does exactly and provide additional info if suitable. This book is absolutely worth every single cent if you want to start with iOS and Xamarin.

If you’re interested in the book, you’re just a click away: http://bit.ly/1tnxmGX

Note: This post was completely written on my phone. If you find typos, you can keep them ;-).

Aug

2014

Book review: Learning Windows Azure Mobile Services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (Geoff Webber-Cross)

During the last months, I used the few times of my spare time when I wasn’t in the mood for programming to read Geoff’s latest book for diving deeper into Azure Mobile Services. Geoff is well known in the community for his Azure experience, and I absolutely recommend to follow him! I am really glad he asked me to review his book and need to apologize that it took so long to get this review up.

The book itself is very well structured with a true working XAML based game that utilizes both Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and connects them to one single Mobile Service.

Even if you are completely new to Azure, you will quickly get things done as the whole book is full of step-by-step instructions. Let’s have a quick look on what you will learn while reading this book:

Prepare your Azure account and set up your first Mobile Service
Bring your Mobile Service to life and connect Visual Studio
Securing user’s data
Create your own API endpoints
use Git via the console for remote development
manage Push Notifications for both Windows and Windows Phone apps
use the advantages of the Notification hub
Best practices for app development – some very useful general guilty tips!

I already use a Mobile Service with my Windows Phone App TweeCoMinder. I have already started a Windows 8 version of that app, which basically only needs to be connected to my existing Azure Mobile Service to finish it.

While reading Geoff’s book, I learned how I effectively can achieve this and also improve my code for handling the push notifications on both systems. The book is an absolutely worthy investment if you look into Azure and Mobile Services and has a lot of sample code that can be reused in your own application.

As this is my first book review ever, feel free to leave your feedback in the comments.

You can buy the book right here.

Happy coding, everyone!

development

Goodbye, 2020!

Review of a geek’s 2014

Goodbye Telefónica (Germany), Hello ShareCommService (Switzerland)

Book review: iOS Development with Xamarin Cookbook (Dimitris Tavlikos)

Book review: Learning Windows Azure Mobile Services for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 (Geoff Webber-Cross)

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