Fridathon: unstructured learning or hacking you can opt-in to do on any random Friday.

• Leveraging Azure Functions for MIT AppInventor Web Interactions

  Posted on October 1, 2016

  The MIT AppInventor platform is awesome to teach kids programming concepts while building an actual Android app. Interacting with the web is super painful, however, and Azure Functions can provide the missing link. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • ai2
  • azure
  • functions

• How to nuke the Visual Studio MEF component model cache from an MSI

  Posted on September 30, 2016

  A quick search on the web for InvalidMEFCacheException will yield quite a few results. If you have faced it, you know it’s annoying like hell. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • vsx
  • msi

• Access Git Information from MSBuild and Code

  Posted on June 19, 2016

  Leveraging Git information can be quite useful for generating version numbers, logging information at runtime, embedding it in assemblies and so on. Here's one way to do it easily and in a cross-platform way. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • programming
  • git
  • msbuild

• Xamarin Mac Build Host Versioning

  Posted on May 21, 2016

  Before I eventually get to the protocol layer underlying the new build host in Xamarin 4 (as promissed in a previous post that introducing it, I wanted to mention how we architected it from the get go for a key scenario that we’ll want to enable in the future: side-by-side (SxS) versioning. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • msbuild
  • xbuild
  • xamarin
  • ios

• XBuild Achilles Heels

  Posted on December 30, 2015

  Invariably, every time I complain about XBuild, some long-time user of it tells me it’s not so bad and it actually works pretty fine if you know its limitations. So I set out to document those, since in my experience, they are so many as to cause beautifully and carefully crafted MSBuild targets to become an entanglement of obsolete elements for the sake of satisfying XBuild (i.e. usage of CreateProperty and CreateItem tasks, when declarative items and property groups are perfect in MSBuild). [Read More]

  Tags:

  • msbuild
  • xbuild

• Open Source is never Abandonware

  Posted on December 14, 2015

  Back in the day, friend Scott Hanselman used Schematron as an example of abandoware. That ends today, thanks to the community, as it should. [Read More]

• How to enable Xamarin.Forms XAML Intellisense in VS 2015 Update 1

  Posted on December 11, 2015

  As explained in XML vs XAML intellisense section of my blog post, Xamarin 4 ships with an XML-based intellisense for Xamarin.Forms we wrote from scratch. We have worked with Microsoft to make it possible to use the excelent built-in XAML language service instead, which knows about XAML’s specifics, and is driven by metadata provided by the Xamarin.Forms library. [Read More]

  Tags:

  • xamarin
  • forms

• How to get the item type or build action of a file in a project

  Posted on December 1, 2015

  Sounds like it should be pretty easy, getting the item type (shown in Visual Studio as the build action) of an arbitrary file given its containing project identifier. Yeah, right... [Read More]

  Tags:

  • vsx

• How Visual Studio builds on the Mac with Xamarin

  Posted on November 23, 2015

  When we started working for Xamarin as consultants, a couple years ago, it was nothing short of amazing for us that Xamarin had already achieved a pretty solid “F5 experience” with an app building on the Mac and debugging like any regular local .NET app. I had the same feeling the first time I did the same thing against an Azure website. Felt like magic (in the Arthur C. Clark way). [Read More]

  Tags:

  • msbuild
  • xbuild
  • xamarin
  • ios

• Sharing assembly-level context across unit tests

  Posted on October 8, 2015

  How to achieve per-assembly fixture state sharing for xunit tests [Read More]

  Tags:

  • xunit
  • tdd
  • testing

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