Forem: Coding Coach

Using screenshots in markdown with VS Code

Rodrigo Juarez — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 04:50:54 +0000

This post is about using Visual Studio Code to include screenshots in markdown files, so you can publish your files without upload the images or change the links (something sometimes you can't do at all)

For that we are going to use Imgur and a VS Code extension called vscode-imgur

Installing vscode-imgur

We can install it from the Extensions panel in VS Code, searching for vscode-imgur
We need to configure the Imgur credentials
- Open the VS Code configuration with CTRL + , then search and replace the following keys
  - Client_id
  - Client_secret
  - Album_id
  - User upload en true
With your VS Code window active, you can paste an image in your clipboard using CTRL + ALT + V, this command will upload our image to Imgur and will add the link in our markdown file
The first time we use it, we will be redirected to the Imgur for confirmation. Copy the provided pin and paste it in VS Code

Get your album id in imgur

Rodrigo Juarez — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 04:40:08 +0000

Original post in spanish

I want to use my Imgur account as storage for the screenshots in my posts.

I'm using Visual Studio Code as my markdown editor, and I found this awesome extension that makes my life easier: vscode-imgur.

When I started to configure the extension, I needed the id of the album used as storage in Imgur.

I didn't found details for the albums, but if you select the Images option in your user menu

You can open any existing album or create a new one

And in the dropdown Edit this album you can select the Embed Album option

In that code, the highlighted part is the album id, everything after a/ in the data-id attribute

Free resources to learn .NET?

Rodrigo Juarez — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 14:06:53 +0000

Good morning everyone!

I'm doing some coaching, and I want to have a good list of free resources that you can recommend.

I will start with https://dotnet.microsoft.com/learn/videos

Thanks!

Change your Visual Studio / Visual Studio Code Font

Rodrigo Juarez — Thu, 19 Sep 2019 13:23:15 +0000

The new Cascadia Code font

As part of the new Windows Terminal development, Microsoft provides an original open-source monospaced font, Cascadia Code.
It is recommended to be used with console applications and development text editors.
This new font supports programming ligatures!
Programming ligatures creates new glyphs by combining characters.
This helps make code more readable.

Installing the Cascadia Code font in your windows system

Download the .ttf file from the github repo to any folder on your computer
Open the context menu for the downloaded file and select the Install option

Change fonts in your IDE

Tired of the same font day after day? Follow this steps to have a new look and feel in your IDE!

Change editor fonts in Visual Studio 2019 for Windows

You have access to the font settings in the Tools > Options menu, under Environment > Fonts and Colors (After changing your font, reopen Visual Studio 2019)

Change editor fonts in Visual Studio Code

Open your Settings and look for User > Text Editor > Font and change it to your desired Font (After changing your font, reopen Visual Studio Code)

References

Cascadia Code

Advanced Xamarin.Forms Part 1 – The API

Rodrigo Juarez — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 12:10:00 +0000

This post is part of an ongoing series that I am writing with @jesseliberty.The original post is on his site and the spanish version on mine.

In this series, we will explore a number of topics on Advanced Xamarin.Forms that have arisen in our work for clients, or at my job as Principal Mobile Developer for IFS Core.

Before we can start, however, we need to build an API that we can program against. Ideally, this API will support all CRUD operations and will reside on Azure.

Building the API

Begin in Visual Studio, creating an API Core application, which we’ll call BookStore.
Change the name of the values controller to BookController.
Create a new project named Bookstore.Dal (Data access layer), within which you will create two folders: Domain and Repository.

Install the Nuget package LiteDB a NoSql database. In the BookRepository folder, create a file BookRepository.cs. In that file you will initialize LiteDB and create a collection to hold our books.

    public class BookRepository
    {
        private readonly LiteDatabase _db;
        public BookRepository()
        {
            _db = new LiteDatabase("bookstore.db");
            Books.EnsureIndex(x => x.BookId);
        }

If bookstore.db does not exist, it will be created. Similarly if the index doesn’t exist, it too will be created.

Go up to the API project and right-click on Dependencies to add a reference to our Bookstore.dal project. Open the BookstoreController file. Add using statements for Bookstore.Dal.Domain and Bookstore.Dal.Repository.

Create an instance of the BookRepository in the controller, and initialize it.

   public class BooksController : ControllerBase
   {
      private BookRepository _bookRepository;

      public BooksController()
      {
         _bookRepository = new BookRepository();
      }

Creating the Book Object

We will need a simple book object (for now) to send and retrieve from our repository and database. Start by creating the book object (feel free to add more fields)

  public class Book
   {
      public Book()
      {
         BookId = Guid.NewGuid().ToString();
      }

      public string BookId { get; set; }
      public string ISBN { get; set; }
      public string Title { get; set; }
      public List<Author> Authors { get; set; }
      public double ListPrice { get; set; }
   }

Notice that the Book has a List of Author objects. Let’s create that class now, again keeping it very simple,

   public class Author
   {
      public string AuthorId { get; set; }
      public string Name { get; set; }
      public string Notes { get; set; }
   }

The Repository

Let’s return to the repository. Earlier we initialized the database. Now all we need is to create the methods.

We begin by creating the connection of our local List of Book to the db table:

    public LiteCollection<Book> Books => _db.GetCollection<Book>();

Next comes our basic methods: get, insert, update, delete:

    public IEnumerable<Book> GetBooks()
    {
        return Books.FindAll();
    }

    public void Insert(Book book)
    {
        Books.Insert(book);
    }

    public void Update(Book book)
    {
        Books.Update(book);
    }

    public void Delete(Book book)
    {
        Books.Delete(book.BookId);
    }

Connecting to the API

We are ready to create the CRUD methods in the API and connect them to the methods in the repo.

      [HttpGet]
      public ActionResult<IEnumerable<Book>> Get()
      {
         var books = _bookRepository.GetBooks();
         return new 
              ActionResult<IEnumerable<Book>>(books);
      }

This will return the retrieved data to the calling method. Note that this will retrieve all the books.

Following along with using the HTTP syntax, let’s create the Post method:

      [HttpPost]
      public void Post([FromBody] Book book)
      {
         _bookRepository.Insert(book);
      }

Testing

To check that we can now add and retrieve data, we’ll create a Postman collection. Bring up the Postman Desktop App (the Chrome extension has been deprecated), and see or create a Bookstore collection. In that collection will be your post and get methods.

To keep this simple let’s add a book using JSON. Click on Headers and set authorization to applicatoin/json. Then click on body and enter the Json statement:

    {"Title":"Ulyses"}

Press send to send this to our local database. To ensure it got there, switch Postman to Get, Enter the url and press send. You should get back your book object.

    [
        {
            "bookId": "d4f8fa63-1418-4e06-8c64-e8408c365b13",
            "isbn": null,
            "title": "Ulyses",
            "authors": null,
            "listPrice": 0
        }
    ]

The next step is to move this to Azure. That is easier than it sounds.

First, go to the Azure site.Select the Start Free button.

Create an account with your email address and after you confirm your email address you are ready to use the account form in Visual Studio.

Our next step is to publish the API. Select the publish option and select the following steps:

When you are creating the App Service to be used in the hosting plan, you can select the free tier.

After publishing is complete, you will have access to your API in the endpoint you just created. In our example, the endpoint is https://bookstoreapiblogpost.azurewebsites.net/
You can test your new endpoint in Postman and then use it in your project.

Source Code Repository

By Jesse Liberty (Massachusetts US) and Rodrigo Juarez (Mendoza, Argentina)

About Jesse Liberty

Jesse Liberty is the Principal Mobile Developer with IFS Core. He has three decades of experience writing and delivering software projects. He is the author of 2 dozen books and a couple dozen Pluralsight & LinkedIn Learning courses, and has been a Senior Technical Evangelist for Microsoft, a Distinguished Software Engineer for AT&T, a VP for Information Services for Citibank and a Software Architect for PBS. He is a Xamarin Certified Mobile Developer and a Xamarin MVP and a Microsoft MVP.

API access in development with Conveyor

Rodrigo Juarez — Tue, 03 Sep 2019 12:47:24 +0000

In my workflow, when I'm developing an API with Visual Studio, and I need to access it from a mobile app, usually I publish it in Azure, or I need to do many steps to configure my IIS express.

This is because IIS express by default publish your API in the localhost endpoint, and it can't be accessed from outside your development machine.

Looking for a quick fix, I found Conveyor, a Visual Studio extension, it's in beta, and free for now, automatically will give access to our API to any device in our network, if you register an account, you could have access from the internet.

After installing the extension, it will run when we start our project in debug mode.
In the next screenshot, we can see the enabled endpoints.

We can also configure certificates if we want to use https.

A great addition to my Visual Studio's toolbox, very useful, and easy to use and install.

Coding for fun for Coding Coach

Rodrigo Juarez — Sat, 27 Apr 2019 22:24:41 +0000

These past months had been challenging, in my current project, we had a problematic deadline, and we were struggling with the integration of our code with other teams and the business side communication. Long days, some weekend work and so on.

So, what do I do when I want to relax and have some fun (other than reading dev.to), of course, I code!

First, a little bit of context, I landed to Coding Coach after reading this blog post.

Fantastic community, excellent idea, but, how can I contribute? Other than being a mentor (it looks like there are not so many mentees interested in Xamarin after all), I want to do something exciting and have the chance to grow.
Many contributors are already working on the web app, and they are using a stack that I don't want to learn right now, so I asked what about the mobile app, can I use Xamarin? So @emmawedekind replied something like, sure, choose your poison (not really :D), and I started as an exercise the development of the mobile app (contributors welcome!).

I have much experience as a Xamarin developer, but usually, your "pay the bills" projects don't allow you to check new things and learn about the latest changes and improvements; also, some developers on Coding Coach were asking why I was using Xamarin, here a brief list of my goals for this project:

Create something useful for the Coding Coach community.
Have a playground for mentees that want to learn about Xamarin.
Have the opportunity to create high-quality code without the restraint of deadlines or business constraints.
Learn about different approaches, tools, and technologies.
Have fun!!

I'm taking this as the chance to find joy in my craft and do (I hope) something meaningful for the community.
Friday 2 am caught me fighting happily with the filter functionality for the mentor's page; if that's not fun, I don't know what it is!

If you aren't already in the Coding Coach slack, go there and say hello, and if you are interested in a Xamarin mentor, contact me! I'm sure we can learn something together.

Chocolatey, a better way to install software on windows

Rodrigo Juarez — Sat, 30 Mar 2019 23:19:32 +0000

This post is aimed primarily to software developers using windows. You should have basic knowledge about your operation system.

When you need to install a new tool, you will have the issue to try to find the location to download it, get the latest version for your SO, and so on.

Trying to improve the user experience related to managing your software installation, Chocolatey comes to the rescue.

This piece of software will allow you to use the windows command line to install, update or uninstall your favorite tools and programs.

You can see a curated list of available packages here.

Install instructions are available in the following link.

In a nutshell, open a PowerShell CLI in administrator mode and execute the following command:

iwr https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1 -UseBasicParsing | iex

If you got an error message about running scripts disabled in your system, just run this in your current PowerShell window (more info):

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

After this, open your windows command prompt as Administrator and use the choco -? command to see more information.
For example, I can install ConsoleZ with:

choco install consolez

Or update it with:

choco upgrade consolez

Usually, the same installer will add the program to the path, so, in this case, use the console command to open your new installed software.

Using Font Awesome in Xamarin.Forms

Rodrigo Juarez — Fri, 15 Mar 2019 01:43:57 +0000

This approach is outdated since Xamarin.Forms 4.5.530

You can get information about the new functionality here

Using Font Awesome in Xamarin.Forms

All the code for this post is available at github

If you want to have a consistent user interface in your Xamarin Forms application, it could be a good approach to try to use vector icons.

For that, I will show you in this blog post, how you can include Font Awesome in your Xamarin Forms project to show icons like in this sample.

Installation

First you will need to download the icons from the Font Awesome site (in this post we are using the free web version 5.7.1).

Select the Start Using Free button.

And then the download button.

After downloading, extract the content of your zip file.

And copy the highlighted file to your Android's Assets folder and iOS's Resources folder.

Change the properties in both to match the images.

For iOS you need to change the info.plist file and include the new font file.

Create support classes

After the installation is complete, we are going to create a derived class from Label to show our text using Font Awesome.

The class is called FontAwesomeIcon in our sample project.

For Android that class needs a renderer (FontAwesomeIconRenderer.cs).

The icon definitions are in the Icon.cs file, you could add any other icon that you need looking for the icon in this link and using the unicode representation.

Using our custom label to show icons

To show an icon in a view with xaml, create a tag like the three that we have in MainPage.xaml, setting the text to one of our defined icons in the Icon class.

And that's all you need to start using Font Awesome!!

Pro tip

You could have noticed that the name of the font used in the FontAwesomeIcon.cs file depends on the platform, the android version is just the name of the ttf file, but for iOS we need the name of the font. In some tutorials they mention that you could check the properties of the file in Windows Explorer and take the name from there, but for the FontAwesome version that we are using for this post, that's not true.

You can see the name of the font in the console of Visual Studio when you run the iOS version because we have this code in place (AppDelegate.cs).

This will be very useful if you want to use another version of the font, but you don't know the name.