Rockford Lhotka's Blog

Visual Studio Live is coming up fast in both Anaheim and Washington DC.

I’ll be speaking at both events, and I hope to see you at one of them. The great thing is that you get to choose west or east coast, whatever works best for you. Or maybe you get to choose Disney or the Smithsonian Museum, depends on how you choose to think about it

Click on the appropriate image to go to the registration page for each event – these links provide a $400 discount off the regular conference price.

Working with .NET Core isn’t for developers focused on productivity or who want modern tools.

Why do I say this?

Because Visual Studio tooling hasn’t been released (or well-updated) to deal with .NET Core or ASP.NET Core, so you have to deal with a lot of bugs, missing features, poor templates, etc.

Generally you are probably better off relying on circa-1989 “modern tooling” like command lines and text editors (though VS Code is pretty good) at the moment.

Microsoft is working on next-gen tooling, so this isn’t a permanent issue, but it is somewhat frustrating to go back in time 25+ years when I’m used to this century’s tooling.

My biggest current frustration is that (working on CSLA .NET) I have a master solution that includes projects for all the platforms CSLA supports:

• .NET Core (netstandard1.5)
• Full .NET (4, 4.5, 4.6)
• UWP
• Xamarin (Forms, iOS, Android)
• WinRT (Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1)

And all my actual code is in shared projects so I only have to maintain the code once, even though it builds for 11 different platform targets in total.

Normally (when you don’t have a .NET Core project in your solution) you can switch your code view between the various platforms in your solution. This is the drop-down in the top-left corner of your code window. Unfortunately when you have a .NET Core project (netstandard project) in your solution this drop-down stops working.

As a result I’m finding that I need to have 3 solutions:

• A master solution to build everything, including netstandard
• A non-netstandard solution to work on everything except .NET Core
• A netstandard solution to work on the .NET Core and ASP.NET Core projects

This way, in the netstandard solution I can actually see what’s going on with the correct code and Intellisense for .NET Core:

And in my non-netstandard solution I can switch between the rest of the platforms to get the correct experience:

Three solutions where I should have (and used to have) just the one master solution.

I can’t wait until the tooling catches up to the platform so things get simpler again!

Over the past few months a group of us have been working on a Mobile Kids Id Kit app for Humanitarian Toolbox and Missing Children Minnesota.

We’re nearing the point of an MVP release and think we’ll get there with one good day of work – that day is this Saturday, August 27.

The location will be in Eden Prairie, MN. Please consider joining us if you are in the area and have skills in any of these areas:

• Xamarin mobile development
• Xamarin Forms XAML themes or styles
• Hockeyapp
• Microsoft Azure web site development (ASP.NET)

This app will support iOS, Android, and Windows. It will provide parents with a valuable tool to help them in the unfortunate possibility that their child goes missing.

How often do you have a chance to apply your software development or design skills to directly and literally make the world a better place? This is your chance!

If you are already part of the development team, full details are on our Slack channel. If you are not yet part of the team, we welcome your help! Please provide me with your email address in a comment on this post or via one of the my social media channels at about.me/rockfordlhotka and I’ll get you looped into the team.

Oh yeah, and because it is summer in Minnesota, this codeathon will also be a BBQ with typical summer grillables provided!

Or, if you have the skills and time, but aren't in the Twin Cities area you can still participate in the codeathon, but you'll have to provide your own summer BBQ while you work from wherever you are :)

In other words, we have all sorts of remote collaboration technologies, the code is in GitHub - so anyone in the world should feel free to get involved!

I’ve heard a few people complaining recently because Microsoft isn’t enabling Windows 10 upgrades for all the legacy Windows 8 and 8.1 phones that exist out there in the world.

I understand that complaint and the frustration. Everyone wants the newest stuff!

The thing is that we have examples of different strategies around vendors upgrading legacy devices to their latest OS, and there appears to be no perfect answer.

For example, Apple is quite aggressive about upgrading people to the latest OS, often resulting in complaints as people agree to the upgrade and then find that their phone has become almost unusably slow.

Google/Android is less aggressive overall (I understand this is due to carrier constraints more than Google itself). But all my Android devices have been carrier unlocked, and so I’ve been able to upgrade them as each new version of Android comes out. My tablet is now entirely useless because it is so amazingly slow. Most apps just crash, and those that run are glacial. And this device is just 3-4 years old, so what gives?

Microsoft is just being (imo) upfront that if you did upgrade some devices to Windows 10 that your experience would be terrible. Just like the experiences of many people on iOS and Android. So they aren’t supporting an upgrade that would make us all cry.

I don’t know the right answer here. Is the Apple/Google approach correct? Encourage and/or let people upgrade to the point that their device is a brick? Or is Microsoft right by not allowing people to upgrade their device to where it is useless?

At the end of the day the result is the same: we all end up having to buy a newer device to run the OS we want to use.