Why don’t users "read the manual"?

In a previous post I had a little rant about some reviews I’d received from users of the FillLPG Android application. This was as a result of a handful of 1 star reviews from users who I believe had missed the point of the app.

You see, the application itself is just a portal into the FillLPG website – a website I do not control. The data provided by the website is maintained by a community of users who use the site and the app to add new stations, remove stations and update prices.

The problem is that users of the app have a place to sound off and express their displeasure – the Google Play Store. By leaving a 1 star review and the most basic of justifications for it (see previous rant) they get it off their chest and move on.

Xamarin Certified Once More

I first passed my Xamarin Mobile Certification back in June 2014 but when it came to taking the recertification exam the following year I never quite got around to it. Ultimately it lapsed and I while I was no longer certified I did keep my University subscription running so that I could keep my skills up to date.

During the next year I have to say that I was quite disappointed as there didn’t really seem to be any new content, i.e. no new courses were added as far as I could tell. At the end of that year I was considering not renewing my University subscription, at $1500 it was not exactly a no-brainer.

Creating a Simple Modal Dialog Form for Xamarin.Forms

I’ve finally managed to get some time to look at the Smite Scoreboard application that I’m using as a vehicle to dive into Xamarin.Forms (XF) and it’s been a fraught time (see bottom of post).

Between incompatible nuget packages, mismatched Windows and iOS configurations and finding that XF didn’t actually support what I wanted to do I was pretty close to saying, “you know what, to hell with it – I’ll just use the native Xamarin approach instead”.

However, I recalled a video by John Sonmez titled ‘Why does Programming Suck?’ and rolled my sleeves up and dug in again.

Unable to deploy Xamarin Android app to GenyMotion emulator

We all know that when you are developing mobile apps there is nothing better than running on an actual device. This is especially useful when wanting to access the device sensors such as GPS and the accelerometer. But we also all know that we have to test against a wider variety of devices than we have in our drawer. That’s where emulators come in – and where the trouble starts in some cases, but I won’t go into Hyper-V here!

StructureMap and MVC5 – Resolving the resolution exception for IUserStore

I’m currently working on an MVC5 website which uses StructureMap for Inversion of Control operations. Everything was working fine but then I started to get exceptions when I ran the application and attempted to login (not sure if Update 3 was responsible for surfacing this problem but it certainly worked without any problems previously)