Coding Journal

I am currently working on a UWP app for a cable TV company. The app allows their clients to watch the TV channels they are subscribed to with additional information like the TV schedule, information about TV shows, recording TV shows for watching later, etc. One of the main functionalities of the app is a TV schedule grid. Creating this TV schedule grid in UWP is not so easy, especially because of the poor XAML rendering performance.

TV schedule grid

The TV schedule grid shows a TV schedule for all the subscribed channels for a given day. The channels are being shown in rows and the columns represent TV shows. The grid is scrollable in both directions and the channel logos are sticky. The users can be subscribed up 70 channels and all of this should work reasonably well even on a Windows Phone.

This is how the result looks in a Windows Phone emulator. Spoiler: there is just no way to make it so smooth on a real Windows Phone device.

When you start using macOS after years of using Windows there are some things you expect to work in certain ways. One of those things is the ways the OS handles keyboard input and keyboard shortcuts. This is especially important if you still also use Windows and use a Windows keyboard with macOS. Here are a few things regarding the keyboard that help me when using macOS working on a side project.

Control, Option and Command keys

The fist thing you may notice when using macOS with a Windows keyboard is that the modifier keys are not in the right order. The order of the modifier keys on an Apple keyboard is Control, Option, Command but the Ctrl, Windows, Alt keys on a Windows keyboard map to Control, Command, Option by default. You can fix the order of the modifier keys in System Preferences | Keyboard | Modifier keys

Getting a MVP is a big thing when you are a developer working with the Microsoft stack. It is supposed to be some kind of approval a sign that you are doing something well. I applied for the MVP award back in 2012 and then got nominated in 2016. I want to tell you about both cases because they really made me think that the whole MVP concept is just wrong.

Disclaimer: First, this post is not a hate post because I did not get an MVP award. I do not really care about it. I just want you to know how it works and what is it like. Second, I am in no way generalizing and saying the MVP awards work like this in every region. This is my experience with the Czech Microsoft branch (2012) and later with the CEE, Russia & CIS (2016). I suspect things may work differently in different regions and with different Microsoft branches.

Sometimes when I use a mobile app that provides data that I find useful my curiosity awakens and I ask myself a question: how does the communication work and how hard would it be to break their security and access the data outside of the app? Mobile apps I have encountered are generally not very well secured and stealing their data is not much of a challenge. But what can the authors of the app do about it?

Lets take an app and an API and walk through the process. The model app is an app I tried last week and provides TV schedules for many local stations, so data that someone might be interested in stealing.

In the last few months I have been noticing a huge decline in software quality on every device I use. It seems to me like bad quality software is a current trend, especially for big corporations like Microsoft or Apple. Even though I consider Apple more of a “fashion company” than a “technology company” I think it is unacceptable for software from such big companies to works as bad as it does.

I am programmer so I know that software has and always will have bugs. My points is not buggy software in general but that software contains more bugs with every release and that stay unfixed.

Windows 10

Windows 10 updates are where I notice the software quality degradation the most. I cannot remember a bigger Windows 10 update that did not break something for me or millions of other users (like the Anniversary Update breaking millions of webcams). I do think this is because of my hardware configuration. I experience all the problem usually on both my laptop and my desktop computer.

When you enable the Linux Subsystem on Windows in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update so you can use Bash and all the GNU utilities, you may encounter a few annoyances like strange error messages, wrong language settings, etc. Here is how to fix the ones I encountered.

Adding Bash to cmder

If you use cmder, you can add a new Bash task like this.

Currently working on a WPF app as a side project for Netglade I came upon and interesting requirement regarding installation and deployment of the application. As a result I ended with some Squirrel and NSIS knowledge I would like to share.

Some time ago while looking at some pixel art work I got an idea to create a retro pixel art game for Windows 10. The choice was obvious, Sokoban. I have a very special relationship with the Sokoban game. The Delpi version of Sokoban was the first game I ever created. I later ported it to all the platforms I played with, namely J2ME (for my Siemens S60 phone), Linux (using Kylix which was basically a Delphi for Linux), Windows Phone 7 and now Sokoban Pixel for the Universal Windows Platform.

If you are a Windows Phone user you must know that filling in forms in apps is usually a real pain. There is no good way to move from one input to another or to collapse the keyboard. The whole process becomes a struggle, tapping outside the input fields to collapse the keyboard allowing you to scroll to the next input or to the submit button at the top of the screen, usually occluded by the keyboard.

The typical struggle to get to the last input fields and the submit button may look like this

There is no guidance on how to approach this. Take a look at the Store app on Windows 10 mobile, the perfect example of bad UI and UX directly from Microsoft and try review an app. You fill in the title of the review, then struggle to go into the review text input, you have to tap somewhere above the input to hide the keyboard, but not to hit the stars control … just an UX disaster.

If you use Windows apps with navigation menus consisting of icons, you may have noticed that some of those apps show you a text when hovering above those icons. This is a nice touch for the users, allowing them to quickly grasp the meaning of the menu icons without the need to click them or to expand the menu (if available).

Implementing this kind of hovers is really easy thanks to the ToolTipService that is available in Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 UWP. You can add <ToolTipService.ToolTip> with any element and include basically any XAML content as the tooltip. Here is a sample from the animation using a simple localized TextBlock