Xamarin forms in anger samples

As developers we use to make stuff work and look “ok” UI-wise. The problem is that what we see as “ok”, is what normal people call ugly or some might even go so far to say it looks like s***!

In most cases I, as a developer, can quickly see that they have a point.

If we look at Xamarin.Forms for instance, many samples works ok and use the standard Xamarin.Forms controls as-is.
Again, it works, but looks boring as hell.

Wouldn’t it be nice if someone took some “real world” UI’s (or at least something similar and good looking) and implemented them using Xamarin.Forms. All to show that Xamarin.Forms is capable of creating something that also looks good?

Well, that is what Adam over at www.syntaxismyui.com is doing in his “Xamarin.Forms In Anger” series.

iOS-Vet

I asked Adam to put these samples on Github too, which he have been so nice to do, so you can find them here for yourself. As they are on Github it also gives you the opportunity to help out Adam, if you find something that could be changed. Just remember to ask him if he would like that change, repo owners often don’t like surprise pull-requests.

PS: Also remember to subscribe to Adams weekly Xamarin newsletter, to get some new Xamarin love each week.

Azure Website – The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred

Tonight I had some problems with an old .NET 2.0 site that I wanted to move from my old host to Azure Website. I did not want to change anything on the site, I just wanted it to run on Azure.

So I created a Azure Website for it and uploaded all the files via FTP – no problems of cause. I then hit the site and got some pretty useless windows errors:

“The page cannot be displayed because an internal server error has occurred.”

As a .NET developer I of cause tried to set CustomErrors=”Off” in Web.config, as the first thing, but that did not change anything.

I googled it with Bing (Scott Hanselman joke), and found that I was not the only one who found this error message useless, so I found a solution.

I enabled diagnostics in Azure Portal on the Website under the Configuration tab, scroll to the bottom. And set both application and site diagnostics on and to Verbose, see screen below.
It is important to turn on the Detailed Errors Messages.

Screen Shot 2014-12-28 at 23.33.20

 

After enabling some diagnostics, save and restart the website, just to be sure.

I then hit the website sometimes and went into the SCM for the site.

https://YOURSITENAME.scm.azurewebsites.net/

I do not think there is a link to this inside the Azure Portal currently (december 2014), so you just browse to your site and put in this little .scm.

In here you can do a lot of things, but what you want to do here is: Tools -> Diagnostics Dump.

This will give you a .zip file. Browse to LogFiles->DetailedErrors and here you should see some error pages.

I looked into some of these and could see the same error on all of them. Basically it said:

“An ASP.NET setting has been detected that does not apply in Integrated managed pipeline mode.”

In my case, I did not want to change anything on the actually site, I just needed it to run. So I went into the Configuration tab and changed from Integrated Mode to Classic – Bum! – site was running on Azure!

Hope this helps somebody out there.

Embed your Github profile card

I really like Github a lot. I don’t have any awesome repositories or done a ton of work on there, but have contributed a little and really enjoy the whole Github Flow.
I am, how ever, a regular visitor as I look into different repositories often and like the whole idea of open source just move things forward so quickly as people share and work together.

Now that I write about it, it’s actually hard to explain what I like about it – I just do – and I would like to have more time to work on open source projects.

While I wait for that ( ;) ) I would like to share an awesome little tool I found the other day. It is a tiny project that lets you embed your Github profile or repository as a little “card”.

It very easy to use, for a profile card simply use this:

Read more about the project on Github

 

Update 15-04-2015:

It is now also possible to embed various things from Github in blogpost, simply by putting in a link to it in the post. It is created as a WordPress plugin, so it is very easy to install and use.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/github-embed/