Tag: web development

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

C# and WebAssembly

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

I’m honored to be able to post in Matt Groves‘ Annual C# Advent again this year, and today… December 22nd, 2018, is my second year contributing to it.

Last year I talked about ways to unload the main UI thread in WPF/.NET apps.

This year, I want to call attention to the Uno Platform tools I’ve been evangelizing for the past six months or so. 

Silverlight is dead – Long Live Uno Platform!

To understand this perspective, we’ll need to walk through some key terms….

What is Silverlight?silverlight

For those who don’t know, about ten years ago, Silverlight was the way to write C# and XAML to run in the web browser. It required a plug-in to run, much like Adobe Flash Player. Unfortunately, Microsoft announced the…. untimely demise of Silverlight in 2012. Silverlight, to some extent, seemed a more catchy term than other related technology names, so Microsoft used Silverlight as the name for mobile platforms that are also now depricated. As a result, it became almost synonymous with XAML.

What is XAML?

XAML, “eXtensible Application Markup Language” is the markup language behind a few great UI / UX layers in various Microsoft .NET-oid languages.  For those who’ve used it, it’s an addictively cool language family.  Using Visual Studio, Blend, and Adobe DX, you can create first-class UI.  With features like Storyboard animation, basic animation becomes child’s play. Composition makes fast, dynamic animations easy. Once you’ve gotten the basic idea of it, one finds themselves wanting to use it anywhere they can…  or at least that’s been my experience through WPF, Silverlight, Silverlight for Windows Phone, Silverlight for Windows Phone 8 / 8.1, Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and probably others.

The “code behind” XAML is typically C#, and historically .NET based.

What is Universal Windows Platform (UWP)?

UWP is the native platform of Windows 10.  It’s similar to classic .NET in a few ways.  First, UWP feels a lot like Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and .NET, being XAML and C# based, respectively.  It differs from classic .NET because it has a lot of fixes, both in terms of security and performance, that .NET can’t afford to apply for various reasons.  More simply put, .NET had some serious technical debt built up, so the easiest way to forgive that debt was to build a new platform based on the old languages.  Your XAML and C# skills are the same, but the namespaces and supporting framework libraries are different.

Don’t fret, though…  UWP runs natively on over 800 million devices (as of today, December 22nd, 2018), and that number continues to grow.  UWP is the native platform for all Windows 10 devices.  This means desktops, laptops, tablets, phones, HoloLenses, Xbox consoles, IoT embedded devices, and more. 

What is WebAssembly?webassembly

WebAssembly is a relatively new bytecode language specification… a virtual machine specification, similar to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM), that is fully supported by most modern major web browsers.  It allows near native performance in the same sandbox that javascript apps run in.  When you run javascript in a web page, the jit compiler in the browser converts the code into tokenized bytecode in order to execute it quicker.  WebAssembly improves on this significantly by pre-compiling the code.  Because the code is pre-complied, it doesn’t have to be sourced from javascript.  It can be compiled from just about any programming language.  Wasm, as it’s called, went from a specification just a few short years ago to being well supported in all major modern web browsers.

What is Uno Platform?uno platform

Uno Platform, for our purposes, is not really a new platform, but an extension to UWP. 

You write your UWP application for your Windows 10 devices the same way you always have.  Uno provides a mechanism to re-compile that UWP app to Web Assembly (and… by the way… using Xamarin tools, also to iOS… and also to Android!)

In a sense, Uno Platform is to UWP as Xamarin is (roughly) to classic .NET.

See the connection? 

Let’s do some math…

UWP = C# & XAML for Windows 10.  (800,000,000 devices)

Uno Platform += UWP for iOS (Millions more devices), Android (over a Billion devices), and WebAssembly (every modern major PC in the world)

Now factor in this…

.NET Core 3 += UWP for services

What does all that add up to? 

One skill set… 

UWP (C# & XAML) = FULL STACK, on all major platforms

From data access layer to REST API to UI canvas.

Wait a minute…  What about Xamarin?

Xamarin is the older way to do C# for cross platform / mobile.  

Coincidentally, just this past Thursday, Carl Barton, a Microsoft MVP for Xamarin presented the Xamarin Forms Challenge at the Windows Platform App Devs users group. The goal of the meetup was to demonstrate creating a simple app in C# and running it on as many platforms as we could in the hour.  He easily pushed ran the app on over a dozen platforms in the hour.

Uno Platform actually depends on Xamarin libraries to support iOS and Android. 

The main differences between Xamarin and Uno Platform are these:

  • Xamarin encourages you to use a Xamarin-specific dialect of XAML, including Xamarin Forms to express your cross platform UI.
  • If you already know & understand Microsoft’s UWP dialect of XAML, Uno Platform uses that dialect.
  • Xamarin enables you to produce binaries for dozens of different target platforms, reaching a billion or more devices.  These include .NET, UWP, iOS, Android, Tizen, Unity, ASP.NET, and many others.
  • Uno Platform only enables you to reach three additional binary output targets…  iOS, Android, and WebAssembly…. but WebAssembly can or likely will soon cover most of what Xamarin Forms covers.

I’ll leave it up to you which to choose, but for me, given the choice between Xamarin with several years of technical debt built up in a distinct dialect of XAML, and Uno Platform, using the fresher, native UWP dialect of XAML…  

Finally… 

Here’s the slides I presented most recently at the New England Microsoft Developers meetup in Burlington, Mass on December 6th (thanks again to Mathieu Filion of nventive for much of the content):

[office src=”https://onedrive.live.com/embed?cid=90A564D76FC99F8F&resid=90A564D76FC99F8F%211297452&authkey=AM6QZrb_6-9ltdE&em=2″ width=”402″ height=”327″]

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Locking Resources in C# for Read/Write Concurrency

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

In a previous project, I became a big fan of System.Threading.ReaderWriterLockSlim.  It was an excellent way to guard a resource against concurrency in a relatively flexible manner.  

C# has a lock(object) {} syntax for simple concurrency locks, but what if you have a resource that can sometimes be used concurrently, and other times, exclusively?

Enter System.Threading.ReaderWriterLockSlim.  This has a few handy methods on it for guarding code on a non-exclusive (Read) and exclusive (Write) mode, with an upgradeable lock, as well, so you don’t have to release a read lock in order to upgrade it.

This source works just as well in .NET as UWP.

I commented the code enough to try to make it so that someone familiar with ReaderWriterLockSlim and using(IDisposable){} would understand the rest, so without further ado…

https://gist.github.com/GraniteStateHacker/e608eecce2cb3dba0dbf4363b00e941f.js

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

Visual Studio 2015: An Insider’s Review

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

I apologize I’ve been pretty wrapped up in a little bit of everything, but I wanted to share a piece my colleague, Dave Davis, Architect at BlueMetal Architects wrote for SD Times:

https://www.bluemetal.com/News/Dave-Davis-Published-in-SDTimes

Well worth the read.

Tech in the 603, The Granite State Hacker

The Edge Browser in Windows 10

Jim Wilcox (The Granite State Hacker)

Today, I was mildly (but pleasantly) surprised when I logged into my laptop and discovered it had updated itself over night to the latest build of the Windows 10 Insider Preview (10158).  I shouldn’t have been surprised, in retrospect… I knew a build was coming, and I left my laptop on overnight…

The first thing I did was run smack into the Edge browser, which is far more polished in this build.  More importantly, this new browser has many features built in… especially Web Notes. 

Web Notes is a feature which, with a touch (or click if you don’t have touch) you can graphically deface (ok, “annotate” or “mark up”) web content.  Even more fun, you can  touch again, and post it to your favorite social media site or even to OneNote.

This one feature really differentiates the browser, in my mind, from just about anything else out there, and makes it much more clear why a replacement for IE is justified.   I’d heard about the feature, but the experience is far cooler than just seeing it. 

Frankly, in the past, I’ve panned Spartan/Edge as nothing more than browser platform fragmentation… a new wedge in the browser market designed to make the browser a harder platform to build viable apps for. After experiencing the WebNotes feature, I find myself wondering if it won’t a)  end Internet Explorer, and b) make the web cool again.

Given the way the Edge browser integrates with OneNote, I also find myself wondering if Edge shouldn’t be considered a part of the Office suite rather than a part of Windows.  That said, I’m aware of the fact that Microsoft has no plans to bring Edge to IOS or Android.

Aside from the myriad of practical content research and sharing applications, I can easily imagine Edge Web Notes being a social media hit, especially.  Who wouldn’t love to draw moustaches on all their friends & family’s profile pictures?

I have not heard if Edge on Windows 10 Mobile will have Web Notes, but I will be fully disappointed if it doesn’t.  It’d definitely make the web more versatile in a mobile form factor.  My Lumia 1520 with build 10149 has Edge on it, but no Web Notes…  yet.  As a colleague of mine points out, Edge is a Universal Platform app, meaning the code should be baked in, even if it’s not exposed in the UI.  I’ll keep ya posted.

Wouldn’t it be cool, also, if MS updated the Apache Cordova platform to incorporate Edge as the web view, thereby enabling annotations in apps that use it?

For what it’s worth, I used Edge to compose & edit this post.  Blogger is definitely much happier with Edge than with IE 11.