Thoughts on Software Engineering

Welcome to the fourth and final part of our series on Android and iOS Mobile Application Development. Previously, we have seen how to debug our mobile application within the Google Android Emulator. Now, we are ready to deploy our app onto an Android and iOS physical device. Let's take a look at how to deploy our application on an Android device first. Android deployment If you are using Windows, first, we will have to download the necessary hardware device drivers. After this is done, we will need to install Google USB driver. This will allow us to use the Android Debugging Bridge or adb for debugging on a physical device later. To install Google USB driver, in Visual Studio 2015, select Tools > Android > Android SDK Manager. Scroll down to Extras and you will be able to see the Google USB driver. Go ahead and install it. After installation is done, we will now be able to start deploying to, and debugging from an Android device. Go ahead and plugin your device...

Welcome to the third part of the series on Android and iOS Mobile Application Development. Let's begin! Creating our first Apache Cordova project First, in Visual Studio 2015, we will need to select Other Languages > Javascript. From here, we can choose Blank App (Apache Cordova). At first glance, we can see that the project structure is very much different than how we are used to seeing it. However, this project structure is pretty much in line with how we will be writing web applications in the future. Scott Hanselman has a pretty good article explaining the idea behind this which I encourage you to read if you are not already familiar with Bower and NPM. For the purpose of this article, we are going to go straight into downloading the packages we need using Bower. Let's open up the bower.json file. We will be downloading AngularJs, Ratchet and something called Script.js Simply, Script.js helps us by being able to download our javascript files on-demand and lo...

Welcome to the second part of the series on Android and iOS Mobile Application Development. Before we begin learning about how to setup Azure Active Directory for securing our Web API, let's first take a deep dive into why we have chosen Azure Active Directory and OAuth to secure our Web API. Why not use ASP.NET Forms Authentication Cookie? Securing our web application traditionally, typically involves validating a user's username and password against our database store, and creating our own ASP.NET forms authentication cookie if the credentials matches. With newer versions of ASP.NET, an identity database can be easily created and utilized with ASP.NET forms authentication cookie issued via the identity framework. This means we spend even less time writing our own custom database store and writing validation code. However, there are still some drawbacks with ASP.NET forms authentication cookie. The security disadvantage can be best explained by Microsoft here , which talk...

When we talk about Mobile Application Development, we are generally given three choices - going with native development, using third-party tools such as Xamarin/ Apache Cordova, or, simply writing a web application running in the context of a mobile device's browser. How we choose often depends on the business requirements of the mobile application, and how much time and money we wish to spend to maintain it going forward. Native Development Going with Native Development means we develop the Mobile Application using the tools and software development kit (SDK) provided by the mobile platform. In the case of Android, it would be the Android SDK and in the case of iOS, it would be the XCode SDK. Given the fact that the platform and programming languages are different, it would be difficult to share a common codebase, and so, it would typically require separate development efforts. This is a great choice if we care about performance, and specific features required for our mobile ap...