Ever wished you’d declare something which gets disposed automatically when it’s enclosing scope finishes executing without adding yet another set of curly braces and indentation to your code? You are not alone. Say hello to C# 8 using declarations 🥰. With using var you can now do: instead of: No more unecesary curly brackets, no…
The operator enables you to assign the right-hand operand value to the left-hand operand only if the left-hand operand value evaluates to null. Let’s take a very basic example: In the example above we declare a nullable int variable i and then make two null-coalescing assignments on it. During the first assignment i will evaluate…
Recently ran a SEO audit tool on the blog just to find out that all the category links were leading to 404s. Upon close inspection the URLs appeared to contain a /blog/ in them while the actual working URLs would be without it. See below: https://startdebugging.net/blog/category/opinion/ – not workinghttps://startdebugging.net/category/opinion/ – working Apparently the whole issue…
Not really, no. Unless the business drives that need for change. This is a mistake that many (including myself) will do. A new piece of technology comes out, our software needs to be rewritten using it. But what advantage does that bring to our business and to our end-users? In most cases, none. Instead of…
Your app’s startup time matters because it’s the first impression that the user gets to make about it’s performance. It doesn’t matter what you promise me if it takes 10 seconds to load the app each time I try and use it. I might even uninstall it thinking it doesn’t actually work. And with Xamarin…
Until recently NativeAds were in a closed beta and only certain developers had access to the ad format, but now, it’s available to everyone. Here’s how you can go about adding one to you Android Xamarin Forms app using a custom renderer. Step 1: Create a view to act as a placeholder for the ad…
Properly sizing your images can improve your page loading times drastically. Here we’re looking at two distinct categories: In our case we have three images on the front page not optimized or improperly sized. For optimizing them I will use Squoosh. First image – the Outworld Apps logo: it had 887px in width and was…
While developing Xamarin Forms applications you will often find yourself in a situation where you need to set different values for a certain property depending on the operating system. OnPlatform allows you to do just that and can be used both from C# code and XAML. Let’s look at a few examples. For this article,…
One of the most important things when it comes to perceived performance is how fast a web page loads when it’s first accessed, and one of the key things in having a fast-loading web page is to only load what’s necessary, when necessary. Of course, this might sound like a lot of work, but there…
Need a webcam to use for streaming? Why not use one of the broken/outdated phones you currently have lying around the house? Most phones are capable of taking pictures and recording at a higher resolution and with a better quality than your typical webcam. This makes them an ideal replacement for a webcam when streaming,…
Lighthouse is an automated tool for auditing the performance, accessibility and overall user experience of any web page. It was initially meant to audit PWAs (Progressive Web Apps) but it’s much more than that. Easiest way to audit your website is using the latest version of Chrome. Navigate to your website and open up the…
I’ve started playing with animations in Xamarin Forms only recently and created a cool background animation for one of my apps (Charades for Dota 2) which I thought I would share. So without any extra introduction, this is the final result: The GIF is a bit jittery but that’s just because by PC can’t handle…