Category Archives: software development

microsoft, mobile, mono, software development, tech

No Mono in Microsoft’s cross-platform MAUI framework on .NET 11 – and a quick hands-on

Microsoft has released preview 6 of .NET 11, for which release is expected in November, including a big change to MAUI (Multi-platform App UI): it now runs only on .NET Core, rather than the Mono runtime.

Principal product manager David Ortinau reports that “your app builds and runs on CoreCLR, the same runtime behind ASP.NET Core, your cloud services, and desktop .NET.”

According to Ortinau, performance is generally faster than Mono on iOS and Mac Catalyst. The implication is that it is slower on Android, though he does say that it is within 10% on startup and app size. Selecting Mono is no longer an option, and the only use of Mono in .NET 11 is for Blazor WebAssembly.

There is a key remark in Ortinau’s post. “We have worked closely with first party .NET MAUI apps validating our progress, and have received feedback from several others,” he says. The question developers may ask: what first party .NET MAUI apps? Microsoft does not use MAUI for its well-known cross-platform apps such as Teams or Office. In 2023, the company said it uses MAUI for its 365 admin, Azure admin and Store Commerce apps, though I do not know if this is still the case.

Slide from .NET Conf 2023 showing some limited use of MAUI at Microsoft

Developers would have more confidence in MAUI, both for its quality and its long-term future, if Microsoft itself made more use of it.

That said, the company does seem to be putting substantial effort into MAUI for .NET 11. Along with the CoreCLR work there are other updates in this preview. Microsoft states that the focus in .NET 11 is “to improve product quality” and this is something developers will be happy about; in some cases a statement like this might imply neglect but for MAUI it is exactly what is needed.

I have a demo MAUI project and decided to upgrade it to the new preview, working with Visual Studio Code on a Mac. It was not as easy as I had hoped. The process involved not only updating the target framework, but also the minimum versions of Android, iOS and Mac Catalyst. Then the Android SDK had to be updated, with an annoyance related to the recommended:

dotnet build -t:InstallAndroidDependencies -f net11.0-android “-p:AndroidSdkDirectory=[your path to the Android SDKs]”

The command failed with an error about the Android SDK licenses not being accepted. The fix is to set an environment variable:

export AcceptAndroidSDKLicenses=True

and then it works, though I’m not sure how this satisfies the lawyers. I also had an error where

builder.Logging.AddDebug();

could not find the AddDebug method; the fix was to add a package reference to Microsoft.Extensions.Logging.Debug to the .csproj file.

With all that done, the “Start debugging” command is not working for me in VS Code. I get a message that the “configured debug type ‘coreclr_mobile’ is not supported, and an instruction to install coreclr_mobile Extension; clicking this button gets me “no extensions found.” Update – this was resolved after updating both the C# and C# Dev Kit extensions to pre-release versions (.NET MAUI was already pre-release).

However, dotnet run from the command line works:

Demo of MAUI using .NET 11 Preview 6 on a Mac

I plan to do some more experimentation; note that this is a preview of .NET so some friction is expected.

.net, microsoft, professional, software development, tech

JetBrains Resharper for Visual Studio Code adds C# debugging support

One of the oddities of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is that it is free to use for almost anything other than the company’s own .NET platform. That is, there is nothing to stop developers from coding in C# with VS Code and using the .net command-line tools without paying Microsoft for a license; but the official C# Dev Kit extension requires a license for teams of 6 developers or more:

For personal, academic, and open-source projects, C# Dev Kit can be used at no cost. For commercial purposes, teams of up to 5 can also use the C# Dev Kit at no cost. For 6+ developers, those users will need a Visual Studio Professional (or higher) subscription.

In addition, there are licensing restrictions on Microsoft’s .NET debugger which impact VS Code forks:

The C# extension for Visual Studio Code includes the Microsoft .NET Core Debugger (vsdbg). Unlike VS Code, and most other parts of the .NET Core ecosystem, vsdbg is not an open source product but rather is a proprietary part of Visual Studio. It is licensed to work only with IDEs from Microsoft — Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio, or Visual Studio for Mac.

JetBrains has now introduced C# debugging support for the ReSharper VS Code extension, which means there is now another high quality option for developers who either prefer not to use the C# Dev Kit, or are using a VS Code fork such as AWS Kiro, Cursor, Windsurf or Google Antigravity, for which the official .NET debugger is not licensed.

ReSharper is free for non-commercial use, or costs £119.00 ($149.00) per year for an individual or £295.00 ($389.00) per year for developers working for an organization. The cheapest standalone Visual Studio Professional plan is currently $540.00 per year, though some developers will get it bundled with other plans.

Leaving aside licensing and cost considerations, how does ReSharper compare to C# DevKit and the Microsoft .NET debugger? I have yet to use ReSharper so do not have a personal opinion; but will note that Microsoft’s recent change which removed the Solution Explorer is unpopular.

Finally, my personal view is that Microsoft has more to gain by making .NET and its tooling fully open, than by playing games with licensing restrictions in an effort to keep developers hooked to Visual Studio or VS Code.

.net, Notes from the field, professional, software development, tech

Fixing a .NET P/Invoke issue on Apple Silicon – including a tangle with Xcode

I have a bridge platform (yes the game) written in C# which I am gradually improving. Like many bridge applications it makes use of the open source double dummy solver (DDS) by Bo Haglund and Soren Hein.

My own project started out on Windows and is deployed to Linux (on Azure) but I now develop it mostly on a Mac with Visual Studio Code. The DDS library is cross-platform and I have compiled it for Windows, Linux and Mac – I had some issues with a dependency, described here, which taught me a lot about the Linux app service on Azure, among other things.

Unfortunately though the library has never worked with C# on the Mac – until today that is. I could compile it successfully with Xcode, it worked with its own test application dtest, but not from C#. This weekend I decided to investigate and see if I could fix it.

I have an Xcode project which includes both dtest and the DDS library, which is configured as a dynamic library. What I wanted to do was to debug the C++ code from my .NET application. For this purpose I did not use the ASP.Net bridge platform but a simple command line wrapper for DDS which I wrote some time back as a utility. It uses the same .NET wrapper DLL for DDS as the bridge platform. The problem I had was that when the application called a function from the DDS native library, it printed: Memory::GetPtr 0 vs. 0 and then quit.

The error from my .NET wrapper

I am not all that familiar with Xcode and do not often code in C++ so debugging this was a bit of an adventure. In Xcode, I went to Product – Scheme – Edit Scheme, checked Debug executable under Info, and then selected the .NET application which is called ddscs.

Adding the .NET application as the executable for debugging.

I also had to add an argument under Arguments passed on Launch, so that my application would exercise the library.

Then I could go to Product – Run and success, I could step through the C++ code called by my .NET application. I could see that the marshalling was working fine.

Stepping through the C++ code in Xcode

Now I could see where my error message came from:

The source of my error message.

So how to fix it? The problem was that DDS sets how much memory it allows itself to use and it was set to zero. I looked at the dtest application and noticed this line of code:

SetResources(options.memoryMB, options.numThreads);

This is closely related to another DDS function called SetMaxThreads. I looked at the docs for DDS and found this remark:

The number of threads is automatically configured by DDS on Windows, taking into account the number of processor cores and available memory. The number of threads can be influenced using by calling SetMaxThreads. This function should probably always be called on Linux/Mac, with a zero argument for auto­ configuration.

“Probably” huh! So I added this to my C# wrapper, using something I have not used before, a static constructor. It just called SetMaxThreads(0) via P/Invoke.

Everything started working. Like so many programming issues, simple when one has figured out the problem!

azure, microsoft, software development, tech

Microsoft to remove Azure “Basic” IP number and load balancer in favour of pricier options

Microsoft is removing some features from Azure which were called “Basic,” in favour of alternatives which have more features but are also more expensive.

A load balancer is a network component which balances traffic to virtual machines. The Basic load balancer is free but has a few limitations, such as no compatibility with availability zones, support for only 300 instances, no SLA (Service Level Agreement), and no support for NAT Gateway. Microsoft has emailed customers saying:

On 30 September 2025, Azure Basic Load Balancer will be retired. You can continue to use your existing Basic Load Balancers until then, but you’ll no longer be able to deploy new ones after 31 March 2025.

The Standard load balancer routes to availability zones, supports up to 5000 instances, is secure by default, and has a 99.9% SLA, but it costs $0.025 per hour, or around $18 per month, for up to 5 rules.

A Basic public IP number costs  $0.0036 per hour or about $2.60 per month. It is a perfectly good IP number but does not support zone resiliency. A standard public IP number costs $0.005 per hour or about $3.60 per month, and does support zone resiliency. A similar email has been sent to users, with the same dates.

Although these extra charges will not make much of a ripple in enterprise accounts, they can be noticeable, for example if you are an individual developing an application and trying to keep within a strict budget.

professional, software development, tech

Web page memory usage: how much is too much?

I have a web application that loads names into a picklist and the question came up: how many names would be too much for the web page to handle? What about 5,000 names, for example?

Modern web browsers have a memory snapshot built in. Just press F12 and there it is. So I fired up my application with over 5,000 names loaded into an array and displayed in a scrolling div. 2.5 MB.

Then I visited Facebook. Logged in, the page reported over 78 MB.

image

Google’s clean-looking home page? Not logged in, 11.2 MB.

image

Twitter? Logged in, 83 MB.

image

This was enough for me to stop worrying about the memory impact of 5,000 names in my web application. With our casual acceptance of multi-MB web pages it is easy to forget that the complete works of Shakespeare in plain text is 5.5 MB and compresses to less than half of that.

Just because you can do something, does not mean you should. Smaller is better and faster, and software bloat of various kinds is responsible for many performance issues.

There are trade-offs though both in time and in performance. Maybe it is better to load just a few names, and retrieve more from the server when needed. It is easy to test such things. Nevertheless, I found it useful to get some perspective on the memory usage of modern web sites.

software development, tech

Installing Ubuntu 22.04 on Apple M1 with UTM

I  started with Arch Linux for Linux development  on  M1, which works, but succumbed to Ubuntu just because it is so widely used and therefore easier to find help. It is also supported by VS Code for remote development, as I am aiming for something similar to a WSL setup on Windows and using VS Code on the host side. I had problems installing 22.04 though;  the install completed but trying to boot resulted in:

EFI stub: booting Linux Kernel

EFI stub: Using DTB from configuration table

EFI stub: Exiting boot services

and there it would stay.

The fix I found was to update QEMU:

sudo port selfupdate

sudo port install qemu

after which Ubuntu started without issue (no need to reinstall).

Following this I was able to install and use the Remote – SSH extension in VS Code which worked first time.

Small points to note:

  • I accepted the option in Ubuntu to install the OpenSSH server during installation
  • In UTM I changed the networking for the VM to Emulated VLAN rather than Shared Network, in order to use port forwarding. I forwarded both the SSH port 22 and also the HTTP port 80, to different ports on the Mac, so that I can test web applications running on Ubuntu.

Thanks also to Liz Rice for her post here.

development, software development, tech, Web

Thoughtworks: do not choose to develop Single Page Applications by default

I have a lot of time for Thoughtworks, a global software development company, and always look at its Technology Radar, the latest version of which appeared recently. Plenty to digest, but what caught my eye was this comment regarding SPAs (Single Page Applications):

The sheer prevalence of teams choosing a single-page application (SPA) by default when they need a website has us concerned that people aren’t even recognizing SPAs as an architectural style to begin with, instead immediately jumping into framework selection. SPAs incur complexity that simply doesn’t exist with traditional server-based websites: search engine optimization, browser history management, web analytics, first page load time, etc. That complexity is often warranted for user experience reasons, and tooling continues to evolve to make those concerns easier to address (although the churn in the React community around state management hints at how hard it can be to get a generally applicable solution). Too often, though, we don’t see teams making that tradeoff analysis, blindly accepting the complexity of SPAs by default even when the business needs don’t justify it.

This struck a chord with me because of my adventures creating an online bridge playing platform using ASP.NET Core. I picked the platform because I was in a hurry, like C#, and had some existing code for implementing a bridge game, done for Windows. Any online game though needs lots of JavaScript and I soon became aware that the traditional ASP.NET approach, where each web page is a separate .cshtml file with server-side rendering and C# code-behind, is at odds with trends towards SPAs and JAMstack (JavaScript, API and Markup, where “Markup” is HTML and CSS).

Note that you can of course do SPAs and JAMstack with ASP.NET; ASP.NET is a nice technology for implementing an API and there are Visual Studio templates for things including “ASP.NET Core with React.js and Redux”. A Razor Pages application is still the default though, and gives you a UI for the ASP.NET Core Identity for free which saved me a lot of gruntwork. Still, as I got deeper into JavaScript libraries, including the AWS JavaScript SDK which I am using for audio and video, I found myself being steered towards React.js (resisted so far) and JavaScript bundling with Webpack (tried but was not a good fit). I also found that even switching my JavaScript code to TypeScript was surprisingly awkward, considering that the creator of TypeScript works for Microsoft. I found myself wondering if I should have started with an SPA, or convert my application to an SPA, in order to fit in well with the new world.

Separately, I’ve been involved with another project, in PHP and JavaScript, which is an SPA, and hitting some of the potential issues. For example, the application made a ton of database queries on first load, the data from which was in most cases never used, as users did not visit the parts of the application that required them. Refactoring to load this data on demand has made the application faster and more efficient.

A problem, which Thoughtworks alludes to in a remark about “closing the gap on user experience,” is that staying in JavaScript rather than loading a new page from the server generally makes for a smoother application. The way my bridge application has evolved is that the main play screen is a kind of SPA: everything is done in JavaScript and API calls, and I have written a ton of JavaScript code for things like rendering HTML tables where server-side rendering with Razor would be much easier, but unacceptable for usability. However, different parts of the application still use separate Razor pages, for things like viewing results, configuring a user profile, finding a game, and admin screens for managing members and running sessions.

JavaScript, now TypeScript, has exceeded my expectations in terms of performance and capability. It is annoying at times but a modern web browser is a phenomenal platform. I was glad though to see Thoughtworks noting that going the SPA route is not always the right decision

software development, tech

Drupal 7 is the version that refuses to die as the majority of sites have not upgraded

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Drupal, which may be the 2nd most popular content management system after WordPress according to these stats, is now at version 9.2. Version 7.0 was released 11 years ago but when 8.0 was being developed (it was released in 2015) the team decided that there there were so many key improvements, including mobile-first design, multi-language support and HTML 5 forms, that in-place upgrade from 7.0 was too hard. In addition, some modules (used to extend Drupal) had no Drupal 8 version. Read all about the migration story here. It is not trivial.

From 8 on, the team promised, compatibility would be preserved so that upgrades would be easier.

What happened? Did every Drupal 7 site migrate to version 8 in order to enjoy the new features and promised future upgrade path?

No. Last month the team confessed that “a majority  of all sites in the Drupal project are still on Drupal 7.” The date for ending support for Drupal 7 keeps getting pushed back and is now November 1 2023, but to be reviewed annually.  “We will announce by July 2023 whether we will extend Drupal 7 community support an additional year,” said the post.

While this is good news in one sense for Drupal 7 site maintainers, it is not good news for the Drupal project. Having more than half Drupal sites on what is now an ancient version is unhealthy and maintaining it is a distraction.

Should the team have compromised the improvements in Drupal 8  for the sake of compatibility? It is imponderable but underlines a general truth in software development: breaking compatibility in major ways is expensive and can only be worth it if the benefits are correspondingly huge.

Another example that come to mind is Visual  Basic .NET which was incompatible with Visual Basic 6.0 and in consequence there are many  VB 6.0  applications still out there, that have never been upgraded.

Python 2 is another example.

What this also means is that time invested in making upgrade easy, or preserving compatibility in a widely-used project, may seem unrewarding but has a big payback.

.net, software development, tech, visual studio

A UI lesson: do not ask users to choose between Register and Login

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I am developing a web site for playing bridge, a project which kicked off in March when lockdown caused bridge clubs everywhere to close. There are lots of sites where you can play bridge online, but not many options (particularly back in March) for clubs that wanted to run their own online sessions.

It’s going OK with a number of clubs now using it every week, though it is still in development. I have learned a painful lesson though. In order to proceed as quickly as possible, I started my project with the Visual Studio template for an ASP.Net Core application with ASP.NET Core Identity – the latter an easy decision since it handles all the complications of registration, password reset and so on. (I did end up having to re-plumb it to use int rather than GUID for the primary key but that is another story).

The default home page the template generates looks like this, with options in the menu to Register or Login.

image

Registration and login are fundamental concepts that have been part of the web forever. It’s simple for a developer to understand: you register to create an account, you login if you already have an account.

The painful discovery is that this is not obvious to everyone, particularly to an older demographic that did not grow up with computers. Another factor is that cookies, browser-saved passwords and single sign-on with Google/Facebook etc means that this whole area is a bit of a mess and there are people who just kinda expect web sites to know who they are (which in one way horrifies me but I do see the massive convenience).

The consequence is that a surprising (to me) number of people had difficulty knowing whether Registration or Login was what they needed. They would Register, then return to the site and hit Register again. Why is this site asking for my details again? Maybe a security thing? Oh no, why does it now say username not available?

This is because asking the user to make this choice is not good design. Registration is rare, login is common. Further, Register is a confusing word. We sometimes use the word register when accounts already exist. Create Account is better. And a better UI is just Login. I need to access this website. Then, underneath the username/password request, an option that says “I need to create an account”. The two options should not be equally prominent; and if you look at how many prominent sites design this, that is what they do:

image image

Lesson learned; but I wish this had occurred to me sooner!

cloud computing, software development, tech

Point-in-time restore: a handy built-in feature in Azure SQL

I am working on a project that is hosted in Azure and I made a mistake, running a SQL script that was dependent on another SQL script that I had forgotten to run. It messed up the foreign keys and I would have to restore a backup … but my most recent backup was from the day before. Annoying.

But wait. Looking the Azure portal I saw this:

image

This is a plain Azure SQL instance with no extras, but look, you can restore the database from 6 minutes ago.

I did it; it restored to a second database. I deleted the bad one, renamed the restored one, ran my scripts in the right order, and all was well.

I recommend you do not run scripts in the wrong order … but if you do, or make some other error, this is a handy feature of Azure SQL which I was not aware of before.