Golfing for the Peyback Foundation and Children's Hospital - Results

The Results of the Morning and Afternoon Rounds:

The Morning Results

The Afternoon Results

We had a long and winding day on Monday.  We went and scored the Morning and Afternoon portions of the Children's Hospital - Peyback Foundation Charity Golf Tournament.  Each portion was flighted.  Pictures were taken of each team while on the course.  The pictures were immediately uploaded to the scoring system for display on the scoreboard.  The flighting of each portion was performed by the application.  As each portion finished, the teams were placed into each flight.  Each team's scores were shown in the flight as well as the team pictures.

The scoring system is hosted in Azure.  The picture upload is done via an iPhone application written in C#/Xamarin.

I learned a few new things that I will work on and resolve the next time around.

Customize the iOS Keyboard with Xamarin

You can customize the iOS Keyboard with Xamarin.

Nearly all applications require that users interact with your app via a keyboard. It could be a search bar, a text field, or something else -- users typically use the keyboard in some way for input. iOS comes with different types of keyboards that can solve just about any need, but there are times when some additional feature would be great. In Google's Gmail app for iOS, for instance, maybe you'd like to make things a bit easier by adding e-mail addresses for .net, .org, and other domain suffixes. This article will look at how to modify the existing iOS Keyboard to better fit the needs of the application.

App To Market: Your Startup Needs An MVP

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2016/03/22/app-to-market-startup-needs-an-mvp.aspx

An MVP is not some Microsoft award, but the acronym for a term, "minimum viable product," that loosely defines what you're trying to provide as far as features -- at a bare minimum -- to get your app to market. Let's look at the considerations for making sure your app achieves MVP status.

Drill Into Problems with Xamarin Insights

Url: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2016/03/01/xamarin-insights.aspx

You've completed the initial version of your mobile app. You've deployed it. And now, you've started to get reports of exceptions in your app. It doesn't happen all of the time, and it doesn't happen to all users, only some of them. What's worse is that the errors aren't often repeatable. For some reason, the issues some users are having can't be repeated in your office. You drive around and try to repeat the errors but you can't, so you wonder if it's is a location issue. Perhaps it's a cell signal issue. Perhaps the issue is the version of the OS the user is running. You're stuck and you don't know what's causing the errors. You need more information in order to solve the problem, so where do you turn? Xamarin has released a product just for this situation. It's called Xamarin Insights.

Neo-Socialism

The formal definition of neosocialism from the 1930s has some rather unsavory pieces.  However, we're in 2016.  If people can redefine things, I figure I can to.

Neo meaning new.

Socialist meaning socialist.

I've noticed this new trend of socialists.  They were brought up in a capitalist economy and want it to change.  these people seem to think that things and times are horrible.  If you listened to them and Bernie Sanders, you'd think we were living under the thumb of bankster gangsters.  Puhlease.  These people need a reality check.  In a capitalistic economy, if you come up with a better idea, you have the opportunity to grow, start a business, and change your situation dramatically.  Anyway, these people that grew in capitalism and now think that socialism would be so cool, I refer to them as neosocialists.

Slim down your Pictures in the iPhone & Android

Url: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2016/02/01/slimming-pics.aspx

Nothing can be as helpful as a picture. Text is great, but there is a reason why pictures are worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, as the cameras of devices have gotten better, the amount of space that pictures take up has gotten larger. With a late-2015/early-2016 phone, a picture can easily be 2MB. Start trying to upload those via e-mail or to a service (Instagram, Facebook, Twitter), and there are always problems with connectivity or otherwise. Let's examine some simple routines to minimize the size of an image.

Xamarin 4 Overview - Article

Url: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2016/01/11/xamarin-4-improvements-upgrading.aspx
November 17, 2015 was a great day for mobile development. That is the day that Xamarin shipped the latest major update to its mobile development suite of tools, and with this one there's lots to like:

• Xamarin.Forms. With Xamarin.Forms 2.0, there are updates for iOS9, Material Design, pre-compiled screens, preview support for Universal Windows Platform apps, and gestures support like pinch.
• Visual Studio iOS Support. Xamarin has reengineered for iOS support for Visual Studio in a way that should improve iOS app reliability.
• Mono Upgrade. Microsoft has open sourced portions of the .NET codebase, and what that, Xamarin has incorporated the open source code into the Mono framework. The move should improve the compatibility and performance of the framework.
• The iOS designer. The iOS designer can now load and save XIB files in addition to storyboard files.
• The Android designer. The Android designer now supports Android Material Design.
• Xamarin Test Cloud. To support the Xamarin Test Cloud and its 2,000+ devices that are accessible to developers, Xamarin has introduced a preview tool named the Xamarin Test Recorder, Xamarin.UITest 1.0, and Xamarin Insights, has been released with free crash reporting for all Xamarin customers (and, finally, additional plans for users).

PS. I was told that Listing 5 should have the following change:

protected override void OnCreate(Bundle bundle)
{

            FormsAppCompatActivity.ToolbarResource = Resource.Layout.toolbar;
            FormsAppCompatActivity.TabLayoutResource = Resource.Layout.tabs;
            base.OnCreate(bundle); 

            global::Xamarin.Forms.Forms.Init(this, bundle); 
            LoadApplication(new App()); 
}