.Net and Xamarin Development

 By default, the portal home link shows the company name of  Contoso, Ltd.  The company name can be changed in organization administration/setup/organization/legal entities but you cannot change the company account name. Below is the official document to manage the banner and logo https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/fin-ops/get-started/tasks/change-banner-or-logo The place to change the home title is in the content snippet of the website. The content snippets contain all required labels for the website for English and the language you prefer, such as Home Tile, which is Contoso by default. Review all the items in this view and update each of them. By default, there are about 239 items if 2 languages are supported. Click each one to modify.

 I have an account with MS Dynamics 365. So I decide to play with it and create a website using the Dynamics portal. I bought a domain name from Google Domain.  It does not take too much time to update the portal setting and google domain setting to map the domain name with the portal. 1.  Go to the portal management page, there is a tool to set up a custom domain. Add custom domain here. 2. Go to Google domain management, in the DNS page, add a CName with WWW and point it to the yourportal.powerappports.com After a couple of minutes, the setup will take effect and the portal will work with the custom domain. However, the Chrome browser complains that the website is unsafe. To resolve this issue, the only way is to buy an SSL certificate. Since this is a personal website, I do not want to spend too much on SSL. I checked around and found that Namecheap provides SSL at a really low price. My impression is that SSL usually cost hundreds of bucks. However, with Namecheap, an...

As usual, the best way to learn something is to use it. Follow the official quickstart sample to develop the Hello World of Xamarin. Xmarin quickstart A few interesting tips: 1. At top right, there are a few icons. One of them can be used to switch to design view as Asp.Net UI designer: 2. In this sample, the local file operation and basic back end code are exactly the same as Asp.net. The only issue I have had is that I changed the application name from "Notes" to "Quickstart_Note" and this caused a build failure. The reason is that then namespace for the Mainpage class is Notes. The namespace has to be used in the App.xaml.cs accordingly. This is how the final app looks like in Android emulator: 3. For the quickstart step 3, SQL Lite recommended by the tutorial has been depreciated. There is an official build specially for Xamarin released by SQLite-net. There is no other issue to follow the quickstart sample. After the quick start, the fundamentals of Xamarin dev...

The official start point of Xamarin resource is Microsoft Xamarin document site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/?WT.mc_id=docs-ch9-jamont    It is also recommended to have a look at github page for the 2020 .Net Conf: Foucus on Xamarin. A lot of Youtube videos, sample apps and keynote powerpoints can be found here: https://github.com/dotnet-presentations/dotNETConf/tree/master/2020/FocusOnXamarin/Technical Following are some interesting samples, controls etc for Xamarin Xamarin.Forms CheckBox Xamarin.Forms RadioButton Xamarin Shell is a great feature that should be checked out as well. It is a usable framework for a mobile app. Xmarin.Forms Shell Another sample for Xamarin Shell can be found here: https://jesseliberty.com/2020/03/07/xamarin-forms-shell/

Here is the story. I have been using Google Drive to host the javascript files and stylesheet files all the time. It works perfectly, until a few days ago when I noticed that if the web page contains javascript files hosted at Google Drive, it can not be viewed properly from the Facebook built in web browser.  I did some further investigation. The same thing happened when the page is opened in Wechat built in browser.  However, the page works fine when it is opened in most browsers, like IE, Chrome, Firefox. It took me several hours to figure why. And So far I have not find out the reason. I checked the mime type of the files. They are correctly recognized by Google Drive. But the solution is: moving the files out of Google Drive. Now it works perfectly, in browser and in App built in web browsers as well.

The  NewsMag  wordpress theme is a fast and simple.  It is excellent for a news, newspaper, magazine, publishing or review site. It also supports videos from YouTube and features a rating system. It uses the best clean SEO practices, and on top of that, it’s fast, simple, and easy to use. In addition, News mag supports responsive Google Ads and AdSense. The problem I had with this theme is that it does not work with  Nelio External Featured Image  by default. You can follow the steps in this article to make the theme and the plugin work with each other Nelio External Featured Image Not working with Newsmag theme Another useful information is here:  Solution fix thumn for theme Newsmag when using module Nelio External Featured Image Unfortunately whenever the theme is updated, the update to the theme will get lost. Therefore it is not a good idea to use the   Nelio External Featured Image  plugin. After some research, I found a...

After spending hours and hours with Azure, I decided to give some other options a try to play with cloud hosting.   DigitalOcean  is a pretty neat and small cloud hosting provider. I played with it for one day and found that it is really easy to use and the price is quite low compared to the major cloud hosting provider like Azure or Amazon AWS, or Google Cloud. I finished the setup in about half an hour and got my website going. Everything works pretty good with a $10 per month web hosting. The speed is actually not so bad. I then deleted everything, and noticed that they only charged me one cent. I payed $5 when I signed up, and now I have $4.99 sitting in my account. So accurate!