No I didn’t misspell “Blog” and intended to say “Bog” because things have been that way around here. Kinda deep and stuck in some things to keep moving forward.

It is a pleasure to be able to use Visual Studio Code again for creating and editing posts and the website. I was able to use it for years until the last couple years when the app got so huge that it dragged. Though VS Code is well know for it’s huge size the problem was also I was trying to run on a Linux desktop built in 2011 and running Ubuntu Studio. And that with only 4GB of memory.

So rather than building a new tower I got a mini-PC with 16 GB of memory, SSD storage and screaming CPU speed. All that for almost 1/3 of the cost of the old desktop. And at 4x4” square not taking up so much space.

Needless to say it is a different experience though some of it is going from Ubuntu Studio 20.04 (Xbuntu) to version 24.04 using Kbuntu because the Xbuntu version isn’t available yet.

The mini-PC did come with Windows 11 installed so I ran it first to register it in case I “ever” need to use it on this machine. But that’s doubtful because sometime in the next few months I will be replacing my Windows 10 development PC with a Windows 11 system. That game PC I use for development is not capable of the Win11 install.

So I am still plaguing with “Not Responding” messages and the “Activity” indicator spinning on that Windows 10 machine. Makes me think that Microsoft is doing that to get people to migrate to Windows 11. Perhaps the big M has too much money to think about the economic problems dropped on the populace the last 4 years to expect them to upgrade so easily. Not to mention problems with their own product development especially .NET MAUI.

That problem resulted in having to delay my migration to MAUI which was announced in early 2000 and I liked the idea of replacing Xamarin with MAUI because it simplified the projects. In that case having both desktop and mobile in the same project. At this time I have been moving my Xamarin desktop app to MAUI. Since I have a backend of code for the app that can be used for various projects their upgrade tool make a good job changing namespaces and some of the “usings” from Xamarin Forms to MAUI. But I’ve yet to see how many other snags I’ll run into. Fortunately over the last few years as MAUI progressed I have been building some smaller apps using MAUI to exercise the platform.

On the way to updating the Xamarin app that has been available since 2017 a bug crept in on the current users which I didn’t see in that release. It effected only users of a less used feature in it if the user was running the app on an Android 14 phone. It did not effect iOS and Windows users.

It was also hard for me to see the bug since Microsoft fixed it last October and the app had been updated since then and didn’t show in an Android 14 emulator. One of the problems again is that back in the day when I started using Xamarin Microsoft had a free-wheeling forum where it was actually easier to find reported bugs than their current setup. To find it required the right search terms.

The bug was in the DateTime API for Android where it was returning a zero as the timezone offset rather than the time zone for the device. I had to do nothing but release the build that I had for Android which included Android 14 in the manifest as the maximum targeted SDK. There is no Android 14 SDK for Xamarin (there is for MAUI) but Android 13 is okay for the build SDK. This allowed developers to release a Xamarin update beyond May 1st and my update is on Google Play.

In the meantime anyway I attempted using MAUI to update the app at least for Android. As I recently mentioned I don’t like to change the UI on users for an update but for an upgrade (or new edition) is okay. One improvement if the Flyout menu that I use in the Xamarin version since MAUI has the real deal. The one Xamarin was a third party hack.

Most all of the app action takes place on the backend so that doesn’t need to change much except that for the main page is on Android and iOS it uses a CarouselPage. Seems that Xamarin (quietly) replaced (or added) a CarouselView back in the day. News to me. It’s also the replacement for CarouselPage in MAUI.

While the CarouselPage worked fine in Xamarin it the CarouselView in MAUI does not. When such drastic changes take place with frameworks pitchforks and torches break out from the app developers. Such action breaks things. The problem? I think a lot of the staff that Microsoft hires it fresh out of college and ill prepared how the real world works. So you need to support both features which they seem to hate.

For the moment it’s a “showstopper” and I don’t want to replace the “gallery” look of the carousel with tabs.

Trying to work on this also showed me why so many of Microsoft’s MAUI and Xamarin developers use Macs instead of Windows. I tried switching development on my MacBook Air which has only 8 GB of memory using Visual Studio 2022 for the Mac (which goes away in August) and while my Windows PC struggled with building and testing an app no problem on the Mac. However noting that the emulator comes up smaller and dimly remember that Google at some point not only mentioned using the Hyper-V it also mentioned a high power graphics card would suffice which I have on the development PC. Making the emulator screen smaller got rid of performance problems on the PC.