Coding With David

    Maui has been out for a while now and I thought I would learn how to create a Blazor hybrid application and see what it is about.   There are blog posts and YouTube videos on how to do this so, see the links below. I am not focusing on the step-by-step but on what I learned by doing this exercise. It will help others.   Prep Work           You will need to make sure you have the Maui project templates installed in Visual Studio.           Go to the VS installer.         a.      Click the modified button.          Make sure under the Desktop and UI Development the .Net Multi-platform App UI development is checked, see image.        If not check it and click modify to install it.     Create the Project 1.      Open Visual Studio and click on “Create new Proj...

You may be asking yourself, what’s the difference, plenty.  If you are a developer who only codes because it is your job and you make a good living, which there is no problem with that, you may not enjoy working for a software company. Both companies need those types of developers.  But if you align yourself as a software engineer, who likes solving problems and is passionate about the profession of Software development, then you want to work for a Software company.  A company that makes and sells software is usually founded by a domain expert who wrote or had a friend write an application he needed, and they started reselling it.  A software company has usually evolved from a company that sells software but learned that the value they are providing to their customers is a high-quality system and high-quality customer support that improves the user’s lives.   My goal is not to state that one type of company is better or worse than the other, my goal is to ma...

  I have mentioned in several previous posts that I have a long list of Blazor applications that I want to build.   I did a self-driven analysis of the structure and hurdles of all the different applications I have written and the applications I have planned to develop.   I found patterns to slow starts.   My new goal is to eliminate the built-in excuses for not even starting these new projects by building a design system. From my analysis, I found out I get stuck on several decision hurdles:                1.        Colors        2.        Layout        3.        Authentication        4.          Database Use        5.        User Controls        6.   ...

  I recently came across a unique use case:  Our marketing department wants to be able to send out email promotions to users.  That is simple enough. Additionally, they want to be able to select the recipients by some or all of the following:      1. All      2. Name      3. City      4. Zip Code In addition, they want to be able to select all matching users of a city or zip code or just the Point of Contact (POC) for the account. The last requirement is that if Name is selected with POC no other users can be selected and vice versa.  If the POC is not selected, the user can add names. Backend Design The backend system design is simple, get a list of users and send each one an email.  If the user chooses city or zip code and POC, we will need to filter by those variables.  We will not cover that code in this post. I want to focus on the UI for this solution. Possible UIs There are many ways...

  I have built a data grid that I like to use but it is a little heavy and is not generic yet. If I can find a lighter-weight grid that will meet my needs, I would be happy to replace it. I might have found one. The new data grid component, QuickGrid,   created by the Blazor team could be it. This data grid can be used with .Net 6 or .Net 7, and it is open source. This is not a replacement for a fully functional data grid but does have nice and simple features. The documentation on this component is exceptionally good. It contains samples and in-depth content. The documentation can be found at QuickData Grid . This post is not to be a tutorial on how to use the Data grid, the documentation does an excellent job doing that already. My goal here is to provide feedback on the pros and cons of using this new component.   Get Started The component is available as a NuGet package or in GitHub. If you plan to use the NuGet Package you will need to have pre-release checke...

  Many of today’s websites provide the option to view a website in either a light mode or a dark mode. While other websites honor the system default to decide to use light mode or dark mode. Personally, I think a website should just use the system default. I can understand that a user might want to view your website in dark mode, or maybe they just want to view it in a different mode just once. If you prefer system default or allow the user to set the mode,   it is a nice feature to allow the user to switch to either dark or light mode. With Tailwind, this is a straightforward process.   How it works To implement the light-dark mode switch feature, a user simply clicks on a switch that selects which mode they want: Implementation There are five steps that must be implemented in other to support this feature.  1. In the TailwindCss configuration set the dark Mode under the Export modules to class. If this is not defined Tailwinds will use the system defau...

 I have made the decision to switch to using TailwindCss for all my new projects because I really like  TailwindCss . It became a pain to have to clean out the Bootstrap and add the styling for the default pages each time I started a new project. My solution, create a new default Blazor default template that uses TailwindCss. Ways to create templates After some investigation, I discovered there are now two ways to create project templates for .Net. The original one where you use Visual Studio to token your project and then export it out. The second method is to use the template engine. Using Visual Studio is error-prone. Once you tokenize your project, it will not build anymore. You will have to keep two versions of the project and update each one moving forward. It does generate a zip file which makes it easier to share the new template. The new and better way, in my opinion, is to use the new template engine. Channel 9 has a good video series  on how it works. You use t...