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Background story

I am developing in dotnet every single day. For the last 18 months (approx since August 2021) I have been doing Blazor front end and for the last month I took the chance on MAUI as my PWA was not living up to my expectations. All this is is working with my dotnet REST API.

MAC is my development environment by choice. Long story short – I haven’t looked back since I tried MAC hardware in 2014. I used to work with Paralell – using Windows to develop on my Mac but since dotnet became available on Mac – I started to work exclusively on macOs.

I have done most of the development with VS Code – as VS 2022 wasn’t work ready but moving into MAUI and mobile development this is no longer an option.

The problemssss ….

Microsoft continues to deliver versions of Visual Studio for Mac – and from late last fall they started giving it names like Release Candidate and even Release – even though one could not rename or move files properly.

The whole time the parsing of Razor files has resulted in the infamous spinning wheel of death – for up to 52 seconds (the longest I measured) when just editing HTML tags.

The release notes continues to list fancy stuff which is of no value to the every day developer until the basic things are fixes and we can work 60 minutes of our hour – not work 20 minutes and wait 40 minutes.

The latest (preview) release (I also use the stable release channel) features an unusable project reference editor – meaning that the list of project references seems to have no connection what-so-ever with the contents of the actual XML in the project file – listing the project references the compiler is actually working with. This cost me several hours yesterday (Sunday) trying to figure out what the hell was actually going on – the compiler complaining about missing and incorrect references.

The problem

For me – the problem is quite obvious – there is nobody on the Microsoft Test Team actually working on real live projects using VS 2022 for Mac – the bugs they release – bear every indication that nobody at Microsoft is actually doing real Blazor and Maui development using this tool. They might be updating the demos and testing out some simple stuff – but nobody is actually doing real live refactoring with VS 2022 for Mac.

Please, please …

… Microsoft – make your development team use this product – we are dying of productivity losses over here in the real world. The excitement about Maui will evaporate quickly if it cannot be developed properly on Mac. Front end developers don’t work on Windows – they work on Mac and MAUI will never gain traction if you don’t fix these basic things properly.

Using: Visual Studio for Mac 17.5 Preview (17.5 build 1701)

Something happened during the upgrade in the preview channel so that Android manifest couldn’t find the appicons provided.

resource mipmap/appicon (aka com.companyname.myapp.maui:mipmap/appicon) not found.

The solution was to copy the appicons to he Platforms/Android/mipmap and change the build action to AndroidResource

In Visual Studio 2019 Mac – while building Theory based tests, using input object array

This will work perfectly

Trying to be a bit more robust (as we now property names will change) , replacing the static “Index” with something like nameOf() won’t work, resulting in the test disappearing of the radar in the test manager. This probably makes perfect sense (not allowing non-static variables in the Theory) – but I think the test manager (or VS somehow) should warn about this … ? 🙂

For 3 hours I was dealing with the title error nothing seems to work until I read the answer from hikrikunen where the key was deleting the localhost certificates in the system keychain and then running

dotnet dev-certs https –clean

and then

dotnet dev-certs https -t

Uptil the point of deleting the localhost certificates, the dotnet dev-certs commands were not getting me anywhere, telling me that there was no cert available, but refusing to add because there was a certificate available. Strange but I don’t understand fully what happened but now my API can be run on https locally again 🙂

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53300480/unable-to-configure-https-endpoint-no-server-certificate-was-specified-and-the

Fun discovery of the day … when building Blazor – having a Pages subfolder called System will completely mess upp the application build.

Renaming the folder to SystemX (or anything else for that matter) will make those errors disappears 🙂

This is possibly a result of some local coincidence … but I can reproduce this over and over again – and there are no changes in my project file or any other project files. Made my day … feels like I have discovered an Easter Egg in Blazor 🙂

I was faced with the project of migrating an mssql database to postgres (why? mainly because of licensing fees as we are about to go live with the solution – without any revenues any time soon 🙂 )

This is more a #notetoself if im faced with this again rather than any kind of guideline attempt – please feel free to contact me for details if I can in any way help – I would be happy to share my experience with this.

So, I thought I would document a checklist for those that might stumble across this post while preparing the same action. I was an absolute beginner with postgres when starting this process so some of the comments might feel a bit “verbal”.

The porting took me about 16 hours for a database with around 100 tables, 50 procedures, 50 functions. My process is not applicable for all as I moved the data between the database using json as staging storage for all data – creating a simple import mechanism in c# thought EF6.

1. Postgres only handles lowercase objects (schemas, table names, columns, procedure names, … ) without quotes. Prepare to rename everything! … unless you want to add a million double quotes to your database procedures and views.
2. Make sure you read this: https://www.npgsql.org/efcore/modeling/table-column-naming.html before thinking about changing your db entity names in c# (from GolfClub to golf_club) This is mapped automatically by EF6.
3. Get ready with your favorite text editor with a lot of search-replace regexp.
4. When putting together dynamic queries and using the pipe || to concatenate strings (instead of + in mssql) make sure you declare empty strings as empty quotes – as when a null is “and-ed” with a string the result is null. I sent quite a few nulls to the execute statement when I was expecting the dynamic string to be full of meaning.

EF6 Core – reconfiguring navigation properties, the runtime was complaining about a column GolferId being missing (invalid database column).

Took me a minute to figure out and remember the default foreign key dependency naming convention in EF. Sometimes these frameworks are a bit too intelligent for my taste.

Turns out the EF was guessing that if I have a navigation property to a related entity called “User” – the framework will automatically use an object property field called “UserId” … easily solved with the ForeignKey tag 🙂

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46091157/changing-default-column-name-for-navigation-property

I had a problem with Xamarin.Forms MessagingCenter – as sometimes the messages disappeared. Code that on most occasions worked nicely failed silently and from debug output – the messages never reached the subscription methods. What I eventually found out was happening (after days of frustration) was that one of the subscriptions was updating the UI and since this is on a thread other than the main one – it just failed silently and the next message subscription never got the message. This is not a 100% diagnostic (I don’t care to waste more time on this) but moving the UI updates explicitly to the main thread solved the issue. Hope this helps someone … a day or two of pointless debugging 🙂