The 3 people who are probably reading this site may have noticed that there is now a “padlock” showing (depending on browser) along with the site address (URL). Yes I finally got around to making this a “secure” site not that it needed it because here is no login or much of anything else that needed it. But I figured as long as “Let’s Encrypt” SSL certificates are free I might as well do it. Why pay my hosting service to run a script to do that? Of course their certificates are good for a year and the free ones only 90 days but the certificate provider I used will email you in advance of the expiration of the certificate so it may be updated for another 90 days.

About the only thing that needed fixing here was the URL reference in the config file change to HTTPS and once that was done and the site generated all pages with the old URL reference were updated.

One of the reasons I got around to this was a need for support form in the apps I sell. Would you believe I get this emails saying “the app don’t work”? So which app? Which platform? The support form is a web page on my hosting site. It worked from a webview flawlessly unless I wanted to publish the app. Then it threw a CLEARTEXT exception. This on Android and iOS just won’t show the page. Best solution was to make the domain that page was on SSL. That took care of the problem.

That page grabs the app name, version and platform version and includes it in the email which is sent to me. So no need to ask back “which app and which platform?” Apparently some of my customers thought I was more psychic than I am.

That is the question. My first main Xamarin project was done using their PCL “Portable” system. It was fairly easy to set up though I spent probably just as many hours dealing with Xamarin workarounds as I did my own code. The advantage was one codebase for three platforms and being able to use C#.

Since then Xamarin has been pushing using .NET Standard builds instead of PCL. In fact PCL is no longer available creating a new project. So I decided to try updating my app to .NET. The process is somewhat simple and I used this article as a guide. Actually I had done this before on a smaller project.

Things went well as far as the conversion went for the Android version. But the iOS version threw some errors I still haven’t sorted out. The problem is it doesn’t like one of the plugins I used but Visual Studio 2017 doesn’t exactly tell you which plugin it is. Great.

I could probably continue shipping the product using PCL as it builds fine that way. And besides I have an idea for a better interface. As it is there are two versions of this app, one in portrait for phones and one in landscape for tablets which is also used for a Windows 10 (UWP) app. I had even originally looked at using a responsive design layout which would have worked for both but there seemed to be a request for a landscape version for Android tablets less than 10” like I had on my flagship smaller app.

Trouble is in two years now almost no one bought the landscape version for Android. My new layout is responsive design so only one codebase needed. Also iOS came late to the party a year after the initial release. Unlike most Android tablets the iPad is more like a 4:3 aspect ratio as compared to Android tablets which are often 16:9. There are more square Android tablets but if the layout is for 16:9 Android letterboxes it appropriately and iOS does not.

I still like Xamarin but have been making forays as mentioned here into other frameworks such as React. However, as usual, I don’t like to be stumped so I will probably still hammer away at getting a .NET Standard version of the original project.