Visual Studio 2019 Tricks and Techniques – Review, sort of

by Contributed | Apr 21, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Earlier this year, Packt released a new book…

Visual Studio 2019 Tricks and Techniques: A developer’s guide to writing better code and maximizing productivity

http://aka.ms/VS2019Book 

But I should be honest. I was involved in this book. Let me find a version of the cover with my name on it…

There you go. I wrote the foreword! It was a great and wonderful thing! At least, I think it was. I really can’t remember what I wrote. I’ll go read it…

Oh, I like how I opened the foreword…

“By combining Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio (VS), the brand is over two times more commonly used by developers than any other environment (Stack Overflow, 2019). What that means is that this topic for 80% of all developers.”

Have you thought about that? In this day and age, when there are so many IDE options for developers to pick from, they simply are choosing Visual Studio. There are many reasons why developers want to use Visual Studio, including compatibility with languages and tools, as well as various feature sets. 

And that’s really what this book is about. As I said/wrote in my foreword, the authors (Paul Schroeder and Aaron Cure) have cracked the code! If you apply the snippets, templates, git tips, and extension-based practices that you’ll find in this book, then not only will you become more efficient, but you’ll also become your team’s hero and thought leader!

Before I move on, did you notice how weird the subtitle was in the top version of the book cover? Let’s inspect it:

“A developer’s guide to mastering in core skills with the IDE and unlock advanced productivity secrets.”

You could probably read that sentence for 20 minutes before you decipher and interpret all its secrets. Moving on…

Let’s take a look at what the topics are…

1. Flavors of Visual Studio


2. Keyboard Shortcuts


3. IDE Tips and Tricks


4. Working with a Repository


5. Working with Snippets


6. Database Explorers


7. Compiling, Debugging, and Versioning 


8. Introduction to Project and Item Templates


9. Creating Your Own Templates


10. Deploying Custom Templates


11. Overviewing Visual Studio 2019 Extensions


12. Overviewing VS Code Extensions


13. CodeMaid is Your Friend


14. Be Your Team’s Hero with CodeGenHero


15. Secure Code with Puma Scan


16. Appendix: Other Popular Productivity Extensions

I know what you’re thinking! You’re thinking, “Is overviewing a word?” Yes, yes it is a word! More specifically, it’s the present participle of a word.

Anyway, the reason why I wanted to write the foreword (and blog about it), is because I truly believe in the value. Developers don’t use templates, especially, to the degree that they could. Plus, you’ll peruse a plethora of other topics that you’d be wise to glean from. 

Also, one interesting tidbit is that the author is partially at fault for the extension featured in chapter 14, CodeGenHero. So check that out!

Whilst perusing the Amazons, I saw the reviews for the book, and they’re pretty impressive. I want to give you just the titles of the reviews here, so you can see what I mean:

• “Useful Visual Studio shortcuts, Git-Jitsu, snippet and debugging knowledge here.” – Dan Hermes


• “Clear and concise with good examples to draw upon for furthering learning.” – Robert Frey


• “This one is a must have!” – Binit Datta


• “Learn everything about Visual Studio 2019.” – Yusuf


• “Excellent for those with some C# programming experience.” – Ben Miller

This book is great for noobs and still useful for ratchety, engineering curmudgeons. So check it out, and leave a review on the Amazons:

• http://aka.ms/VS2019Book 

Remember to keep your mask on your face, your feet on the ground, and your head in the Cloud!

Ed

How to beautify your Power Apps

by Contributed | Apr 21, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Power Apps offers you a variety of icons – and recently, there were nice additions announced and rolled out. But if we want to create even more appealing apps, it makes sense to extend our pretty little icon library. Microsoft provides us with Fluent UI.

 

Fluent UI is a collection of UX frameworks for creating beautiful, cross-platform apps that share code, design, and interaction behavior

One part of Fluent UI is the iconography

 

 

 

 

How to get Fluent UI icons

You can browse through the icons in the Fluent UI icons tool, but there is right-click download option. As a developer, you can import Fluent UI iconography (and more) into your applications; for Power Apps, there a different way how to use them:

 

Use a community-driven tool to import icons to Power Apps

there are several tools available to get Fluent UI icons into Power Apps; find two of them here:

• 
  

  Office Ui Fabric Icon Generator

  
  


• 
  

  2000 free Power Apps icons

  
  

However, if you only want to use a few specific icons for an app or would like to try them out, you can head over to the Fluent UI repository on GitHub and right-click-download the icons. After that, you upload them to your Power App and can use them like any other image. Super cool: You get all icons as .svg files, which have three significant advantages:

 

• 
  

  .svg are transparent, which means you have no extra work to remove any background

  
  


• 
  

  .svg are lossless scalable, which means that you blow them up as you like it

  
  


• 
  

  .svg have are usually smaller than .jpg files of the same quality – this will have an excellent effect on the performance of your app

  
  

 

Pop-Ups

Screens in Power Apps are perfect for displaying information that should always be shown. But what if we only want to show some more content occasionally? Pop up to the rescue!

 

 

 

To create a pop up effect, create:

 

 

• 
  

  a rectangle that overlays the content that our user now should not focus on – good idea to have it filled grey and semi-transparent

  
  


• 
  

  a rectangle, smaller than the GreyOutRectangle, filled in in brighter background-color

  
  


• 
  

  a text label which shows the information

  
  


• 
  

  a cancel icon

  
  

Group these controls; it’s easier to work with them then.

 

• 
  

  Now create a textlabel (or a button, or an image… something that our user will click on to see the pop up).

  
  


• 
  

  Set the .onSelect property of this label to UpdateContext({isShowPopUp:true})

  
  


• 
  

  Set the .onSelect propert of the cancel icon to UpdateContext({isShowPopUp:false})

  
  


• 
  

  Set the .visible property of the whole PopUp Group tp isShowPopUp

  
  

 

This way, we set the isShowPopUp variable to true, if the user clicks the label, which will make the PopUp visible. As soon as the user clicks the cancel icon, the isShowPopUp variable is set to false, which means that the group will not be shown anymore!

 

Create an expand- and collapse able menu

As we need to deal with all screen estate carefully, it is a fantastic idea to have a menu that can expand and collapse. To create this, we need

 

• 
  

  a collection that holds the screens that we want our users to allow to navigate to

  
  


• 
  

  a gallery, which displays the items of our collection

  
  


• 
  

  a Hamburger Menu icon, which sets a variable to control the width of the gallery

  
  

1. collection

To have icons (which will show while the menu is collapsed) and text (that will show up right next to our icons when the menu is expanded), we will first upload a few svgs (see above) and then refer to them in our collection:

 

 

ClearCollect(

NavigationMenu,

{

Row: 1,

Title: "About",

Image: ic_fluent_lightbulb_24_regular

},

{

Row: 2,

Title: "Flights",

Image: ic_fluent_airplane_take_off_24_regular

},

{

Row: 3,

Title: "Hotels",

Image: ic_fluent_bed_24_regular

},

{

Row: 4,

Title: "People",

Image: ic_fluent_people_32_regular

}

)

)

 

 

2. Gallery

We create a gallery and set the .items property to our collection

We set the .width property to If(!IsExpand, 200, 50) or similar – first value is the expanded width, second is the non-expanded (collapsed) width.

As we want to pretty things up a little bit,

• 
  

  add a small rectangle to your gallery

  
  


• 
  

  add a rectangle (width = 1) to the right of your gallery

  
  

3. Hamburger menu

we add a hamburger menu icon and set its .onSelect property to Set(IsExpand, !IsExpand)

4. adjust all other controls on the screens

Now work on the .X property of all labels, buttons, images, etc. Set it to

If(!IsExpand, <original value>,<originalvalue>-150)

 

Our result should look something like this:

 

 

 

Feedback and what’s next?

What are your little tricks to make apps look more beautiful? I am curious to learn from you! Please comment below!

Introducing the MySQL Flexible Server PowerShell Module

by Contributed | Apr 21, 2021 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Late last year, the Open-Source Databases on Azure Team announced the Preview release of Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server to provide customers with greater control and manageability. Today, we’re pleased to let you know that the PowerShell module for MySQL Flexible Server is now available. Developers can use now use PowerShell to manage MySQL Flexible Servers and dependent resources. Detailed development documentation and examples are available in the topic Az.MySql.

Provision a server quickly and easily 

To provision an instance of MySQL Flexible Server, developers can run the following command:

$server = New-AzMySqlFlexibleServer

Creating Resource Group group28382412... 
Creating new vnet vnet-server2867384 in resource group group28382412... 
Creating new subnet subnet- server2867384 in resource group group28382412 and delegating it to Microsoft.DBforMySQL/flexibleServers... 
Creating MySQL server server2867384... 
Your server is using sku Standard_D2ds_V4 (Paid Tier). Please refer to https://aka.ms/mysql-pricing for pricing details... 
Creating database flexibleserverdb... 

The example above shows that the module creates the associated resource group, default database, and network resource – the default network option is to create a server within a VNET and subnet.

Server properties (e.g., location, SKU, storage size etc.) are set to default values. To see all the properties in the $server object, run to following command:

Write-Host ($server | Format-List | Out-String) 

For example, the generated password is saved as a SecureString in SecuredPassword.

Provision a server with private or public access 

To set up an instance of MySQL Flexible Server more quickly, the New-AzMySqlFlexibleServer cmdlet provides options for private and public accessibility. As a result, you can create a server with a private network or a network open to public access. The detailed scenarios are below.

Private access

To set up a network with private access, use the following commands.

Public access

To set up a network with public access, use the following commands.

*You need to add allowed IPs using the `New-AzMySqlFlexibleServerFirewallRule` command.

Connect to your server easily 

After provisioning your instance of MySQL Flexible Server, you can easily test the connection and obtain the connection string in the programming language you are using.

To test the connection to your server and try out a simple query, use the Test-AzMySqlFlexibleServerConnect cmdlet 

PS C:> Get-AzMySqlFlexibleServerConnect -ResourceGroupName PowershellMySqlTest 
-Name mysql-test -AdministratorLoginPassword $password 

The connection testing to mysql-test.database.azure.com was successful!

PS C:> Get-AzMySqlFlexibleServerConnect -ResourceGroupName PowershellMySqlTest 
-Name mysql-test -AdministratorLoginPassword $password -Query "SELECT * FROM test"  

col  
-----  
1  
2 

To obtain the connection string for programming language in which you are developing, use the Get-AzMySqlFlexibleServerConnectionString cmdlet.

PS C:> Get-AzMySqlFlexibleServerConnectionString -Client Python 
-ResourceGroupName PowershellMySqlTest -Name mysql-test  

cnx = mysql.connector.connect(user=mysql_user, password="{your_password}", host="mysql-test.mysql.database.azure.com", port=3306, database="{your_database}", ssl_ca="{ca-cert filename}", ssl_disabled=False)

PS C:> Get-AzMySqlFlexibleServer -ResourceGroupName PowershellMySqlTest 
-ServerName mysql-test | Get-AzMySqlFlexibleServerConnectionString -Client PHP  

$con=mysqli_init(); mysqli_real_connect($con, "mysql-test.mysql.database.azure.com", "mysql_test", {your_password}, {your_database}, 3306); 

Additional resources

For more information, consult the following resources.

• To try out the new module, use Azure Cloud Shell (https://shell.azure.com) in the Azure portal or download the Az.MySQL module (PowerShell Gallery | Az 5.5.0).


• To learn more about MySQL Flexible Server, see the blog post What is Flexible Server in Azure Database for MySQL? or refer to the Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server documentation.

You can also manage MySQL Flexible Servers by using the Azure CLI or SDKs at your convenience. To develop on other platforms, check out the following resources.

• Quickstart: Create a server – Azure CLI


• Quickstart: Create a server – ARM template


• Azure SDK for Python


• Azure SDK for GO


• Azure SDK for .NET