Developer tips - Visual Studio - plist files

Disclaimer !
This article is based on tests/research/finding at April 2018. Things can change.

A project in Visual Studio that involve Apple iOS has some configurations saved in files ending with the .plist suffix.
These files are Property List files.

These files, combined with the project setting, contribute to set up the application configuration that need to match the content of the Provisioning profile.

However the files "per se" contains only few XML lines.

Developer tips - Visual Studio - Apple iOS development types of build

Disclaimer !
This article is based on tests/research/finding at April 2018. Things can change.
 
Apple iOS can be a very complicated environment, especially if Xamarin is involved (Visual Studio on Mac).
This article is part of a small collection of notes about some things that usually annoy the developers :) (me)

Ok ok, these are just some notes for me to remember some annoying things

Developer tips - Visual Studio - Apple iOS certificates

Disclaimer !
This article is based on tests/research/finding at April 2018. Things can change.
 
In order to develop code for iOS (or also Mac) you need to have certificates and provisioning profiles from Apple.
In other words the application will be able to be installed and run on the device ONLY if Apple recognize the certificate.
The certificates are so a very intimate and integral part of the development and preparation of an app for iOS.

Enable passwordless access to a machine

DEBRH or ... Don't Expect Big Revelations Here :)
Just a quick note that maybe can be useful to somebody.

Here the scenario.

We have two Linux machines in the network. A user from the machine A (call it Auser) need to  access some data on the machine B, under a specific user (call it Buser).
So, we can simply use ssh for that.

Raspberry Pi - broken micro SD card reader

One of the Raspberry Pi I have around has now a broken micro SD card reader.
The micro SD card is not retained anymore, thus the options are :

a) trash away the Raspberry and buy a new one
b) try to repair it

A personal CI system - building C program

Now we do have our CI system, how can we use it ?


If you have some code to compile with GCC, is possible to create a job in Jenkins to monitor it (on github) and every time the code is committed, have it updated on the server and compiled, notifying errors to the developer.

Monitoring a Mac CPU

Recently I'm using some very CPU intensive programs on the mac, like Xamarin (Visual Studio), Android Studio and test code.

Sometime, when I'm running a lot of this stuff, the Mac is clearly slowed down and can be useful to know what is going on.
So I did look around for some monitor application, possibly capable to show what is going on on the tray.

I did found many apps but I wanted something small and possible free :)

I did found MenuMeters, a very small and nice app, but unfortunately is not supported since 2014 and thus is not working on the latest releases of Mac OS.
However somebody did write a patch to allow this utility to run also on newer systems (at least for now, it seems Apple is locking down even more the systems to prevent this kind of third party utility to run).

Click here to find the patch for the MenuMeters app.

Drobo - monitoring it

Now that the Drobo unit is on the final place, connected to the server, I did set up a monitor activity of it.

The server, other than handle the backup operations, also monitor that everything is OK, Drobo included.

Repairing a zapper

In the springtime, summer and fall, there is an appliance that works almost 24 hours a day, at least in my garage.
A zapper.
This one, a PestiTech, did work all the last summer and fall.
Really, in Arkansas is not an option to have a zapper to limit the "things" that can fly and bite you !
The garage is the main entry for these pests, so a good zapper is really the first protection.
Now it was time to restore it and ... of course dead !

Why sometime ...

... simple things does not work or just make you crazy losing hours and hours if not days  ?

Who work in the magical world of the software development, especially embedded or firmware, sometime find himself in weird situation, when something incredibly simple and trivial, simply does not work.
Why ?