Much of the Angular code is asynchronous. The fakeAsync function is very useful when testing such code, especially when not all promises and observables are publicly accessible. You can use the flush function instead of awaiting them individually. I recently learned that this does not work in all cases.
Thanks to Xamarin, C# developers can use a lot of their existing knowledge even when interacting with native Android (and iOS) APIs. However, some APIs still break the idioms we're used to in .NET. When I recently had to integrate Firebase Cloud Messaging into a Xamarin application, I encountered an asynchronous call that couldn't be awaited. The method even returned a Task. It just wasn't the right Task.
Interfaces usually have methods that return tasks because they were designed to be asynchronous. But how should you implement such a method when you don't need to call any asynchronous methods inside it?
In Ionic 4, the dismissAll method for closing all currently open loading overlays has been removed. This might not be such a bad idea since it could cause problems when used carelessly. Still, when porting an existing Ionic 3 app to Ionic 4 not having an equivalent for it available can be a problem. I created my own replacement to make porting easier and minimize the required code changes.
Last year I wrote a blog post about making code for displaying alerts reusable and testable by wrapping it into a function which returns the user's response as a promise. The sample was written in Ionic 3. The code doesn't work in Ionic 4 without modifications. Since I recently received a request for an Ionic 4 version of the code, I decided to write this follow-up post.
In version 2.1 that was released in December 2016, TypeScript finally added support for downlevel transpilation of async and await keywords for ES3 and ES5 targets. To give this new feature a try, I decided to convert the Angular Tour of Heroes tutorial to use async and await.
This week the second community organized Cancel conference was taking place in Ljubljana. It spanned over two days. Thursday was the main conference day with 20 sessions grouped in 4 tracks. On Wednesday afternoon preconf was organized at the premises of Microsoft Slovenia. I had my sessions on both days.
It's May again, which means the annual NT Conference was taking place in Portorož at the beginning of this week. This year I had two sessions scheduled, the first one on Monday and the second one on Tuesday.
Writing unit tests for code that needs to be run on the UI thread can be quite a challenge in WinRT. TestMethodAttribute supports asynchronous test methods but doesn't run them on UI thread. UITestMethodAttribute runs test methods on UI thread but doesn't support asynchronous methods. Still, I managed to make the test method asynchronous and run it on the UI thread.
Writing asynchronous code in .NET framework 4.5 is pure joy thanks to task-based asynchronous pattern (TAP) and the async/await syntactic sugar. Although many APIs have been updated since the introduction of TAP to provide task based asynchronous methods which can be used with async and await, occasionally you will still encounter operations in APM (Asynchronous programming model) or EAP (Event-based asynchronous pattern) without a TAP equivalent. Fortunately .NET framework provides helpers which will make wrapping older style asynchronous operations into tasks much easier.
Task-based asynchronous pattern has many advantages over other asynchronous patterns introduced in the past, most of them boiling down to the fact that it's really easy to get into and start using it. Like any other technology, it does have its pitfalls and there are many details to know about once you get into more advanced scenarios.
On Monday our local Microsoft subsidiary organized Visual Studio 2012 bootcamp as a preconference to Bleeding Edge 2012. For my talk I selected 3 new features in .NET Framework 4.5 that excite me most.