Anthony Simmon

Universal UI testing based on image and text recognition

At every major release of the ShareGate Migration Tool (SGMT), a part of the development team spends a few hours to do regression testing. These tests cannot be automated using UI testing tools such as Cypress, Playwright and Selenium because SGMT is a desktop application made in WPF.

I started looking for UI testing solutions for desktop applications. I quickly discarded expensive UI testing suites. WinAppDriver was very interesting, but one of the requirements was to add some kind of identifiers on every UI element that we wanted to interact with. This would have required a huge effort from the team.

I wanted a solution that does not require to modify our application. Something easy to learn, where tests could be written quickly and with low-maintenance over time as the product evolve. This is how I started working on Askaiser.Marionette, a universal UI testing library based on image and text recognition, made in C#.

SOLID principles: the Single Responsibility Principle

If you are a programmer, you may have heard of the SOLID principles. This acronym, among others like TDD, DI, etc. is unfortunately more and more used as buzzwords. It is not rare to hear a candidate quoting the definition of the SOLID principles in a technical interview: single responsibility, dependency inversion… However, the most interesting part may be how to effectively use them everyday.

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ServerPilot for your PHP development environment

ServerPilot is a cloud hosting control panel designed to be simple, efficient and available as a service. It installs everything you need to run your PHP websites and web applications in a few minutes, with a production-ready configuration on your VPS or dedicated server. In my current company, we started using ServerPilot to host every PHP websites or web applications of our clients.

My co-workers and I encountered some issues with our development environments. Some of us were using the default LAMP stack provided by apt-get, while others used a compiled version of it. In both cases, it wasn’t that optimized and we often had to deal with configuration, permissions or e-mail delivery errors.

Now, we all use the same environment on our production, staging and development environments, thanks to ServerPilot.

Pillar, a MVVM framework for Xamarin Forms

I’m proud to annonce the release of Pillar, a lightweight MVVM framework for Xamarin.Forms 1.x and 2.x. With this framework, you won’t have to deal with page navigation or messed up code-behind anymore. Now, it’s all about view models, and navigation between view models. It rely on Autofac for dependency injection and MvvmLight for basic MVVM features and helper classes.

Features included in Pillar:

ViewModel navigation, you won’t need to manipulate pages in your view models
Design your apps with unit testing in mind with dependency injection
Flexible, you can use differents patterns: ViewModel first, Messaging, ViewModelLocator
EventToCommand behavior and useful converters included
Useful views: ItemsView repeater, with optional DataTemplate selector by item type
Not intrusive, you can reuse your view models in other projects (WPF for example) with very few modifications

Getting started

You can install Pillar with the Nuget package manager:

Install-Package Askaiser.Mobile.Pillar

You will find the documentation and samples on the GitHub repository.

ASP.NET Core with Nginx as reverse proxy on Linux

Being able to run ASP.NET web applications or web sites on Linux operating systems now is very cool. Before that, we had to use Mono, but it does’t support the full .NET framework or .NET technologies such as MVC or async support. Now, we have the .NET Core 5.0 (dnxcore50), and we can run our cross-platform ASP.NET Core web apps with the same new web server, Kestrel. Kestrel is a web server based on libuv and works nicely. Therefore, there are a few things that discourage me using it in production as the main web server. I prefer to use a more popular web server, Nginx. I really like Nginx, it is the third most popular web server in the world, and it is often used as a reverse proxy, and this is exactly how I am going to use it with Kestrel.