Milestone 1 Reboot

It is time for a check in. I had just started down the road with an exploration of Xamarin Forms when I received a call by word of mouth to help a company with a small project. A few weeks later with a vacation in the middle I am back on track, only my tooling has gone through a few iterations.

I explored react-native via Expo which deploys a shell to the app stores with the ability to update the JavaScript files on demand. This fits well with my agile approach to software development; however, Apple has started rejecting software that uses this approach inappropriately. I have decided I would avoid the risks of Apple redrawing that line.

I was also excited to stumble upon Firebase especially with their recent beta release of Cloud Firestore. Authentication, scalable NoSQL, file storage, and pretty much everything I need to get up and running the server-side of the project. There are also react-native plugins. Unfortunately, most of the services require Google Play which is not easily added to Amazon Fire, one of my target markets.

I took a brief return to Xamarin with the concern that Xamarin.Forms may not meet much of my app's needs. After immediately failing to build due to some missing java component, I decided I was better off going native. Android Studio it is; if it can be done on a droid, Android Studio must definitely be capable of handling it. So far I am happy with my choice and have already completed a proof of concept ensuring that the user experience I am aiming for is possible.

My current focus is the completion of Milestone 1 which primarily finishes the mobile application (now only Android for this pass) against a mock REST API. .NET Core 2 is serving as my API and will likely serve as my primary server stack.

In other news, BizSpark rejected my application a few times so I have given up for now. After closer inspection I discovered that "Monthly Azure credits for Visual Studio subscribers are specifically for dev/test usage only.".  I am still debating how I will host this service – Google Cloud, Azure, AWS, Digital Ocean, etc..