Build Login in Xamarin with Xamarin.Forms
Chuck Norris could easily make a single app run on all of the platforms iOS, Android, and Windows - without any frameworks or tools. Most of the rest of us could probably do with some help. Happily, Xamarin Forms is the perfect tool for the job, and makes it a breeze to create an app! With Xamarin Forms your app will run on all three platforms from a single codebase. Xamarin Forms comes free with...
5 Essential Tips for Building Developer Libraries
As a software developer, it’s your job to know your customers and their use cases well enough to create an elegant and functional solution. This understanding will help you succeed and ultimately enjoy watching them love and use your applications. When building libraries, your clients are other developers just like you, and in addition to providing a functional library that meets their needs, you need to deliver a great experience when using your product. In...
Build a Phone System for Your Company With Twilio, Okta, and JavaScript
If you’ve ever worked for a company with more than a few employees, you’ve probably seen some interesting phone systems. When I used to work at Cisco, everyone was given a dedicated Cisco desk phone that hooked up to a server somewhere in the company and each employee was assigned a unique phone number and extension. I never really liked that setup. It annoyed me that I had this big, clunky desk phone taking up...
7 Ways an OAuth Access Token is like a Hotel Key Card
What do OAuth 2.0 access tokens and hotel key cards have in common? It turns out quite a lot! A hotel key card is essentially a physical counterpart to an OAuth access token. You get a hotel key card by authenticating at the front desk At a hotel, you check in at the front desk, show your ID card, and then you get a key card that you can use to get into your hotel...
What the Heck is Sign In with Apple?
This week at Apple’s developer conference WWDC, Apple announced a new feature, “Sign In with Apple” enabling users to sign in to apps using their Apple ID. This new feature is positioned as a secure and privacy-friendly way for users to create an account in apps. Most iOS and Mac users already have an Apple ID, and this new feature lets them use that Apple ID to sign in to other apps and websites. If...
Store ASP.NET Secrets Securely with Azure KeyVault
Nothing ruins your weekend quite as wholly as getting paged at 2 am on Saturday to tell you that there’s been a data breach at your company. In this post, I’m going to talk about how you can reduce the risk of that happening by keeping secrets out of your source code. By following this guide, you’ll create an ASP.NET Core MVC web application that uses Okta for identity management. Rather than working through a...
Simple Authentication with Spring Security
Authentication is vital to all but the most basic web applications. Who is making the request, wanting data, or wanting to update or delete data? Can you be sure that the request is coming from the stated user or agent? Answering this question with certainty is hard in today’s computer security environment. Fortunately, there is absolutely no reason to reinvent the wheel. Spring Boot with Spring Security is a powerful combination for web application development....
Build Simple Authentication in Express in 15 Minutes
Building web pages with user authentication can be a huge pain. You typically need to set up some sort of database to manage users even if you’re not using the database for anything else. You would then need to store their password hashes, and you almost need a degree on internet security to know the safest ways to do that. What if I told you it didn’t have to be so complicated? Using Okta and...
Build Your First PWA with Vue and TypeScript
With the ever-increasing use of mobile devices over the last few years it has become more and more important for web developers to anticipate the need for users on these devices. The first step was the ability to cater for different screen sizes, thus creating the need for responsive user interface design. Over time the demands of the users increase and it is now becoming even more important to provide a high-quality user experience, independent...
Build a CRUD App with Node.js and GraphQL
There are so many options when it comes to building out a simple CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) app. The most refreshing data access layer to work with recently by far has been GraphQL. It’s great because the developer can use a simple, strongly typed language to define models and their relationships, then provide functions to define how each piece should be resolved. The user can then pick and choose which pieces they want and...