I have a traditional Win32 desktop app written in C++/MFC that I have packaged as a UWP app for the Microsoft store using the desktop-bridge facility in Visual Studio 2019. The VS solution thus contains 2 relevant projects - the main program, which is a standard MFC desktop program, and the Package project. The bundle produced by the packager works and is currently published on the store.
For the next update I would like to enable the user to receive notification messages (toast?) that I send from the Microsoft Partner Center. I want to notify users when another update is available, and also when new data files are available (from my website) for use within the program.
I have read a lot of MS documentation about how to code for push notifications, but it all seem to refer to native UWP applications. I have come across this blog which contains a working sample of an MFC program receiving notifications, but to be honest it does not really explain how it works, nor does it explain how to retrofit the facility to an existing program.
Can anyone explain (or point to a resource/sample explaining) how to add this facility to an existing MFC program such as mine?
Any help would be much appreciated.
Related
I have a client that wanted an easier way for his team members to build/update pages on their site, their site is heavily customized with a lot of JavaScript. The issues is that when a team member wanted to add a new section to the page they had consult a dev person to hard code in the desired features. So we decided to create customizable web parts of those features making the site more self-serviceable.
When I first started I found some documentation that said to use visual studios to build the web part using sandbox code, upload it to the site and then they would just need to activate it to deploy it on the site. Buuut unbeknownst to me code based sandbox solutions are no longer supported in Sharepoint and therefore the web parts we built could not be deployed. I was then told that I needed to build it as an Add-in, but as I started building the add-ins I found that the customizable field properties (i.e. ability to change background color, text style/color and banner color) that I want are not implementable as a add-ins.
So now I’m back at square one and I don’t know if it’s even possible to build a web part as a add-in or do I need to go a different route?
Any thoughts or links to sources you can provide would be HUGELY appreciated!
Thanks
Terek
In SharePoint 2016 things have changed a lot from the traditional model which was the classic way of building web parts. The way you worked before is called "classic", the new way is called "modern", and the way to get your dev environment is the following (brace yourself, it is a long answer):
1) In SP2016/Online you will need to configure your dev machine with the following environment, installing the following:
NodeJS Long Term Support version
Yeoman (which will be used to create web parts)
GULP (which will play the role of virtual web server)
Once the three components above are installed, you will install the Yeoman SharePoint Generator to create the SharePoint Web Parts, Yeoman simplifies the process of creating things by delivering templates ready to use and making all the configurations standard, you gonna love this guy!
To configure your machine see the following link:
https://dev.office.com/sharepoint/docs/spfx/set-up-your-development-environment
2) In SP2016/SP Online, you will develop for SPFx (SharePoint Framework), Microsoft has made significant efforts to address the changes and help developers to embark on this new journey by publishing training and educational material at GitHub, YouTube, and on its official website (I will add link below), but for the purpose of helping you, please follow this tutorial, it helped me to learn how to develop Modern Web Parts for SP 2016/Online:
https://dev.office.com/sharepoint/docs/spfx/web-parts/get-started/build-a-hello-world-web-part
3) From the tutorial above, you will get a fully functional Modern Web Part that can be deployed to SP2016/Online, you will see the new modern architecture allows you that old experience of "sandboxing" web parts in a faster way without, thus solving your problem of constant updating/refactoring components in a live production environment. This way now allows you to constantly update the code and see the results in real-time , you will be able to see results on your dev environment by calling: https://localhost:4321/temp/workbench.html and at same time on your SP environment. for example: http://portal.company.com/_layouts/workbench.aspx
Links:
YouTube "SharePoint Framework Tutorials" - it is the step by step tutorial video showing the whole process of creating a web part:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLR9nK3mnD-OXvSWvS2zglCzz4iplhVrKq
GitHub repository with the full documentation, samples and extras for the SPFx and PnP (this is another story for another time):
https://github.com/SharePoint
I hope it helps you!
I am new to Xamarin and not sure if chose Xamarin.Forms to create a application for ios and android platform has a problem or not.
The application has some features below:
The application will be able to running some code in background without launching application by user.
The application can be launched by a href link or a notification.
The application is able to launch a builtin Camera application, and receive picture data from Camera application.
Thanks,
Bo
The features you are mentioning can be done with both. Actually, anything you can do on Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android can be done with Forms. Because Forms is only an abstraction layer for the UI which is installed by a NuGet package.
Now, having that said when to use Forms or when to use iOS/Android? It is mostly about UI. Are you going to do some advanced or platform specific stuff is is easier to implement that with the platform specific project.
If you UI will be the same in both platforms and mostly consists of some lists and input fields, then that is a very good candidate for a Forms project.
Notice how I said it is easier to do in the platform specific projects. Again here, you can do anything in Forms as well by the means of Custom Renderers, it is just a bit harder to do.
Ideally try it out yourself and see what suits you best.
In regard with your need to execute code in the background. This will be tricky and is very dependent on the platform that you're on. You will definitely have to write platform specific code for that for which you can use the DependencyService to abstract it to your shared code.
However like AlancLui mentioned executing code in the background isn't something that is easy to do on mobile. On iOS it is restricted to accessing location data or playing music, but still your app needs to be running (in the background). Android has something called Services for this, which makes it a bit easier.
I am working on creating a Windows 10 Universal app. My goal is to have the app run in the background and periodically display a status notification to the user.
I've seen a few articles that talk about creating a background task within the app (https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/launch-resume/run-a-background-task-on-a-timer-), is this the best design pattern I can follow? I'm fairly new to Windows Universal apps and any recommendations on how to do this would be appreciated.
Look at the IBackgroundTask docs. In addition, you can easily implement notifications via the OS with Adaptive Toasts
Since the story around notifications can get complex depending on how you want to control UX, don't be afraid to research building an RT component if you can't find a UWP API that meets your needs. For instance, you can package an RT component with your UWP app that calls into native C++ libraries or more low-level Windows APIs to curate the notification experience for your user.
We have this application written in Visual Basic (Windows Form Application) and I am tasked to convert it to Universal App (UWP). the said application uses a dll that is specific to .Net Framework so in order to convert it into a Universal App, I need to have a dll that is targeting .Net Core.
Is there a way to do it?
I know nothing in dll stuffs, can someone enlighten me up? Any help will be appreciated.
Your best bet in this case is the Desktop App Converter.
In summary, what that does is takes your existing .exe application and converts it to an Universal Store appx. In most cases this can happen without any code changes, and the resulting app can be deployed to the Windows Store or other UWP deployment channels (MDM solutions). It also lets you add some of the UWP features such as Live Tiles or Push Notifications, while others won't be possible with this (Adaptive Layouts). The application, though running under the new Application Model will still run with the same permissions as the original .exe (not sandboxed).
So, if you are being asked to convert the app for (some of) those reasons, it might be your best solution.
If this does not work for you, there is no other choice than a complete rewrite at this point since UWP does not support Forms, you will need to use XAML, so your entire UI stack needs to be redone at which point, a complete refresh usually makes more sense.
I'm creating a UWP application that will be used exclusively on rugged Win10 tablets by a group of initially 10-20. If things go well it will be expanded to 100 users. These users are employees of our company, but will be remotely located.
Currently, with the test tablets, I am pushing the packages in google drive and manually copying them to the tablets, unzipping and executing the ps file on the tablet. This is way to complicated for even a beta test group of our users.
I'm looking for short-term/long-term recommendations for deployment. Someone mentioned SCCM to me and I've read a little, but that seems like quite a major endeavor to host. I would prefer something like a "private store" concept, but I can't find anything like that.
You can create a private store for your company. The best solution is probably to use Windows Store for Business. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/business-store
Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AD) accounts for your employees are needed if you select this solution.
An alternative way is to use HockeyApp http://hockeyapp.net to deploy your application.
According to your description, HockeyApp should meet your requirement. Via HockeyApp, you can upload and distribute builds for beta or enterprise distribution using our web UI, or our API. HockeyApp also supports build servers like Jenkins or Visual Studio Team Services. Don't forget to upload your dSYM or
mapping.txt to get readable crash reports.
With HockeySDK for UWP integrated, you can also:
Integrate our open-source SDK to:
Collect crash reports
Show update alerts for new beta builds
Add a feedback view directly into your app
For more information, please visit support.hockeyapp.net.