Azure

Deploying Uno Platform Applications to Azure

On the Web, Uno Platform WebAssembly applications are all client-side, Static Web Apps. In this session from UnoConf 2021, Andres explores how to set up a hosting service designed for Static Web Apps and Uno Platform. As such it can be hosted in Azure with all the best Azure has to offer. Azure style Web Apps is a service that allows hosting static content on Azure by connecting a core repository like GitHub or Azure DevOps and automatically builds and deploys your applications based on code changes. In Azure, there are lot of features to make deploying and configuring your app seamless, including free SSL certificates that renew automatically, custom domains, a seamless security model, and free built-in authentication and routing. A secondary benefit of the Static Web Apps is the fact that your static content is globally distributed making it very close to your final user so that when they access your application, the application loads fast. Watch Andres Pineda’s full UnoConf talk for a more in depth look at deploying Uno Applications to Azure.   RESOURCES Additionally Gerard Gallant, an Uno Platform guest author and senior software developer has also written an article providing a Step-by-Step Walkthrough to

WebAssembly App deployment
Azure Static WebApps, Azure DevOps and CDN friendliness

Azure Static WebApps is a recent service provided by Microsoft to host static files, alongside optional backend Azure Functions. A free tier is available that allows the application to be deployed quickly while integrating it with PRs validations. These features make this service a good candidate for hosting WebAssembly-based apps, which don’t need any much server-side dynamic content. There is however one feature missing, currently there is no proper way to handle application upgrades, as hosted files may become out of sync, or just plain removed when a new version of the app is deployed. This can in turn create random application failures for users who are in between versions. Uno Platform, the Uno.Wasm.Bootstrap and the Azure DevOps Artifacts Multi-Download projects are able to help when releasing the application through Azure DevOps. This set of scripts is used to deploy nuget.info, the NuGet Package Explorer for WebAssembly.   The Uno Application packaging An Uno Platform application is built around the creation of an hash-based packaging, making it easy to hint that a CDN can cache files provided by the app indefinitely, except for the index.html file. The index.html file is generally set to be cached for a short period of

Hosting Uno Platform WebAssembly apps on Azure Static Web Apps

This article covers : Creating a GitHub repository and cloning it using Visual Studio. How to create an Azure Static Web App and configure it to pull from your GitHub repository. Creating an Uno Platform WebAssembly application and committing it to your repository. Note: A shorter Version of this article for those with more experience with Azure is available here in Uno Platform’s documentation. Suppose you have an idea for an Uno Platform WebAssembly application and you’re also thinking about how you could host it. In the past you may have used CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) for things like JavaScript libraries because the network distributes the files around the world. Being distributed around the world, the files are physically closer to your users which speeds up a browser’s request for the file compared to if the file was served from a single server on the other side of the world for example. Because an Uno Platform WebAssembly application is all client-side (all the work happens in the browser), what you have is a static web app. While you could host your static web application with a traditional hosting service, that would limit its potential. That’s because one of the main

Kahua uses Uno Platform, WinUI and Azure to deliver a multi-platform app four times faster than anticipated

Kahua provides project management and collaboration software focused on real estate, engineering, construction, and operations industries. Kahua’s solution helps manage project and program costs, documents, and processes from inception through implementation to improve efficiency and reduce risk. Recently Kahua has been selected by US General Services Administration (GSA) Public Building Service for its new management information system to manage 8600+ assets, with 370 million square feet of workspace for 1.1 million federal employees and preserve 500+ historic properties. By using Uno Platform, Kahua were able to go to market four times faster than anticipated. “By combining Microsoft WinUI 3 and Uno Platform we are able to provide our customers with features, functionality and security that is simply unachievable with any other solution” – said Colin Whitlatch, CTO of Kahua.     The Challenge & Technical Requirements Kahua needed a future-proof solution which builds on its legacy desktop application, while using C#, XAML and Azure skillsets of its developers. Kahua had a short timeline and a recurring imperative to bring new features to market quickly, on different devices – from desktop to web and mobile. In addition, Kahua’s developers wanted to reduce the time to market by maintaining a single codebase

Demo – Working on Home Automation with Xamarin, Uno Platform, IoT and Azure IoT central

Now you are no longer only a mobile developer – now you are also an IoT developer! Allan Pead, a Microsoft MVP from South Africa delivered a talk to MSDUG, taking the code sharing to the extreme. It is a Home Automation application he developed for his own purpose, in his own house. Watch below for a super cool 15-min demonstration of code sharing between a native mobile app and IoT device (IoT controller) and having them interact through the cloud (IoT Central/Azure), Raspberry Pi and MQTT.   You can see the demo here – fast forward to 2:11:00 (yes, 2 hours, 11 min in).              

How to – Uno Platform and Azure Pipelines

Mobile applications developers often set up a build pipeline for each target platform and even target environment. Thanks to Nick Randolph, we now have this process documented and more importantly easily reusable for Uno developers via his Azure Pipelines templates.   Part 1 – Creating a new Uno Platform project and corresponding multi-stage pipeline setup allowing to build and deploy to Visual Studio App Center. This part will walk you through creating and populating secure files and certificate or provisioning profile you need to use and the set of The Common Build Variables for the pipeline you are building. Part 2 – A complete example , including all the code, showing a single multi-stage Azure Pipelines pipeline for building a Uno Platform application for iOS, Android and Windows (UWP) and releasing them to App Center. As you can see, this blog is a completion of blog two posts initially written by Uno community member Nick Randolph . We think that these guides are very high quality, documentation-worthy pieces and we want to make it more discoverable to Uno community. In the coming weeks we will be featuring other how-to blog posts coming from the rest of the Uno community Uno