Week One

This is my progress on week one (28/01/2019 – 04/01/2019) for the CS39440 major project.

Research:

One of the biggest challenges of my major project was getting used to a new development environment: Xamarin which is part of Visual Studio. However, I have used Visual Studio 2017 prior to starting this project, meaning the IDE wasn’t completely alien to me.

However due to Xamarin being unfamiliar I decided that a suitable place to start on my major project was to start looking at tutorials. These tutorials would then help me get to grips with Xamarin.

The first set of tutorials I watched was by Bert Bosch. However, when I got to episode 5 which contains information about REST APIs, it became apparent that the code was outdated. Therefore, I decided to look around for more recent tutorials.

I then started watching another set of tutorials by Thumb IKR- Programming Examples. These were slightly more recent only being seven months old. By following these tutorials I was able to create a simple database and perform CRUD (create retrieve update delete) operations using a Sqlite database. However, I modified the example code so that it was more inline with what I had seen on previous tutorials and forums.

Source Control.

Whilst creating these examples, I added the projects to source control, and I used Visual Studio Team Services (now Azure DevOps) to publish the Git repo. By doing this I would gain experience in using Git.

Other tasks.

I also read through the coding guidelines for Xamarin and adjusted my project accordingly to comply with the coding standards.

Additionally, I created a dummy project where I started prototyping the more difficult parts of the project such as searching.