Wanna easily create an awesome dummy data set ? ;)

So probably you are one of those developers who is looking for a dummy or fake data set for you application development, testing or populate a set of good-looking screenshots for your application ? Yep ! I have been there… 😉

This is something almost every developer had gone through in their lifetime, and most of the time they end up going through the burden of writing a whole bunch of scripts from scratch to populate the data set and so on…

Well, my story…

Sometime back I had the same exact requirement, where I wanted to populated a bunch of fake data for testing out one of my C# dot net applications, not just a few amount, but in big chunks, a whole bunch of dummy emails, address, names and so on. I was actually going to write a bunch of scripts to populate those data by myself, but I got lucky 😉

Behold…

Yes lucky enough I came across this awesome tiny library called Faker.NET Portable Edition ! 😀 So I thought of sharing about it and give it a shout out as it’s a truly great library for easily populating dummy data sets.

And you can check it out on nuget right here –
https://www.nuget.org/packages/Faker.Net.Portable

Faker.Net.Portable

This is by far one of the easiest and lightest libraries I have used for populating dummy data. This is actually based on the Ruby Faker gem (http://faker.rubyforge.org/) library according to their documentation. It fully supports the below versions of dot net, thereby goes on saying yes you could obviously use this for your Xamarin Forms projects just like I used to.

• .NET framework 4.0,
• Silverlight 5.0,
• Windows 8,
• Windows Phone 8.1,
• Windows Phone Silverlight 8,
• Xamarin.Android,
• Xamarin.iOS,
• Xamarin.iOS (Classic),
• Mono 3.2.8

It’s very much lightweight as well so it wouldn’t be any burden for your application’s compilation size and also it’s pretty fast. 😉

You could check out their documentation and github repo right here –
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable

And trust me it’s super easy to implement, simply add it from nuget or through DLLs to your project and start calling the methods right away… 😀 Some of its awesome uses are as follows,

Names – Create dummy names, not just names with random letters but actual real-human-readable names. You could even separate First Names, Last Names, Middles Names and so on.
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#names

Address– Yep, same goes for addresses as well, streets, cities, states, Zip codes, and even Latitudes and Longitudes… 🙂
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#addresses

Phone numbers – Not just some random numbers, but actual real-like phone numbers with actual area codes and so on.
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#phone-numbers

Company – Let’s you create Company names, Suffixes, Logos (yep with actual images), even fake motos with real words…
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#company

Avatar – Yes that is right actual dummy images, with defined sizes, and image formats of your choice… 😉 A very useful option for displaying profiles, contact lists and so on.
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#avatar

Business – Need to populate Business related data ? Credit card numbers ? expire dates ? You got it !
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#business

Internet – Let’s you easily populate almost all the internet related data such as, domain names, emails, MAC addresses, IPV4 IPV6 Addresses…
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#internet

Lorem Ipsum – Oh yeah, you are going to love this, no need to worry about populating large paragraphs with random words, you could do it very much easily with this library
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#lorem-ipsum

App – Need any dummy App Names ? Authors ? Version numbers to be generated ? Oh well not worry… A simple one method call away!
https://github.com/AdmiringWorm/Faker.NET.Portable#lorem-ipsum

So that’s it fellas, and I wanted to show you some insight to it from the VS Object Browser, and see how impressive it is from down below… 🙂

Almost all the types of dummy data you need to populate, right here, and not just random ones that doesn’t make any sense, but absolutely real-like dummy content for your applications.. 😀

I felt like this library hasn’t gotten enough coverage, therefore I thought of writing a small blog post giving credits for this and the developers of it. And most of all let this heard for the fellow developers out there, for I hope I may have saved your burden of populating dummy data for your awesome applications… 😉

Cheers folks ! Stay Awesome ! 😀

Project – Sri Lankan Photography

What is Project – Sri Lankan Photography ?

It all started off with an enthusiasm, where I simply wanted to build an app where at allows people to view photography published on Facebook, which later turned out to become a large scale project. In simple words Project Sri Lankan Photography is a Centralized portal for viewing and showcasing Sri Lankan Photography. View and Showcase all Sri Lankan Photography that are published on facebook in one single place, right in-front of your fingertips.

Photography in Sri Lanka…

Photography is one of the very famous field in Sri Lankan, where its adoption keeps on growing with a huge number of new Photographers. A lot of photographers are publishing their amazing hard work, their photography, on the biggest Social Media Network, Facebook. But how many people actually follow them? How much publicity could you reach? As there are so many

Photography Pages, how could one individual person reach them at once? Or even be aware of them? Therefore we came up with this simple solution, a centralized portal for viewing all Sri Lankan Photography, “Sri Lankan Photography”! There are so many Sri Lankan Photographers who has published their amazing photographs online on the biggest Social Media Network, Facebook, but there is still no one place to access all those photography.

We saw this burning need, So we came up with a Solution…

Therefore we came up with this simple solution, bringing all Sri Lankan Photography that are published on Facebook to a one place, giving an ultimate experience to the user. With “Sri Lankan Photography”, we are empowering talented Sri Lankan Photographers to reach more audience easily and quickly and for the User, we are bringing a stunning ultimate experience for you to view all Sri Lankan Photography published on Facebook, right from your fingertips. This app provides so many special features, such as facilities keep in touch with the user’s favorite photographers as they wish, instantly viewing all the photo albums published on their public pages. Sharing those photography with user’s friends immediately on demand.

Yes it is Awesome !

 

Easy to navigate Stunning user interface with seamless multimedia content streaming from our cloud servers. Thanks to this app now the users has the capability for Searching any Photography Album of those photographers instantly, whereas this app streams over 3000 photography albums for the first time in Sri Lanka, while maintaining the largest Photography album database.

The Innovation and Uniqueness…

“Sri Lankan Photography” app is a very unique and innovative projects because this is the first time such initiative has been launched in order to provide a single portal for viewing and showcasing talented Sri Lankan Photography. Even though so many Photographers has published their talented work on Facebook, they are all scattered everywhere, and it will only be visible for a very limit amount of audience, who has liked their pages only.

But from this project all those scattered Photography of these talented photographers, are bringing together as a whole showcasing them to a wider audience at the same time. These Photography data will be fetched from their Facebook pages in real time from our Cloud servers and instantly displayed to the users upon their choice. This whole process happens fully automated through our cloud servers, all those fetched photography will be streaming into the users smartphone seamlessly.

  

Some amazing features this App brings…

Below are some of the special features this app brings to the user –

• Easily Search through all the Photography Albums that are published on Facebook pages and view them within seconds like never before…
• Keep in touch with all the favorite Photographers very easily…
• Search for any Photography album in one place…
• Pin you favorite Photography pages and Photography Albums to Start screen…
• Offline Image Caching facility saves you Data Connection usage and you can view pre-loaded images even if your data connection is offline..
• Random Gallery – Gives you a random stream of images from all the pages and let you pick your favorites…
• Unique facilities – Photo Stream, Photo Grid – Quickly view and browse through hundreds of photos…
• Awesome View – giving you an awesome experience of viewing each Photography album…
• Play stunning slideshows of each and every photo Album…
• Share any photography with your Friends or on any Social Media Network…

  

Wait what ? the Largest Photography Albums Directory ?

Yes that is true ! Project – Sri Lankan Photography has built the largest Sri Lankan Photography albums database ever created, thanks to our unique high end cloud servers that are automatically executing around the clock. Our cloud servers are streaming from over thousands of Photography Albums into our apps, and using this now you can Search for any Photography album that is published on Facebook, among the thousands that our project has gathered and view them instantly right from our app.

 

Alrighto now you know the awesomeness of this project, so why wait ? Go ahead and download it from here right into your Windows Phone ! Or you could try out our Windows 8 PC app which is in Beta level…

Windows Phone – http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/sri-lankan-photography/63987005-02b7-46c9-868e-05aa53a4a142

Windows 8 Store App – http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/sri-lankan-photography/db25698d-de96-4a80-af66-fbe9c283ec48

So after all that, how are our project Statistics ?

We are very pleased to announce that after about a year of publishing the app into Microsoft Windows Store, we now have over 90,000 users worldwide for our Windows Phone app and over 1000 users for the Windows 8 Store app !

So following are some of the statistics we screenshotted from our Windows Developer account,

And below are the overall statistics of our Windows Phone project, whereas you can see that there are 91,043 users worldwide using our app and nearly 76 news users are downloading our app every single day ! 😉 

So Finally…

We are now looking to expand our project more exponentially, therefore if you are interested in our project and you want to publish your Photography page in our app to open up your amazing Photography skills to a worldwide audience of over 90,000 people around the world, then Contact us immediately !

As to cover up our maintenance cost of this project, we are now opened up for advertisers. Therefore if you want to advertise your ads or banners on our app and open them up to a global audience worldwide, please contact us. Thank you !

Are you ready for the ultimate experience ? 😉

Share with your friends and spread the word !

(xtremesourcecode@live.com)
[ÇøŋfuzëÐ SøurcëÇødë]

Always Wonder Where the Heck Am I ?

We Always Wonder…

We always wonder Where am I ? What is the address of this place ? In which road am I in ? how am I gonna tell them where I am right now ? and so on.. We always go through those rush moments, where as we wonder where we are and the address of the location we are at right now !

Then this is for You…

Very well then, let me introduce you the awesome “I Am At” app for Windows Phone. Thanks to this App you can easily find where You are right now preciously, allowing you to find more information about you location !

Welcome to I Am At app for Windows Phone !

You might be At…

You might be at a huge party, or a festival, or carnival, or a sports ground, you can find your exact location and send it to anyone so that they can find you easily ! 🙂 Could be your girlfriend, your best friend, your parents, if you want to find out what you current location is and send it to anyone to find you easily, then here is the App for you, ready at anytime ! 😉

Now I Know What You are Thinking… 😉

Yes, I know what you are thinking, ‘the how the heck is this different from Maps ?’
We will tell you where you are right now very preciously along with the exact Address of your current location, where ever you are on Earth ! Also we will let you send your current location to anyone and share with them, such as text, email and even Social Media Networks instantly ! 🙂

Oh yes we know, this is totally Epic ! (^_^)   Try it now for Free ! 🙂   

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/i-am-at/b1bcd22a-c57b-4a26-b9e2-3ec6aeb96d01  

IAmAt #WindowsPhone #Nokia #Lumia #Places #Locations #Navigation #Travel #Mapping #wp8 #wp81 #Address #WhereAmINow

How to make your Windows 8 App support for different Screen Resolutions

So currently I’m going through the aftermath of my Final year Project submission, waiting for the Final Presentation to be done with. The other day my friend Nisal ‘Cheezy’ called me up and talked about developing some app for Windows 8. So as usual, I opened up my Visual Studio 2012 and created a new project. Suddenly it occurred to me that I have been struggling with different Screen resolution support for couple of my past app developments. So here I thought of leaving a small note of it.

Most of the people does not realize this fact, once you develop a Windows 8 App, it usually does not support different Screen resolutions, even though it is a primary requirement in App certification. Due to this fact a lot of applications fails at the certification level. There are several number of standard screen resolutions that we need to make our apps to be supported, some of them are, 1366×768, 1920×1080, 2560×1440, 1280×800, 1920×1080, 2560×1440  and so on. But most of the Windows 8 devices, laptops, tables and PCs today are set to 1366×768 screen resolution by default. According to Microsoft statistics, most of the Windows 8 Devices uses 1366×768 screen resolution. But you will never know what our users will be using as their screen resolutions or in what kind of situations they would change their screen resolutions.

I also once went through this tragedy when someone was showcasing one of mine and Nisal’s windows store apps. Therefore it is crucial to focus on support your apps for different screen resolutions.

So below are some of the techniques that I use when I develop my windows 8 apps,

Start Development with the Lowest Resolution

Once you create a new Windows Store app project in Visual Studio 2012. The app’s layout default is set to 1366 x 768 screen resolution to start the development with. But this is not a very smart step, because 1366 x 768 is not the smallest screen resolution in Windows 8 devices. According to Microsoft 1280×800 is one of the smallest screen resolutions available and it is best to start your development with supporting to the smallest reslution as a practice. Therefore, when you starts your app development, always make sure to change the default UI designer’s screen resolution in Visual Studio to 1280×800 resolution. This can be easily done by going to the “Device” pane in your left and changing the “Display” settings. Through this page you can check how your App’s UI supports different resolutions, View states and themes. Once you start development with the lowest resolution you won’t have to worry much about dealing with the rest because then you can easily zoom in the components by using Viewbox, which we are discussing in the next paragraph.

Use Viewbox, the Life Saver ! lol

Using viewbox component you can easily set your App’s UI to scale and fit automatically for different Screen sizes with ease. You can look up in google how to use it in your code wiht examples, but for the time being below is how I usually use my ViewBoxes to fit into different screen resolutions,

<Viewbox HorizontalAlignment=”Left” Height=”auto” Width=”auto” VerticalAlignment=”Stretch” >

//………………the rest of the components goes here in your XAML…..//

</Viewbox>

Maintain a Root Grid

When you are placing your rest of the UI components, make sure you place them with in a root Grid layout and also make sure to set that grid with static Width and height. This will prevent the ViewBox zooming in your UI unnecessarily for different screen sizes.

Test your app in different Screen Resolutions using the Emulator

And finally, after combining all the above methods, do not forget to test your applications on Emulator under different screen resolution settings.

One thing I have noticed, once you optimize your apps to 1366×768 resolution, it perfectly supports all the other resolutions except 1280×800 resolution. Therefore it is always best to start from the lowest resolution and test it out every step of the way.

Here are some of the useful links which I have used before,
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465349.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465362.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/hh465337.aspx
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/jj679352.aspx

Well thats it from me fellow awesome Developers out there !
Cheriyo ! 😀

Stay Awesome ! xD

Sri Lankan Photography App for Windows Phone :)

Photography Enthusiast ? Amateur Photographer ? or anyone who seeks for Photography or photographers ? Having too much trouble going through hundreds of photos and albums ? searching for photography pages ? too much time waste ?

 “Sri Lankan Photography”

A Centralized portal for viewing all Sri Lankan Photography. View all Sri Lankan Photography that are published on facebook in one single place, right in-front of your finger tips.

There are loads of Photographers who has published their amazing photographs online on the biggest Social Media Network, facebook, but there is still no one place to access all those photography. Therefore we came up with this simple solution, bringing all Sri Lankan Photography that are published on facebook to a one place, giving an ultimate experience to the user.

With “Sri Lankan Photography”, we are empowering talented Sri Lankan Photographers to reach more audience easily and quickly and for the User, we are bringing a stunning ultimate experience for you to view all Sri Lankan Photography published on Facebook, right from your finger tips.

Are you ready for the ultimate experience ?

Sri Lankan Photography

Cheers ! (^_^)

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/sl-photography/63987005-02b7-46c9-868e-05aa53a4a142

Some of the Windows Phone Apps that I have developed so far…

Hello folks, here is the Microsoft Windows Phone marketplace link for the Apps which I have developed so far… 🙂

If you are a Windows Phone user, I dare you check it out, there are some pretty cool useful and handy apps ! 😉

Here is the link –
http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/search?q=Udara+Alwis

I have developed a series of Innovative and Creative Windows Phone Applications over 30 Windows Phone apps and published them on Microsoft Store, with over 160,000 users currently worldwide with a rapid increasing user base.

I am still 21 years old and for this date I hold the position for the most number of apps developed by a College graduate for Windows Phone Store. You can check out all my apps from the below link to Microsoft Store.

http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/search?q=Udara+Alwis

So if you are using a Windows Phone, I would like to Welcome you to try out some of my Apps in the marketplace and share with your friends as much as possible, I would really appreciate that.

Have fun folks ! (^__^)