This article is the beginning of a series of articles in which I want to discuss the basics of building web services and designing REST APIs using ServiceStack. This first article discusses the question of what ServiceStack is all about, the benefits of it, and why you should use (or at least try out) this framework. The following articles will then discuss the design of a simple service by using a simple example to illustrate the various possibilities it offers. Each chapter ends with a summary to provide a quick way to look up previous sections. ...

Android runs on a variety of different devices. In order to improve the way your app looks on different phones, depending on their screen size and resolution, Android offers the possibility to use different layouts for different screen sizes. This is the topic I’ll discuss in this article. Summarizing the Demo Application First of all, I would like to briefly discuss the app, the optimization of which will be discussed below. The app serves as a tool for the card game “Magic the Gathering”. While this app was my first real application for Android, this side project has evolved over time and accompanied me on the way to Android development. I maintain the sourcecode on GitHub and you can download the app via PlayStore. ...

The dxGrid grid control for Xamarin, which DevExpress provides free of charge, is a powerful feature for mobile application development. However, many of the functions are a little bit hidden. In this article I will discuss how to customize the display of column values. In my concrete example my grid contains a numeric column, which can contain numbers with or without decimal places. I want these decimal places to be displayed only if they exist. The magic term that DevExpress provides fortunately is DisplayFormat. You can use this parameter to make various adjustments that describe the corresponding value and its representation. ...

View definitions under android are often used for many different controls. However, there is an easy way to recycle defined styles and use them for other controls, often saving a lot of code. So, styles basically allow you to move your repeatedly used styles out of the layout file into a styles.xml file (which is located in the values-folder). This article covers the basics of using styles on Android. Think of the following layout, which represents two simple buttons inside a LinearLayout: ...

This article describes the process of creating voxel explosions in Unity by using particles. For our models, we use MagicaVoxel, but every other tool can be used as well. The final result will look similar to this: Setting up the test environment For test purposes, I’ve set up a basic FPS environment using the built-in CharacterController package. I then added a gun model to the _FirstPersonCharacter _game object, which is located as child element in the hierarchy of the FPSController. The following snippet shows the code I added as a custom script component to the gun: ...