Allan Ritchie

Ramblings of an old software engineer

Notes from 25 years of shipping software — .NET, mobile, and the open source libraries I maintain when I should probably be sleeping.

About me Projects Speaking RSS

Latest

1–12 of 41

Aug 26, 202617 min read

Shiny HTTP Transfers: Why Is This Data Still Not Here?

Somebody is waiting on bytes that were supposed to have arrived. Usually nothing was carrying them — HttpClient stops the second iOS suspends your app, and Android will reclaim the process while you are not looking. Shiny.Net.Http hands the bytes to the platform instead — NSURLSession, a foreground service, a connectivity-driven managed loop, Service Worker Background Sync — under one API. Plus why I sign Azure Blob and S3 uploads by hand instead of taking the vendor SDKs, what the Android service does when the network drops, and why a Live Activity has to animate a time range instead of a percentage.

Aug 24, 20266 min read
DocumentDB in Aspire
DocumentDb runs on ten-odd backends, but picking one used to be a line of C# inside your service. The Aspire integration moves that decision into the AppHost — the consuming code becomes one provider-agnostic line with health checks and OpenTelemetry attached, the admin UI becomes a resource, and an entire Orleans silo points at the same store.
Aug 21, 20268 min read
DocumentDB in .NET Orleans
Membership, grain storage, reminders, grain directory and streams are five separate provider contracts. Shiny.DocumentDb.Orleans implements all five on one IDocumentStore — one connection string, grain state you can query without waking a grain, and a stream backlog you can actually open and look at.
Aug 20, 202611 min read
Level Up Animation with Keyframes for MAUI & Blazor
A seekable keyframe engine for .NET MAUI with CSS @keyframes semantics in XAML, 42 motion icons compiled from one spec into a drawn scene on MAUI and real CSS keyframes on Blazor, and a ShinyButton that finally makes press-wait-see-if-it-worked a one-liner.
Aug 17, 20268 min read
Shiny Controls 1.0 — The Ultra Control Suite for .NET MAUI & Blazor
Sixty-odd controls, one token contract, two renderers, zero WebViews. Shiny Controls hits 1.0 for .NET MAUI and Blazor — and there is a live playground you can click through before you install anything.
Aug 13, 20266 min read
Shiny.DocumentDb — Hidden Gems
Thirteen major versions in, there's a lot of DocumentDb that shipped in a bullet list and never got explained. A store that diffs documents for you, a read path that never deserializes, and an extensibility surface that soft delete is entirely built out of.
Aug 12, 202610 min read
Shiny.DocumentDb v13 — Encryption, an Outbox, and a Front Door
v13 puts AES-256-GCM field encryption in the core package, adds a transactional outbox that commits with the write that caused it, and gives a document type a front door — REST + Server-Sent Events, and an MCP server. Plus Orleans streams on the database you already have, and admin tools that read an encrypted store without a key.
Aug 11, 202615 min read
Shiny.Net.HttpServer — A Real HTTP Server Where ASP.NET Core Will Not Go
Ten new packages: a dependency-light, AOT/trim-clean HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 server that runs anywhere .NET runs — including inside a .NET MAUI app on iOS and Android. Routing, middleware, DI scopes, WebSockets, SSE, TLS with managed self-signed certs, an OpenAPI document built with zero reflection, source-generated typed endpoints, XML/MessagePack/protobuf without reflection, gRPC and gRPC-Web, a WebDAV mount, mediator handlers and DocumentDb documents as endpoints, tunnelling so a phone is reachable from the internet, and an MCP server you can point Claude at.
Aug 4, 202630 min read
SwiftDotNet — It Started With "What If I Could Just Write SwiftUI in C#?"
A shower thought about writing SwiftUI from C# turned into a Kotlin shim for Jetpack Compose, and then into the realization that the shim was never the point. One C# view tree, a diff engine, and a patch protocol — now rendering as real SwiftUI, real Compose, real GTK4, real WinUI, real DOM, a from-scratch SkiaSharp toolkit that paints the whole thing itself, and — as of today — characters in a terminal, images and all. Plus 28 real controls built on it, what writing your own looks like on each backend, and an honest accounting of how far the Skia renderers still have to go. Think .NET Comet, but without the MAUI underneath it.
Jul 27, 202615 min read
Shiny.DocumentDb — Doing All The Things!
v12 ships an admin UI for your document stores, schema-free JSON collections with no CLR type at all, interceptors that can replace a write, soft delete in the box, a fully trim/AOT-clean package set, and a provider consolidation that deleted 4,300 lines and found four real bugs on its way out.
Jul 27, 202633 min read
Faces, Voices & Documents — On-Device Recognition Controls for .NET MAUI
A MAUI UI July post: two drop-in MAUI controls — FaceRecognitionView and FaceEnrollmentView — that put live face recognition and a guided enrollment wizard on screen in one line of XAML, plus the CameraView frame analyzer, a GraphicsView overlay with an even-odd scrim, speaker recognition, and Shiny.DocumentDb + sqlite-vec as the on-device vector database.
Jul 24, 202628 min read
Giving your .NET MAUI a real set of AI Wings
A .NET MAUI app built straight on Microsoft.Extensions.AI — an IChatClient onto OpenAI, ChatOptions.Tools, and UseFunctionInvocation running the loop. The chat UI is a control; the hands are Shiny — contacts, reminders, calendar, GPS, health, music, a local document DB, your own services, and the app's own navigation. All opt-in, all switchable, all AOT-clean.

Ramblings of an old software engineer

Latest

Browse by topic