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.

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Nov 12, 20268 min read

AgentView and A2UI - Agents That Answer With Real Controls, on .NET MAUI and Blazor

Every AI chat UI I build ends up as the same pile of code: streaming markdown, tool cards, approve buttons, and a model that describes a table instead of showing one. So I built it once. AgentView renders any AG-UI agent, and A2UISurfaceView draws the UI an agent describes with real Shiny controls: DataGrid, Gauge, date range pickers and more. Same API on MAUI and Blazor, and a real model can run right in the browser.

Oct 31, 20265 min read
.NET MAUI on the Web - and Most of Shiny Controls Just Works
I wanted MAUI in a browser without Blazor: real DOM elements, positioned by MAUI's own layout engine. So I built a backend for it. Then I pointed the Shiny Controls gallery at it, 68 pages of unchanged XAML, and nearly all of it just worked. Here is what does, what doesn't yet (MediaElement, SkiaSharp views) and how to try it.
Oct 22, 20266 min read
Universal Hubs - Write the Hub Once, Connect Over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi
BLE Hubs got two phones talking with nothing but Bluetooth between them. But Bluetooth is short, slow and stuck in one room. So I taught the same hub to speak Wi-Fi too: one hub, one contract, one discovery list, BLE and Wi-Fi players in the same game, Wi-Fi drops that resume without anyone noticing, and a hub you can reach from across the internet.
Oct 19, 20266 min read
Shiny.Net.Http - The Mobile Library Workhorse You Didn't Know You Needed
Nearly every app I've worked on eventually had to move a file while nobody was looking at the screen. Shiny.Net.Http has been doing that job since 2016 - background uploads and downloads on every platform, a queue that survives restarts, retries, pause/resume, and progress you can bind to a UI or put on the Lock Screen.
Oct 9, 20267 min read
BluetoothLE between apps has never been easier - Enter BLE Hubs
Two phones in the same room, no server, no Wi-Fi, and nothing but Bluetooth between them. That should be easy, and it has never been. So I took the SignalR hub model and put it on the radio: one C# interface, generated proxies, request/response, streaming, events, groups and JSON, with every byte chunked, framed and reassembled for you.
Sep 29, 20266 min read
Shiny.AppFunctions — Siri and Gemini, From One C# Record
Apple and Google both want assistants to act inside your app, and they picked completely different ways to do it: Swift App Intents on one side, Kotlin AppFunctions on the other. I didn't want to write the same feature twice in two languages I don't ship in, so I built a source generator that writes both from one C# declaration.
Sep 18, 202611 min read
Shiny.AppDeviceBridge — Stop Waiting on App Review, and Stop Needing the Phone to Test
A web app inside a .NET MAUI app, served from the device, updated from your own signed server whenever you like, and talking to GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, the camera and more through typed C# and TypeScript clients. Background jobs, pushes and geofences reach the page, or a background script when no page is open. Hot reload runs inside the real app, and a terminal simulator stands in for the device so you can test Wi-Fi drops, denied permissions and GPS walks from a browser.
Sep 4, 202619 min read
Shiny Controls 1.3 — Word, Excel and PowerPoint in Your App. Free.
Four Office editors, a free-form notebook, ribbons on everything, Find across all of them, presenting mode for decks, and a camera you call instead of a screen you build. All of it in the box, on .NET MAUI and Blazor, no WebViews.
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.

Ramblings of an old software engineer

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