WWDC 2020 Keynote Highlights

AirPods

• AirPods now magically switch between your devices as you use devices that would logically call for AirPods to be connected

• AirPods Pro now supports spacial audio to emulate a theatre like immersive surround sound experience… this takes into a account head movement to map the sound field and anchor it to your device, so if you move your device and head the surround sound pivots to keep you at the centre! 

AppleWatch and WatchOS7

• You can now have multiple rich complications on the one watch face

• You can now download tailored watch faces, or create your own pre configured watch faces and share them via iMessage 

• Maps on watch will include the new cycling directions from Maps 

• Workouts now includes ‘Dance’ and it can tell if you’re dancing with your whole body, just lower or just upper body

• Core training, Functional strength training and cool downs also added 

• The activity app is completely redesigned on iPhone and has been renamed to ‘Fitness’ 

• Sleep tracking is finally here! It allows you to set goals on bedtime and wake times. 

• In the evening, your phone can start a ‘wind-down’ process which will turn on do not disturb and can start your meditation app or some relaxing music 

• The wake up alarm can be Taptic so you don’t wake your partner

• When you’re sleeping you have to tap the screen for it to light up to show time

• There is now a hand washing feature in WatchOS that makes sure you’re washing your hands effectively and for long enough

Privacy

• ‘Sign in with Apple’ now allows developers to help users move their existing accounts across to sign in with apple access 

• With location sharing, you can choose to share your precise, or just approximate location 

• Apps have to have a privacy policy, but it’s usually hidden, so they now have a ‘nutrition label’ style label on the App Store page so you can see a summary of the apps privacy practices. 

Home

• Apple, Amazon and Google have formed an alliance on smart home standards

• Homekit is now open sourced

• The flow for adding Homekit devices 

• Activity zones and face recognition now supported for all cameras in Home, and it will recognise faces of friends and family you’ve tagged in your photos app

• You can now view cameras and your doorbell camera on Apple TV! 

AppleTV

• AppleTV supports the new Xbox adaptive controller and the new Elite controller

• You can use PIP anywhere within AppleTV (so watch the news while you use a workout app etc)

• Airplay now supports 4K 

MacOS

• The new version of MacOS is called MacOS Big Sur

• The OS has been refined, it has more of an iOS feel

• New icons, controls, surfaces

• Consistent highlight tints in apps, rounded row selection styles

• Control centre can be customised and you can add quick actions to your top bar

• Notifications look and are grouped like in iOS

• The new iOS widgets have been bought to the Mac too 

• MacOS Messages: Now has refined search; supports message effects, Memoji stickers and the other enhancements that were added to group chats 

• Catalyst has updates including Total Pixel control, Mac specific interactions and date pickers

• Safari on MacOS: redesigned, more effective tab management, page translation built in

Mac is moving to their own Apple silicon (ARM chips) 

• All the new native Apple apps work on the new chips…. Including Xcode, Final cut etc

• Using a new tool called Universal2 developers can use a single binary to make apps work on both the Apple Silicon and old Intel Macs 

• Microsoft and Adobe are already onboard and have built many of their apps to work on the new Apple Silicon

• Microsoft Office is already built out to support the new Apple chips … and Powerpoint is using Metal for rendering. 

• Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop have also been converted

• Rosetta2 converts existing Mac apps automatically… even games can be converted for the user automatically…. (They demo’d the latest Tomb Raider) 

• iPhone and iPad apps will run on the new Arm MACs completely unmodified! 

Todo app using SwiftUI

It's time again and I started learning the iOS programming again as SwiftUI looks cool.

I spent couple of weeks going through the swift programming documentation and watched the WWDC videos. 

Note: This is an ongoing blog, which I update as I add more features to my TodoApp.

Learning

Follow along the Swift documentation. Try to code along the examples. Just go through the documentation even if you don't understand the whole thing just try to read all the documentation and get yourself aware with the concepts. This is will help later while reading the code of some

open source project. 

And.. read the documentation again. This is what I am doing now, this time try to understand and repeat until it becomes muscle memory. this is ongoing process.

SwiftUI

Follow the SwiftUI tutorials and try to recreate them. 

Videos

One of my colleague suggested WWDC videos and watch them in the order. 

• SwiftUI Essentials
• Data Flow Through SwiftUI
• Introducing SwiftUI: Building your first app
• Mastering Xcode Previews
• Protocol-Oriented Programming in Swift
• Building Better Apps with Value Types in Swift

Blogs

• Ole Begemann
• Paul Hudson

After going through all those videos and tutorials, I have decided to start creating something. So what is first app everyone build, it's Todo app. 

iOS-TodosApp

Download the Github repo to follow along and try the completed features.

Features

• Create a new Todo
• Context menu to Complete or Delete a Todo
• Show completed tasks
• Add Priority
• Add Date

Upcoming

• Edit 
• Persist the data
• Add Notification
• Add Location
• Login functionality

Learnings while doing TodoApp

Implementing Azure Ad B2C with MSAL.js in SPA with aspnetcore api

In the previous article Implicit Flow in SPA with Azure Ad I tried to learn how to use the Azure Ad Implicit flow to login to Single Page Application.

Azure AD B2C documentation on Microsoft is very elaborate and will take you through the steps from Creating a tenant in Azure to running an application.

Currently, you cannot create an Azure B2C tenant in Australia

If you have gone through the previous article, I had use MSAL.js in the client app to implement the login flow.

If you want to follow the steps you can refer the code hosted on Github AzureAd Samples under the SPA_B2C folder.

I have tried to implement only signup and sign-in flow.

If you follow the steps in the documentation you will have an Azure Ad B2c tenant and user flow to sign in and sign up a user.

you would need to create a .env.developement file next to the .env file in the root folder and update the following variables

REACT_APP_CLIENT_ID=

 REACT_APP_TENANT_ID= 

REACT_APP_TENANT_NAME= 

REACT_APP_SUSI_FLOW_ID= 

If you do not know about React environment variables have a read at Adding custom environment variables


Also, I am loading the SPA from the aspnet core web app. So in my case, the redirect URL in the app registration is https://localhost:44321, which can be found in the launchSettings.json

If you run the aspnet core web app and navigate to https://localhost:44321 on your favorite browser. you will see an empty page with a Sign-in button.


There are 2 flows that can be used

- Popup flow where a separate popup window will open to login
- Redirect flow

If you just check out the repo you will see the redirect flow and if you wanna see the popup action you need to be on the corresponding commit

There are some known issues with IE.

If everything is configured properly you should see your custom ui page after clicking the login button

You can hit sign up to register a new user.

Note: The order of the fields on the signup page will be what is set in the Page layouts in the Azure Ad B2C. If, you want to chage the order you can do in Azure

Also, you can set which fields are optional or not.

You will need a real email for verification. This is the first step in the registration process.

After you get the email with verification code you can finish the registration process.

If the user is created successfully and logged in you will see the next page in the app.

logout button does not work at the time when I am writing this article but it may be in when you are reading :)

Next article I will be doing how to access the API and get the weather summaries.

Cheers

Happy coding.

Authentication and Authorization with Azure Ad using Implicit Flow and Security Groups

Authentication

The process of identifying is a process of identifying the identity of a person or process or device. This process identifies the end user and get the basic details about the user. This process only see if the user is who it is but has nothing to do with giving it access to the resources.

Authorization

Authorization is something that decide what part of the system or resources an end user can access based on their identity.

So, I want to know how these things are actually implemented in the real world.

Fow now, I am aware of Microsoft Identity Platform, Auth0 and Identity server.

I have started looking into MS Identity platform and how to implement these different Authentication flows in real world.

I am talking about real world implementations, so it is better to point you to the some code that I have started to write to get these implementations done.

As the title of the article says, I have use the Implicit flow to authenticate the user. AzureAdSamples is my GitHub repo that will eventually evolve to have most of these Authentication flows.

There not much to explain here if you follow the document in the github and try to run the app with the changes suggested in the Git document, you should be able to run this app and see the content.

Let me know if you face any issues.

Happy coding..

Create React App Functional Automation Testing with Cypress

This post I am going to discuss about the new testing framework for testing, it is called Cypress and integrating the Cypress tests in CI pipeline.

I encourage you to go through how-to-works section of the website and get a brief idea of how it is different from existing framework like Selenium.

Setup 

Start with setting up your Create React App and Cypress following the blog code-create-react-app-v3-and-its-cypress-tests-using-typescript.

This will get you up and running with cypress and you app with Create React app and Typescript. I was using Azure DevOps for CI so I had to create a variable SKIP_PREFLIGHT_CHECK in my pipeline to make it work.

Writing Tests

If you have every written tests with mocha then you will find yourself in very familiar environment. Cypress has adopted mocha style syntax. Read about the bundled tools.

I am gonna give example of very simple tests. As, purpose of this article is to make you aware of things we can do in Cypress. 

describe('Should render', () => {

  it('Successfully loads', () => {

    cy.visit('/');

  });

  it('State Select', function () {

    cy.visit("/")

   

    cy.get('#select-name').should('be.visible')

  })

})

These 2 tests are testing if application loads successfully and my states select is rendered. 

I have configured my base url in the cypress.json file so that I do not have to type it again and again.

{

"baseUrl": "http://localhost:3000"

}

Running Tests

You can run Cypress tests using command npx cypress open from command line if you are using npm and have npx available. 

I have added scripts to start cypress when I am running locally or when I need to run t from CI. 

"scripts": {

"cypress:open": "cypress open",

"cypress:run": "cypress run",

"cypress:verify": "cypress verify",

"ci:cypress-run": "start-server-and-test start http://localhost:3000 cypress:run"

},

These are the tasks I have added in package.json to run cypress.

use cypress:open while doing locall development which open the Electron browser and watch the changes. So I can see my tests run while I am typing them. It is super fast.. I Love it.

cypress:run is used to run the tests from command line. 

cypress:verify is task added to verify that cypress is installed properly. 

CI/CD

You might have other tasks in the pipeline which will do you package restores versioning and builds. So once your code is built you want to run your tests. 

Here is how my pipeline looks like 

Build Pipeline

Once my build is successful I would want to verify cypress is installed properly.

Cypress Verify

Now that we know that cypress is installed properly and my actual step which will run the tests will fail only if there are tests failure and not because issue with cypress.

Note: In command line tasks you might have to change your working folder in the Advanced settings.

Now comes the part where we need to run the cypress tests. 

I am using a package start-server-and-test and it helps me start the server monitor the url and then run my tests in one script task.

Cypress run

If you see my script tasks

"scripts": {

   "cypress:run": "cypress run",

   "cypress:verify": "cypress verify",

   "ci:cypress-run": "start-server-and-test start http://localhost:3000 cypress:run"

  },

ci:cypress-run task is the one that is responsible for running my tests. This task is running my create react script start task and monitoring the url and later run my tests. 

If you will run the command locally you will see that the recordings are saved in the Cypress/Videos folder. 

If your tests are run successfully you will see those great lines at the end of CI.