September 2026 - The Seeley Coder

Futuristic central hub connecting blue and violet computer networks

One MAUI Binary, Two Backends: Switching UAT and Production (and Detecting TestFlight Along the Way)

One MAUI binary, two backends: how a single signed app switches between UAT and Production at runtime, plus detecting TestFlight installs via StoreKit.

Gourd Alert (fictionalized while my actual app is still building up a tester base) is a .NET MAUI app that checks nearby farms for gourd availability and yells at you when the good pumpkins come in. Testing it needed a UAT backend, so testers could break things without touching production data. Apple and Google do not make that simple. App Store Connect and Google Play both expect you to promote the exact binary you tested, through TestFlight or an internal track, all the way to production. Build a separate app just to point it at a different backend, and you stop testing the artifact you are actually about to ship. What I needed was one MAUI binary, two backends, switchable without a rebuild.

Silhouetted cybersecurity professional monitoring colorful data flows and server alerts

Application Logs Are Your Friend (and How to Write Them)

Application logging done right means picking the right log level, masking PII with Serilog, and understanding how sinks route your logs.

A while back I wrote about why application logs are your friend: when something breaks in production, read your logs before you panic and roll back. That post assumed the logs were already good. It never asked the harder question: who wrote them, and did they write them well? Good application logging is a skill, not an afterthought, and most of us pick it up the hard way, one 2 AM incident at a time.

Android and iOS development paths with code, .apk, and ipa files

Building One Publish Script for Two App Stores (and Debugging the One That Almost Worked)

One publish script for two app stores hid three PowerShell bugs, including a case-insensitive variable collision with a switch parameter.

I wanted one command that builds a release, stamps the right version into it, and hands me an artifact ready for the App Store or Google Play. No manual archive steps, no hunting through Visual Studio menus, no “wait, which signing profile did I use last time.” Just a publish script for two app stores.

MAUI iOS Archive Fails on Windows: The Real Cause

A MAUI iOS archive fails on Windows with a cryptic Unzip error. Two documented bugs looked like the cause and weren’t — here’s the real fix.

A MAUI iOS archive fails on Windows with a cryptic Unzip error. I burned an afternoon blaming two real, documented bugs before finding the actual cause: a plain JSON file. Have you hit “The filename, directory name, or volume label syntax is incorrect” or “The given path’s format is not supported” while archiving a .NET MAUI iOS app through Visual Studio’s Pair-to-Mac? Save yourself the detour. Here’s the whole mess, dead ends included.

MAUI iOS Provisioning: Why Old Certs Return

Visual Studio’s Pair-to-Mac tooling keeps restoring dead Apple certificates because MAUI iOS provisioning now lives in a different cache location.

I spent an evening trying to convince Visual Studio and my Mac that I no longer work for a defunct company — and that my MAUI iOS provisioning setup has nothing to do with it.

The Real Cost of Developer Context Switching (And Why ‘Quick Fix’ Is a Lie)

What does developer context switching actually cost? A real production incident, plus the research on why ‘just a quick fix’ is more expensive than it looks.

Developer context switching sounds like a minor inconvenience. Then you live through what it actually costs a project. Here’s what it cost one of mine.

Month: September 2026