Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
The other day Martin Zikmond tweeted about a messaging sample app he’d built using the Uno Platform, allowing the same app to run on iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS and Web. Whilst the concept was simple enough, the point was that there was almost no platform specific code and yet the app works and looks virtually … Read more
If you’ve been looking at the release notes for the Visual Studio previews, you’ll have noted that there’s some work being done on the XAML designer that now supports both WPF and UWP. I figured I would take this opportunity to go through and document some of the features that I use and some of … Read more
Louis Matos has put together Xamarin Month with the topic of Code Snippets – Check out Louis’ blog for the full month of snippet. In this post I’m going to cover some code snippets that use Pipeline Templates in order to setup a Azure DevOps pipeline for your Xamarin application. Azure Pipeline Templates are a way … Read more
I still recall the simplicity of standing up a SOAP service and adding a service reference via Visual Studio by simply entering the url to the WSDL – this scenario just worked…. until we moved on. There was a rapid progression away from the overly prescriptive XML based world of SOAP to REST based APIs. … Read more
In my last couple of posts I covered setting up multi-targeting and improving the developer experience with multi-targeting. This was in the context of an application that supported iOS (Xamarin iOS), Android (Xamarin Android) and Windows (UWP). In this post we’re going to look at a template for Uno cross-platform applications. If you’re new to … Read more
In my previous post on using multi-targeted cross platform projects I showed how you can add additional target frameworks to allow the addition of platform specific code to a library. One of the downsides of this approach (versus perhaps using a shared project) is that the library gets built once for every target framework that’s … Read more
The story of cross platform development for Microsoft developers has been one marked by iteration after iteration of .NET framework fragmentation. With .NET 5 the promise is that we’ll return to having a single framework that will be used everywhere…. Sorry, what?? when did we ever have a single framework? For as long as I … Read more
I’ve been a long time supporter of the work that the team at Uno Platform have been doing. The announcement today of v3.0 of the Uno Platform comes hot on the heals of releases 2.3 and 2.4 that introduced AndroidX and MacOS support. This isn’t just any old announcement, v3 aligns the Uno Platform with … Read more
Last week Microsoft released the schedule for sessions for Build 2020. However, other than via the portal, there’s no easy way to get a list of sessions so that you can easily work out which sessions work for your time-zone and which sessions you want to attend. In order to solve my own dilemma of … Read more
Earlier this year I published a pre-release version of an Azure DevOps extension that wrapped the ApkTool for extracting and re-packing Android APK files. Having spent more time working with Azure Pipelines, I realised that most of what I was doing with the extension could actually be done with one or more templates. Today I … Read more
In part 2 of this series of posts on Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications (parts 1, 1b, 2 and 3) we saw that the composition APIs could be used to generate a DropShadow. However, what wasn’t immediately clear is that this mechanism only works for a limited set of controls, namely Shape (including Ellipse, … Read more
In Part 2 of this series I talked about how to create your own shadow using the DropShadow class. I mentioned that whilst it was easy enough to do, the DropShadow had to be created in code, rather than being applied in XAML. Well the good news is that the team building the Windows Community … Read more
Following Part 1 – ThemeShadow (and Part 1b – Lists) in this post we’re going to look at a very simple example of creating your own shadow. I’m going to reuse my simple example of two overlapping rectangles. The goal is to: Add a shadow around the bottom-left rectangle The shadow should elevate the rectangle … Read more
Originally, I had planned that the next post was going to talk about making use of the Shadow property and creating a custom shadow. However, following part 1 there was a bit of dialog online talking about the use of shadows in lists. I figured that it shouldn’t be too hard to extend my example … Read more
I’ve been watching James Montemagno bring his AnimalCrossing app to life. The progress continues: #AnimalCrossing Turnip Tracking App powered by #Xamarin and amazing library creators. 99.9% shared code 🙂 pic.twitter.com/7CSlmk6nCJ — James Montemagno – ? Live on Twitch (@JamesMontemagno) April 11, 2020 What’s super impressive is that this doesn’t look anything like a regular out … Read more
In October 2019 Microsoft announced a new category of dual screen device with flagship products Surface Neo and Surface Duo. Since then, there has been a massive undertaking by Microsoft to prepare developers of both Windows (UWP and Win32 apps) and Android apps for a new world of dual, or even multiple, screen devices. This … Read more
It appears that the Runtime Parameters of Azure DevOps Pipelines has rolled out to most organisations. As such I thought it important that the Pipeline Templates are updated to use strongly typed boolean parameters. For example in the following YAML taken from the Windows Build template has a parameter, build_windows_enabled, which is typed as a … Read more
If you’re a die-hard Windows user, like me, you’ll be excited to know that you can now build iOS application using Xamarin (and Xamarin.Forms) and Visual Studio, without having to buy or use a Mac. That’s right for development, you no longer need to invest, or carry around, a Mac. In this post I’ll walk you through how to enable this feature.
A question was raised this week by Sturla as to how to incorporate the Launch Icon Badge extension into the build process when making use of the templates from Pipeline Templates (Damien covers how to use this extension in a Azure DevOps pipeline in his post on the topic). By the way, a big thank … Read more
When deploying a release to AppCenter you can specify release notes that get presented to the user when they go to download a new release. This week a question was asked as to how to specify release notes from a file when submitting a new app version to AppCenter. If you looked at the complete … Read more