Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
Whether you’re developing an Android app in Kotlin, a cross-platform app in Flutter or Xamarin Forms, or an Xbox app in C#/XAML, supporting multiple environments when building an app, is just not as easy as it should be. For example the different environments might be dev, test, staging, prodution etc to align with your dev, … Read more
As a developer working with Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms you should be aware of the Xamarin.Essentials package that Microsoft have been developing that “provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications”. If you haven’t taken the time to look through the source code, it’s well worth cloning the repository and taking a look. Not only … Read more
Last week was a huge week for the Uno platform with their inaugural Uno conference, #UnoConf. As the technology continues to mature, I’ve no doubt that Uno will become a viable solution for building applications to target all sorts of markets. This includes support being progressively added by the various Mvvm frameworks. Following my previous … Read more
I’ve covered this topic previously in my post Create, Build and Publish a Flutter Web App but things have changed a little now as web support has been merged, making it easier to build a single application that runs on iOS, Android and Web. To find out more you can check out the Flutter docs … Read more
Following my previous post on Mvvm Navigation with Xmarin.Forms Shell there were a few things that I felt I hadn’t addressed adequately. Loading Data on Appearing The first thing is how to load data when navigating to a page, and perhaps to do something when the user navigates away from the page. Since it’s the … Read more
In this post we’re going to look at the Text widget in Flutter and some of the options you can tweak when displaying text within your app. If you’re after a more detailed discussion of strings, characters and how they’re displayed, you should check out the post, Mastering Styled Text in Flutter. To get into … Read more
One of the topics that I find a bit contentious amongst app developers is how navigation is handled, specifically when it comes to MVVM. Should navigation be done in the code behind of the page? or in the ViewModel? and should navigation be based on a path/URL or based on what ViewModel you want to … Read more
One of the things that I don’t like about the web is that I have to access everything via the browser. Whilst favourites and bookmarks are all well and good, one of the nice things about apps is that I can do things like pin to start/taskbar (Windows) or add to homescreen (Android). Sure I … Read more
Using Flutter for building iOS and Android applications brings with it some advantages over other cross platform solutions such as Xamarin.Forms or React but one of the more interesting developments to keep an eye on is the support for running Flutter apps on the web. In this post we’re going to create a basic Flutter … Read more
Rukesh has put together a great post, entitled Using C#, XAML + Uno Platform to Build One Codebase, Cross-Platform Apps, that provides a great walk through of getting started with the Uno Platform. It goes through grabbing the Uno extension for Visual Studio and then creating a new multi-platform application using just C# and XAML. … Read more
Someone pointed me in the direction of a series of great blog posts that have recently been migrated to a github repository. The posts are quite old, dating back to a period between 2005 and 2013 when Beatriz Stollnitz worked for Microsoft as part of the WPF and Silverlight teams. Here are the links to … Read more
There is plenty of documentation on how to build a Flutter application and more importantly the significance of widgets. Most articles you’ll read about widgets talk about what a StatelessWidget is and what a StatefulWidget is and how you can inherit from these to create your own widgets. However, what happens when you want to … Read more
In this post we’re going to cover one of the basics of app navigation which is the use of the UWP SplitView. If you’re coming from iOS and Android development you might be thinking “huh, I don’t even know what that is.” Well the good news is that it’s actually something you’re already familiar with. … Read more
This post will cover the basics of how to get started with Flutter. It’ll provide you with an overview of your first Flutter app and will give you some pointers on how to get familiar with Flutter, Dart, the tools and ecosystem around building apps using the Flutter SDK. Enough about what you’ll take out … Read more
In this post we’re going to cover creating a custom control that uses a control template to define how it looks, aka a Templated Control. The principles of templated, or lookless, controls have been adopted by most of the XAML based technologies but for the purpose of this post we’re going to start by building … Read more
Over time Visual Studio has progressively improved support for solutions that have a large number of projects. MvvmCross used to be over 200 projects to handle each of the target platforms it supports. With the introduction of multi-targeted projects the number of projects dropped significantly to around 50 projects. For example, the core MvvmCross project … Read more
In my previous post I discussed Control Template in Windows development (UWP and Platform.Uno). I feel the topic of templates warrants at least one follow up post. So, in this post I’m going to walk through ListView Templates and GridView Templates. As both ListView and GridView inherit from ListViewBase, I’m actually going to focus my … Read more
Recently there has been a lot of discussion about using code to declare the user interface of an app. Such as a recent post I did following the announcement of SwiftUI by Apple. In the Xamarin.Forms world the hashtag CSharpForMarkup has become the latest distraction. CSharpForMarkup encourages developers to move away from XAML to defining … Read more
In just under a month some of the biggest names in the Xamarin community will be presenting alongside a prominent members of the Microsoft Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms teams at the Xamarin Developer Summit. Whilst I’m not going to be able to make it across to the summit I wanted to do a bit call out … Read more
One of the most important aspects of an app is the flow or journey that the user takes through the app. Apps are often described in terms of pages, or screens, and navigating between them. In this post I’m going to cover dividing your application into routes, and how to work with the Flutter navigation … Read more