iOS Hot Restart, Multi-Targeting and Solution Template for Cross-Platform Applications with Uno

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

Improving Developer Experience with Multi-Targeted Visual Studio Projects

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

Cross-Platform Libraries with Multi-Targeting for Xamarin, Uno and Windows Development

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

Microsoft Build 2020: Uno Platform + WinUI = Future of Cross Platform Apps

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

Look iOS Developer, No Mac Required – Build an iOS Application using Xamarin and Visual Studio for Windows without using a Mac

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.

Pipeline Templates: Complete Azure Pipelines Example for a Uno Project for iOS, Android and Windows

My last post was a bit of a long one as it covered a bunch of steps for setting up the bits and pieces required for signing an application for different platforms. In this post I just wanted to provide a complete example that shows a single multi-stage (6 in total) Azure Pipelines pipeline for … Read more

Pipeline Templates: Building and Deploying Uno Apps for iOS, Android and Windows

In my previous posts covering the Pipeline Templates I’ve discussed building a Xamarin.Forms apps for iOS, Android and Windows (UWP) and subsequently deploying them to AppCenter. In this post we’re going to look at doing the same with a Uno application. Given that Uno is built on top of the core Xamarin functionality, the process … Read more

Deploy Xamarin.Forms Apps to App Center from a Azure Multi-Stage Pipeline using Templates and Environments that Require Manual Approval

Wow, that title’s a mouthful, and I didn’t add in there that I’ve just pushed v0.2.0 release of the Pipeline Templates repository. In this post we’re going to add stages to a YAML based Azure DevOps pipeline in order to deploy a Xamarin.Forms application to AppCenter for testing. We’ll also be using on the of … Read more

Pipeline Templates: Building Xamarin.Forms Apps on Azure DevOps using Templates

One of the things I find frustrating is that for every new project we seem to have to recreate the build and release pipeline. In each case we step through the same steps, run into the same, albeit familiar, issues and end up with a pipeline that looks incredibly similar to the pipeline we setup … Read more

Visual State Management with BuildIt.States and Uno

I’ve posted previously on using visual states in Uno and how they can be used to effectively manage the different visual layouts a page can take on. These may be changes in layout due to the application being resized, or perhaps due to different data loading states. I’ve recently created a Uno build of the … Read more

How to Support Multiple Environments in your Mobile Application?

Build Configurations

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

Do Uno Mvvm?

MVVM

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

Content from Former Microsoft WPF and Silverlight Team Member

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

Using the UWP SplitView on iOS, Android and WebAssembly with Uno

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

Optimising Multi-Targeting with Visual Studio Solution Filters

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