Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
One of the things that has always impressed me was the ability to pair Visual Studio running on Windows to a Mac and be able to debug on either a real device, or on a simulator. There’s even a remote simulator which will display the simulator on Windows, meaning I never have to open, or … Read more
With each update to the .NET SDK and Visual Studio the support for Hot Reload improves. Hot Reload is the ability to make changes to your running application without having to restart and it can dramatically improve developer productivity, when it works. In this post we’re going to look at a simple example of where … Read more
As Windows, continues to apply the Fluent design language across various aspects of the underlying operating system, Microsoft is also looking to apply it to other first party applications. According to this post on their blog, Visual Studio is the next application to be hit by designers and not everyone is happy (check out comments … Read more
If you use Visual Studio Code you’re probably already familiar with this features, since Sticky Scroll was rolled out to Visual Studio Code a while ago (see here for a write up about that). In terms of code navigation, Sticky Scroll is one of the more significant improvements to the code editing experience we’ve seen … Read more
I have to start this post by pointing out what a major bonus it is for .NET developers that you can build, deploy and debug an iOS application on Windows – that’s right, if you didn’t already know this, if you’re using Xamarin (now net6 ios/android), Xamarin.Forms (now dotnetmaui) or Uno Platform, you can do … Read more
Earlier this year I shared a post, Visual Designer, Hot Reload and Beyond, where I talked about how I thought the future of designers would evolve. Looks like I preempted a new feature that’s coming to Visual Studio 2022 called XAML Live Preview. Currently this is in preview for WPF applications but you can imagine … Read more
There’s a bit of fanfare going on at the moment because Microsoft have released the first preview of Visual Studio 2022 (announcement / download) which is significant because this is the first version of Visual Studio which will be 64bit. Note, this isn’t the first version that supports 64bit development, it’s the first version where … Read more
Firstly, the news – Microsoft has made preview 1 of .NET 6 available. Make sure you checkout the long blog post that gives background on what’s coming in .NET 6 and what’s shipped in the preview. Setup Next, grab the bits and get ready to build an Android app using .NET 6. Make sure you … Read more
Preview 4 of WinUI3.0 dropped recently and if you want to get started you’ll need the preview of Visual Studio and the WinUI project templates. One of the things I noticed was that some of the tool windows I was used to from UWP weren’t working as I expected. I recall hearing that Microsoft had … Read more
Here’s a quick fix for an error I came across when I’ve been experimenting with various packaging options for WPF (Win32) applications. To set the scene I have a new application, PackagingWPF, that I created based on the WPF Application project template. At this stage I’m not even going to both modifying the application. Next … Read more
In the .NET ecosystem there have been a number of different approaches to building libraries that work cross platform (i.e. support building apps for different platforms such as iOS, Android, Windows etc). One of the more recent is to build a multi-targeted project that can light up either different features or just different implementations for … Read more
Build and debug a source code generator with C# 9 and Visual Studio.
Building and deploying UWP apps on Xbox is frustrating – every time I come back to it I get caught out by things that should just work. The one that always seems to get me is that you have to be signed in on the Xbox. This used to not be a problem because Visual … Read more
For those following the on-going discussion around the future of XAML and specifically the use of XAML in DotNetMaui/Xamarin.Forms, this post is a follow on from two great posts discussing the options that are, or will be, available for Xamarin.Forms developers as we move forward with DotNetMaui: Mobile Blazor Bindings – Getting Started + Why … Read more
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
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
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.
Over the last 24hrs I’ve had to setup a new dev machine from scratch. After installing all the bits and pieces I need to test out to make sure I can build and deploy apps to Android, iOS and Windows. After creating a new Xamarin.Forms application I set the UWP head project to be the … 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
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