Windows
Thinking Out Loud: Mvvm Navigation for XAML Frameworks such as Xamarin.Forms, UWP/WinUI, WPF and Uno
One of the things that’s often given me pause for thought is the approach we take to navigation within applications. For the purpose of this post I’m going limit the scope to just XAML based applications (XF/Maui, UWP/WinUI/Uno, WPF). In all of these application platforms there is a built in capability to navigate between pages. … Read more
XAML Basics for WPF, UWP, Uno and WinUI
This is an index post for a series of blog posts covering some XAML basics. The original content came from a series of posts that Beatriz Stollnitz made on WPF/Silverlight that had been moved to a github repository. Unfortunately most of the samples don’t work out of the box with the latest version of Visual Studio … Read more
XAML Back to Basics #6: SelectedValue v SelectedItem
What is the difference between SelectedValue and SelectedItem?
XAML Back to Basics #4: ComboBox Binding
How to bind the items of a ComboBox (and get its ComboBoxItems
17 Years as a Microsoft MVP
Earlier this month I was, was awarded Microsoft MVP for the 17th year and I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on this. Firstly a note of appreciation to all the Microsoft staff both from the MVP program, the various product teams and of course the Australian sub. Overall an amazing set of people … Read more
DotNetMaui (Xamarin.Forms) is Not a XAML Platform
Yeh I know I’m going to get a ton of abuse about how this title is just click bait but before you start with the comments, hear me out. Firstly, the title is actually just missing a word DotNetMaui is Not JUST a XAML Platform In this post we’ll go through why DotNetMaui/Xamarin.Forms is/is not … Read more
Windows (UWP) Point Animations
A week or so ago I noticed a really slick piece of animation done as part of a Flutter app. Unfortunately I can no longer find the tweet as the account has been removed. However, it perked my interest enough to go playing with animations in XAML to see what I can do. Note that … Read more
Building Messages in Blend for Visual Studio
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
Windows (UWP) Designer in Visual Studio and Blend for Visual Studio
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
Xamarin DevOps Snippets (aka Pipeline Templates)
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
Consuming REST API with Swagger / OpenAPI in Xamarin and Uno Applications
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
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