Let's be honest, every application needs to store data. Sometimes it is settings, configuration, HTTP requests, or a full database. What I was recently looking to accomplish was to make a web request, cache the request locally, and have it expire after a given amount of time. There are a lot of great solutions out there for storing data, but nothing seemed to fit exactly what I was looking for with a minimal amount …
James Montemagno
So, you just got a Nintendo Switch for the holidays, now what?!?! It can be overwhelming to navigate the eShop, which is full of goodies (and not so good junk), as well as trying to figure out what you actually need for your Nintendo Switch. If you are looking to get started be sure to head over to my original guide that still holds up on just Nintendo Switch accessories, but after I tweeted about SnipperClips, I …
James Montemagno
This year I have made a big push towards making Visual Studio Team Services my new continuous everything for my mobile apps, libraries, and any other project that I work on. While Azure DevOps (VSTS) has a lot of built in tasks for mobile applications, there are still a few essential things missing that would really make it a joy to use. The top that stuck out was having the ability to easily bump the version/build …
James Montemagno
I think we all can agree that attempting to do beta testing on iOS is pretty terrible. You can't side load apps easily, provisioning profiles are terrible, and manually adding people to TestFlight is no fun. All I want to do is get my app in users hands! Why do I have to go through so much stress? Well you don't, because fastlane comes in to save the day just like it simplifies provisioning in Visual Studio for Mac.
James Montemagno
I have to admit that I actually really hate launch (or as I call it splash) screen on applications. On iOS and Windows we never had a choice and our apps always have a launch screen. On Android though we have always had the option to integrate a launch screen or not and in the past it was sort of frowned upon to have a launch screen in your app. It meant that your app was a bit slower or had long load times so we …
James Montemagno
Last week Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4 and VS for Mac 7.2 were released into the stable channel. They include the very first release of the Xamarin Live Player capabilities in Visual Studios. This means you can simply update Visual Studio, turn on Xamarin Live Player (Preview), and get started visualizing your mobile apps with nothing more than VS and your iOS or Android device!
James Montemagno