When developing with Xamarin in Visual Studio you have a lot of options for Android Emulators. You can go with the VS Emulators for Android powered by Hyper-V, Genymotion, or the out of the box x86 HAXM powered Android Emulators from Google (a few are installed for you already). It looks though that with some of the latest updates to Windows and VS when you go to launch them you get an error message that they can’t …
James Montemagno
In 2006, after years of writing C++ and Java code, while attending UAT an instructor named Phil Miller introduced me to this amazing language called C# and changed my life. It was love at first “Hello World” and I have never looked back. C# is an extremely powerful, mature, and extremely cross-platform programming language that I have been using for decades. The beauty of C# of course is that you get this amazing …
James Montemagno
So, you just downloaded and installed Xamarin and ready to build your first Android application in C#. You select file -> new Android project and then build and get ready to run it on a simulator and BOOM it has either just deployed a beautiful “hello world” app… or you have some cryptic error message about an appt.exe error or more likely a unsupported version 52.0? WHAT?
James Montemagno
TLDR; I created a brand new cross-platform Permissions Plugin for Xamarin to enable anyone to query and request common permissions from shared code. You can watch a video here.
Permissions! Blarg! As an Android developer I have felt pretty spoiled over the last few years when it came to getting access to an API that required a permission. Simply check a checkbox in the project setting and any of the 130+ permissions …
James Montemagno
In the world of Android one of my biggest pain points over the years is that often you need access to the apps current Activity when writing libraries or abstracting out common functionality. For years I have been hacking around the issue by setting special Intent flags or more than likely creating a BaseActivity with a static “CurrentActivity” that is set when the page is started up. While this works short term for …
James Montemagno