13 posts
Xamarin.Essentials is a new official library from Microsoft (that I worked on) that provides developers with over 30 cross-platform APIs for their mobile apps to tap into to access native features. Yes, this may sound similar to Plugins for Xamarin, but it is an evolution that is super optimized for each plaform, provides a consistent API, and is super crazy well documented. And of course it is completely open source …
James Montemagno
I build a lot of .NET libraries that include simple .NET Standard libraries to fully cross-platform plugins for Xamarin and Windows that target up to 10 different platforms. When I got started building libraries and shipping them to NuGet I went down a simple path of just building everything locally on my machine and manually uploading them to NuGet. This worked great for a single library, but as soon as I took on a …
James Montemagno
If you are like me you may have a lot of standard Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android libraries sitting around. They aren't plugins, but they do extend a single platform with custom functionality and controls. Wouldn't it be great if you could update them to the new SDK Style projects which use Package References, auto-NuGet packaging, and load WAY faster?!?!? It is all crazy simple to do just like converting old PCLs to …
James Montemagno
It has been nearly two and a half years since I wrote about how to easily get access to the current Android Activity with just a few lines of code. This code led to the creation of my Current Activity Plugin for Xamarin.Android apps and library creators to easily get access to the current Activity. Since then it has been the core of many of my plugins and has been installed over 600,000 times from NuGet!
James Montemagno
The Connectivity Plugin for Xamarin is my second most installed NuGet package with nearly 600,000 installs at time of writing this. It is easy to see why as it gives developers the ability to check connectivity on any platform with a single line of code, subscribe to events, and see what the current connection type is, with a complete cross platform API for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows.
James Montemagno
I could never imagine the amazing response to Plugins for Xamarin, those amazing little libraries that abstract away all that platform specific code into a lovely cross-platform API for iOS, Android, and Windows. They sure have grown, with hundreds of plugins being generated by the community and with tons of installs. My plugins alone have now hit 3 Million installations! With all this momentum it is a great time to …
James Montemagno
So you love unit testing…. said no one ever, but you are forced to write unit tests and you want to use Plugins for Xamarin which are all singletons and need platform specific implementations or they will throw an exception in your tests…. what to do?!?!? Plugins are all interface based, which means all we have to do is use standard practices to not directly call the singleton, and setup our code to return the …
James Montemagno
Sometimes you want to ask your users to rate your application. There are several components out there that will open a dialog box and prompt for ratings, but sometimes you don’t want to stop the flow of your app and throw it in their face. What I do in my application is simply add a section on my settings page asking if they would like to rate the app. When pressed I launch the app store directly to the review page:
James Montemagno
