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77 posts
You know I love Xamarin.Forms, but I also absolutely love Xamarin Native with iOS Storyboards, Android XML, and all of that UWP goodness. When you want to build an app that opens in sub-2 seconds, super optimized, and takes advantage of every custom control and animation out there (especially with material design) you have to go Xamarin Native. That is why the next evolution and favorite new feature, Xamarin.Forms …
James Montemagno
Getting started, step by step, in under 15 minutes! Yesterday, we announced the Xamarin Live Player for both iOS and Android which includes the Live Player Extensions for both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac enabling you to get started with mobile development with just a device! The Live Player apps let you debug your apps and make live edits and see them reflected live on your device. Your code runs …
James Montemagno
Last week I blogged about the important changes to Device.OS in the latest version of Xamarin.Forms. Well, I am back with some other changes from that same exact Pull Request that have to do with OnPlatform in code and XAML that use the new Device.RuntimePlatform. So, what is OnPlatform? It allows you to set properties on elements or run specific code based on specific platforms. This is really nifty for tiny tweaks …
James Montemagno
So, this is pretty awesome! Today, the Mobile Center team rolled out a huge update to Visual Studio Mobile Center enabling you to build your iOS and Android apps in the cloud from any GitHub, BitBucket, or Azure DevOps (VSTS) code repository! This is great because VSTS offers FREE unlimited private repos for your code with a git backend. Mobile Center offers up build, test, distribute, analytics, and backend services …
James Montemagno
If you just updated to Xamarin.Forms 2.3.4 you may have noticed and be freaking out that you have tons of green squiggles that Device.OS and TargetPlatform are obsolete. This was all done in regards to the new changes for OnPlatform. We can see here that it says to use RuntimePlatform isntead, which is a string… but how do you use it??!?! If you hover over TargetPlatform, and enum, it doesn’t tell you what to replace …
James Montemagno
I get a lot of questions about Xamarin.Forms. One of my most popular blogs was about spicing up iOS tabs with selected and unselected tab colors, and since that day developers have been asking about Android. Well, to be honest I was always against adding icons to material tabs in Android, but developers want to do it, so here is how you can, with a Custom Renderer for a Tabbed Page. Here is what it will look like at …
James Montemagno
I just installed the latest RC for Cycle 9 and was extremely surprised and happy to find some brand new Item Templates for Xamarin.Forms including: Carousel Page List View Page Map Page Tabbed Page Along with the awesome new project template creation! When you add a page it will scaffold out your entire ViewModel too!!! Amazing! Just by adding the ListView Page you get this:
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
