Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
144 posts
Microsoft Build 2019 is right around the corner (not only from where I live, but also it starts next Monday), so what better time to plan some meetups with awesome .NET developers <3. There will be tons of awesome sessions, the Xamarin booth, but also tons of coffee drinking with me, and even a bike ride opportunity. Here is my schedule for Build!
James Montemagno
It has been a little over 7 years since I left my day job at Canon crafting wonderful printer workflow management software, to dive into the world of mobile development. At the time it was an extremely tough decision because I had been only working on desktop Windows Forms and WPF applications, and this change meant entering a whole new unknown world of platforms that I didn't know much about. This move was not only …
James Montemagno
I am going to be honest with all of you, I never really understood Git tags and releases inside of GitHub. In my old TFVC days I would just create a branch with the name of the release and call that my "tag" so I could always go back to it. What sparked my interest was seeing a bunch of popular projects that I was using combine tags with the GitHub releases. I started reading the documentation and still …
James Montemagno
A little over a year ago, I introduced my Mobile App Tasks Extensions for iOS and Android into the Azure DevOps (VSTS) marketplace. For iOS and Android developers it made the tasks of versioning and adjusting package names a breeze. They were written completely in TypeScript with VS Code and of course are open source on GitHub. Since the initial release I have received overall positive feedback and a few feature …
James Montemagno
One common query I get all the time from developers is how to get a unique device or application identifier for their mobile app. After deciding to not include an API for this in Xamarin.Essentials we heard a lot of different use cases for it including: Client/Server Communication Login Validation In-App Purchase Verification Licensing Purposes The next obvious question that you may have is why didn't we include it …
James Montemagno
I have been a mobile developer for 7 years now and since the day I started one of my largest complaints has been the Android emulator. From the very start we had just ARM emulators that were a complete joke to work with as they moved at a snail's pace. From there a bunch of companies attempted to fix the problem by using custom built solutions on top of Virtual Box or Hyper-V. Google has done a lot of work in the …
James Montemagno
Real Time Communication or RTC as the cool kids call it has always been a hot topic, especially for mobile. In normal mobile development when we wanted to get updates of data we would make a web request to a server, pull down data, and update our user interface. If you wanted to get bits of data on demand and in real time you would have to integrate WebSockets or some sort of push notifications to receive data as it …
James Montemagno
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
