Improving Developer Experience with Multi-Targeted Visual Studio Projects

In my previous post on using multi-targeted cross platform projects I showed how you can add additional target frameworks to allow the addition of platform specific code to a library. One of the downsides of this approach (versus perhaps using a shared project) is that the library gets built once for every target framework that’s … Read more

Cross-Platform Libraries with Multi-Targeting for Xamarin, Uno and Windows Development

The story of cross platform development for Microsoft developers has been one marked by iteration after iteration of .NET framework fragmentation. With .NET 5 the promise is that we’ll return to having a single framework that will be used everywhere…. Sorry, what?? when did we ever have a single framework? For as long as I … Read more

Microsoft Build 2020: Uno Platform + WinUI = Future of Cross Platform Apps

I’ve been a long time supporter of the work that the team at Uno Platform have been doing. The announcement today of v3.0 of the Uno Platform comes hot on the heals of releases 2.3 and 2.4 that introduced AndroidX and MacOS support. This isn’t just any old announcement, v3 aligns the Uno Platform with … Read more

Pipeline Templates: Templates for Downloading and Caching

Earlier this year I published a pre-release version of an Azure DevOps extension that wrapped the ApkTool for extracting and re-packing Android APK files. Having spent more time working with Azure Pipelines, I realised that most of what I was doing with the extension could actually be done with one or more templates. Today I … Read more

Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 4 – Custom Shadows

In part 2 of this series of posts on Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications (parts 1, 1b, 2 and 3) we saw that the composition APIs could be used to generate a DropShadow. However, what wasn’t immediately clear is that this mechanism only works for a limited set of controls, namely Shape (including Ellipse, … Read more