Building amazing cross-platform solutions for iOS, Android and Windows
A week or so ago I noticed a really slick piece of animation done as part of a Flutter app. Unfortunately I can no longer find the tweet as the account has been removed. However, it perked my interest enough to go playing with animations in XAML to see what I can do. Note that … Continue reading “Windows (UWP) Point Animations”
The other day Martin Zikmond tweeted about a messaging sample app he’d built using the Uno Platform, allowing the same app to run on iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS and Web. Whilst the concept was simple enough, the point was that there was almost no platform specific code and yet the app works and looks virtually … Continue reading “Building Messages in Blend for Visual Studio”
If you’ve been looking at the release notes for the Visual Studio previews, you’ll have noted that there’s some work being done on the XAML designer that now supports both WPF and UWP. I figured I would take this opportunity to go through and document some of the features that I use and some of … Continue reading “Windows (UWP) Designer in Visual Studio and Blend for Visual Studio”
Louis Matos has put together Xamarin Month with the topic of Code Snippets – Check out Louis’ blog for the full month of snippet. In this post I’m going to cover some code snippets that use Pipeline Templates in order to setup a Azure DevOps pipeline for your Xamarin application. Azure Pipeline Templates are a way … Continue reading “Xamarin DevOps Snippets (aka Pipeline Templates)”
I still recall the simplicity of standing up a SOAP service and adding a service reference via Visual Studio by simply entering the url to the WSDL – this scenario just worked…. until we moved on. There was a rapid progression away from the overly prescriptive XML based world of SOAP to REST based APIs. … Continue reading “Consuming REST API with Swagger / OpenAPI in Xamarin and Uno Applications”
In my last couple of posts I covered setting up multi-targeting and improving the developer experience with multi-targeting. This was in the context of an application that supported iOS (Xamarin iOS), Android (Xamarin Android) and Windows (UWP). In this post we’re going to look at a template for Uno cross-platform applications. If you’re new to … Continue reading “iOS Hot Restart, Multi-Targeting and Solution Template for Cross-Platform Applications with Uno”
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 … Continue reading “Improving Developer Experience with Multi-Targeted Visual Studio Projects”
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 … Continue reading “Cross-Platform Libraries with Multi-Targeting for Xamarin, Uno and Windows Development”
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 … Continue reading “Microsoft Build 2020: Uno Platform + WinUI = Future of Cross Platform Apps”
Last week Microsoft released the schedule for sessions for Build 2020. However, other than via the portal, there’s no easy way to get a list of sessions so that you can easily work out which sessions work for your time-zone and which sessions you want to attend. In order to solve my own dilemma of … Continue reading “Add Build 2020 Schedule to Your Calendar”
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 … Continue reading “Pipeline Templates: Templates for Downloading and Caching”
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, … Continue reading “Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 4 – Custom Shadows”
In Part 2 of this series I talked about how to create your own shadow using the DropShadow class. I mentioned that whilst it was easy enough to do, the DropShadow had to be created in code, rather than being applied in XAML. Well the good news is that the team building the Windows Community … Continue reading “Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 3 – DropShadowPanel”
Following Part 1 – ThemeShadow (and Part 1b – Lists) in this post we’re going to look at a very simple example of creating your own shadow. I’m going to reuse my simple example of two overlapping rectangles. The goal is to: Add a shadow around the bottom-left rectangle The shadow should elevate the rectangle … Continue reading “Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 2 – DropShadow”
Originally, I had planned that the next post was going to talk about making use of the Shadow property and creating a custom shadow. However, following part 1 there was a bit of dialog online talking about the use of shadows in lists. I figured that it shouldn’t be too hard to extend my example … Continue reading “Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 1b – ThemeShadow in Lists”
I’ve been watching James Montemagno bring his AnimalCrossing app to life. The progress continues: #AnimalCrossing Turnip Tracking App powered by #Xamarin and amazing library creators. 99.9% shared code 🙂 pic.twitter.com/7CSlmk6nCJ — James Montemagno – 🔴 Live on Twitch (@JamesMontemagno) April 11, 2020 What’s super impressive is that this doesn’t look anything like a regular out … Continue reading “Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 1 – ThemeShadow”
In October 2019 Microsoft announced a new category of dual screen device with flagship products Surface Neo and Surface Duo. Since then, there has been a massive undertaking by Microsoft to prepare developers of both Windows (UWP and Win32 apps) and Android apps for a new world of dual, or even multiple, screen devices. This … Continue reading “Dual Screens with Surface Neo (Windows 10X) and Surface Duo (Android)”
It appears that the Runtime Parameters of Azure DevOps Pipelines has rolled out to most organisations. As such I thought it important that the Pipeline Templates are updated to use strongly typed boolean parameters. For example in the following YAML taken from the Windows Build template has a parameter, build_windows_enabled, which is typed as a … Continue reading “Pipeline Templates: Runtime Parameters in Azure DevOps Pipelines”
If you’re a die-hard Windows user, like me, you’ll be excited to know that you can now build iOS application using Xamarin (and Xamarin.Forms) and Visual Studio, without having to buy or use a Mac. That’s right for development, you no longer need to invest, or carry around, a Mac. In this post I’ll walk you through how to enable this feature.
Over the last 24hrs I’ve had to setup a new dev machine from scratch. After installing all the bits and pieces I need to test out to make sure I can build and deploy apps to Android, iOS and Windows. After creating a new Xamarin.Forms application I set the UWP head project to be the … Continue reading “Solved: Unable to Run Windows (UWP) Application from Visual Studio 2019”
