Xamarin.Forms, .NET Maui and the Uno Platform

The .NET Maui team at Microsoft recently dropped Release Candidate 1, so I thought it worth taking a quick look at how it compares to both it’s predecessor, Xamarin.Forms, and the Uno Platform, which is arguably the market leader for building multi-platform application with .NET. If you missed the announcement by Microsoft, here’s a tweet … Read more

UI Testing for WASM (WebAssembly) with the Uno Platform

One of the guilty truths of software development is that despite our best efforts we never write enough tests, and seldom do we write enough automated tests. This isn’t entirely our fault because for some reason testing frameworks, particularly those for UI testing, always seem to be an after thought. In this post we’re going … Read more

I am a Windows App Developer

With the recent excitement surrounding the announcement of Windows 11, there’s renewed interest in developing apps for the Windows platform. In this post we’re going to celebrate what it means to be a Windows App Developer, regardless of what framework or technology you chose. It’s not going to be an exhaustive list of options but … Read more

Xamarin DevOps Snippets (aka Pipeline Templates)

Louis Matos has put together Xamarin Month with the topic of Code Snippets – Check out Louis’ blogĀ 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 … Read more

Consuming REST API with Swagger / OpenAPI in Xamarin and Uno Applications

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. … Read more

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

Look iOS Developer, No Mac Required – Build an iOS Application using Xamarin and Visual Studio for Windows without using a Mac

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.

Repacking and Resigning an Android APK to Target Different Environments

In my previous post talking about targeting different environments I ended with the proposition that what we need to be able to do as part of the release pipeline for an app is to adjust the configuration file that’s included in the app package. In this post I’m going to manually walk through what this … Read more

Running Android Device Tests for Xamarin.Essentials on Windows

As a developer working with Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms you should be aware of the Xamarin.Essentials package that Microsoft have been developing that “provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications”. If you haven’t taken the time to look through the source code, it’s well worth cloning the repository and taking a look. Not only … Read more

XAML Control Templates for Windows (UWP) and Platform.Uno

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about using code to declare the user interface of an app. Such as a recent post I did following the announcement of SwiftUI by Apple. In the Xamarin.Forms world the hashtag CSharpForMarkup has become the latest distraction. CSharpForMarkup encourages developers to move away from XAML to defining … Read more

Apple Introduces SwiftUI; So What?

Shortly after Apple announced SwiftUI a twitter thread erupted discussing a hypothetical Sharp UI. It was positioned an alternative for declarative ui development, across Xamarin applications in C# or F#. If Apple has SwiftUI, perhaps we’ll Microsoft rollout # UI (Sharp UI) for as a new method for building user interfaces in @xamarinhq apps with … Read more