Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
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 … Read more
A question was raised this week by Sturla as to how to incorporate the Launch Icon Badge extension into the build process when making use of the templates from Pipeline Templates (Damien covers how to use this extension in a Azure DevOps pipeline in his post on the topic). By the way, a big thank … Read more
When deploying a release to AppCenter you can specify release notes that get presented to the user when they go to download a new release. This week a question was asked as to how to specify release notes from a file when submitting a new app version to AppCenter. If you looked at the complete … Read more
We just released v0.5.1 of the Pipeline Templates – templates for creating build pipelines for Azure DevOps. This was a minor increment but fixed an issue that emerged due to a change in the validation of pipelines by Azure DevOps. Before we get into the details of what is included in v0.5.1, the other big … Read more
If you’re developing cross-platform applications using Xamarin.Forms then you’re likely to be using either Visual Studio or Visual Studio for Mac (as an aside, if you’re new to Xamarin.Forms you can get the tools you need for free, so don’t feel you need to go out and purchase the professional version of Visual Studio!). The … Read more
My last post was a bit of a long one as it covered a bunch of steps for setting up the bits and pieces required for signing an application for different platforms. In this post I just wanted to provide a complete example that shows a single multi-stage (6 in total) Azure Pipelines pipeline for … Read more
In my previous posts covering the Pipeline Templates I’ve discussed building a Xamarin.Forms apps for iOS, Android and Windows (UWP) and subsequently deploying them to AppCenter. In this post we’re going to look at doing the same with a Uno application. Given that Uno is built on top of the core Xamarin functionality, the process … Read more
Wow, that title’s a mouthful, and I didn’t add in there that I’ve just pushed v0.2.0 release of the Pipeline Templates repository. In this post we’re going to add stages to a YAML based Azure DevOps pipeline in order to deploy a Xamarin.Forms application to AppCenter for testing. We’ll also be using on the of … Read more
One of the things I find frustrating is that for every new project we seem to have to recreate the build and release pipeline. In each case we step through the same steps, run into the same, albeit familiar, issues and end up with a pipeline that looks incredibly similar to the pipeline we setup … Read more
In my last couple of posts (here and here) I talked a bit about using the ApkTool to repack an Android APK in order to update an Android application to target different environments. To make this easier I’ve just published a preview of an extension for Azure DevOps. The ApkTool Build and Release Task extension … Read more
Following yesterday’s post on repacking an Android APK, I was pointed to an awesome post by Daniel Causer entitled Build Once Release Everywhere – APK. Daniel’s post goes into a lot of detail on how to setup your build and release process. Specifically the scripts that he’s created for automating the repacking process I described in … Read more
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
I’ve posted previously on using visual states in Uno and how they can be used to effectively manage the different visual layouts a page can take on. These may be changes in layout due to the application being resized, or perhaps due to different data loading states. I’ve recently created a Uno build of the … Read more
Whether you’re developing an Android app in Kotlin, a cross-platform app in Flutter or Xamarin Forms, or an Xbox app in C#/XAML, supporting multiple environments when building an app, is just not as easy as it should be. For example the different environments might be dev, test, staging, prodution etc to align with your dev, … Read more
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
Last week was a huge week for the Uno platform with their inaugural Uno conference, #UnoConf. As the technology continues to mature, I’ve no doubt that Uno will become a viable solution for building applications to target all sorts of markets. This includes support being progressively added by the various Mvvm frameworks. Following my previous … Read more
I’ve covered this topic previously in my post Create, Build and Publish a Flutter Web App but things have changed a little now as web support has been merged, making it easier to build a single application that runs on iOS, Android and Web. To find out more you can check out the Flutter docs … Read more
Following my previous post on Mvvm Navigation with Xmarin.Forms Shell there were a few things that I felt I hadn’t addressed adequately. Loading Data on Appearing The first thing is how to load data when navigating to a page, and perhaps to do something when the user navigates away from the page. Since it’s the … Read more
In this post we’re going to look at the Text widget in Flutter and some of the options you can tweak when displaying text within your app. If you’re after a more detailed discussion of strings, characters and how they’re displayed, you should check out the post, Mastering Styled Text in Flutter. To get into … Read more
One of the topics that I find a bit contentious amongst app developers is how navigation is handled, specifically when it comes to MVVM. Should navigation be done in the code behind of the page? or in the ViewModel? and should navigation be based on a path/URL or based on what ViewModel you want to … Read more