Don’t Judge XAML Based On Lines of Code

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For those following the on-going discussion around the future of XAML and specifically the use of XAML in DotNetMaui/Xamarin.Forms, this post is a follow on from two great posts discussing the options that are, or will be, available for Xamarin.Forms developers as we move forward with DotNetMaui: Mobile Blazor Bindings – Getting Started + Why … Read more

DotNetMaui (Xamarin.Forms) is Not a XAML Platform

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Yeh I know I’m going to get a ton of abuse about how this title is just click bait but before you start with the comments, hear me out. Firstly, the title is actually just missing a word DotNetMaui is Not JUST a XAML Platform In this post we’ll go through why DotNetMaui/Xamarin.Forms is/is not … Read more

Building Messages in Blend for Visual Studio

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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 … Read more

Windows (UWP) Designer in Visual Studio and Blend for Visual Studio

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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 … Read more

Xamarin DevOps Snippets (aka Pipeline Templates)

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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 … Read more

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

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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

iOS Hot Restart, Multi-Targeting and Solution Template for Cross-Platform Applications with Uno

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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 … Read more

Improving Developer Experience with Multi-Targeted Visual Studio Projects

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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

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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

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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