Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
Developing cross platform applications, targeting platforms such as Android, iOS, Windows and Web, is becoming progressively easier. As .NET developers, one of the leading technologies for building cross platform apps is the Uno platform. Whilst Visual Studio, and the corresponding Uno solution templates, make it easy to create a new Uno application, setting up a … Read more
As part of writing code to read and write data to Azure Cosmos DB I created a bunch of test cases. However, I didn’t want to have my test cases reading and writing from an actual Cosmos DB instance. For this, the Cosmos DB Emulator is perfect. That is, until you come to want to … Read more
This post looks at deploying resources defined using Azure Bicep to multiple environments using Azure DevOps Pipeliens
As I start to work with Azure Bicep I figured I’d share some of my experiences here. First up, is just a quick recap of how to generate bicep code from an ARM template. Actually, the problem I initially started with was how to start writing bicep code since I wasn’t really familiar with either … Read more
This post covers how you can use a .bicep file in your Azure DevOps pipeline to deploy resources to Azure via an ARM template
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
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
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 … 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
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