Tag: UWP

Don’t Judge XAML Based On Lines of Code

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 … Continue reading “Don’t Judge XAML Based On Lines of Code”

DotNetMaui (Xamarin.Forms) is Not a XAML Platform

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 … Continue reading “DotNetMaui (Xamarin.Forms) is Not a XAML Platform”

Windows (UWP) Point Animations

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”

Windows (UWP) Designer in Visual Studio and 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”

Xamarin DevOps Snippets (aka Pipeline Templates)

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)”

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 … Continue reading “Improving Developer Experience with Multi-Targeted Visual Studio Projects”

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 … Continue reading “Cross-Platform Libraries with Multi-Targeting for Xamarin, Uno and Windows Development”

Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 4 – Custom Shadows

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”

Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 3 – DropShadowPanel

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”

Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 2 – DropShadow

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”

Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 1b – ThemeShadow in Lists

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”

Shadows in Windows (UWP) XAML Applications – Part 1 – ThemeShadow

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”

Solved: Unable to Run Windows (UWP) Application from Visual Studio 2019

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”

Pipeline Templates: Complete Azure Pipelines Example for a Uno Project for iOS, Android and Windows

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 … Continue reading “Pipeline Templates: Complete Azure Pipelines Example for a Uno Project for iOS, Android and Windows”

Deploy Xamarin.Forms Apps to App Center from a Azure Multi-Stage Pipeline using Templates and Environments that Require Manual Approval

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 … Continue reading “Deploy Xamarin.Forms Apps to App Center from a Azure Multi-Stage Pipeline using Templates and Environments that Require Manual Approval”

Pipeline Templates: Building Xamarin.Forms Apps on Azure DevOps using Templates

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 … Continue reading “Pipeline Templates: Building Xamarin.Forms Apps on Azure DevOps using Templates”

Visual State Management with BuildIt.States and Uno

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 … Continue reading “Visual State Management with BuildIt.States and Uno”