Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
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
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
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
Someone pointed me in the direction of a series of great blog posts that have recently been migrated to a github repository. The posts are quite old, dating back to a period between 2005 and 2013 when Beatriz Stollnitz worked for Microsoft as part of the WPF and Silverlight teams. Here are the links to … Read more
In this post we’re going to cover one of the basics of app navigation which is the use of the UWP SplitView. If you’re coming from iOS and Android development you might be thinking “huh, I don’t even know what that is.” Well the good news is that it’s actually something you’re already familiar with. … Read more
In my previous post I discussed Control Template in Windows development (UWP and Platform.Uno). I feel the topic of templates warrants at least one follow up post. So, in this post I’m going to walk through ListView Templates and GridView Templates. As both ListView and GridView inherit from ListViewBase, I’m actually going to focus my … Read more
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
I think I’ve been living under a rock as I’ve only just come across dnSpy, a decompiler for .net! I’ve been building apps and services with .NET for a long time, so a Twitter thread talking about decompilers amused me. David Kean’s comment pretty accurately reflects my sentiment regarding Reflector. You can pry ildasm from … Read more
Debugging Http/Https Traffic using Fiddler for Xamarin iOS, Android and Windows (UWP) Applications