XAML Back to Basics #4: ComboBox Binding
How to bind the items of a ComboBox (and get its ComboBoxItems
Windows
17 Years as a Microsoft MVP
Earlier this month I was, was awarded Microsoft MVP for the 17th year and I wanted to take this opportunity to reflect on this. Firstly a note of appreciation to all the Microsoft staff both from the MVP program, the various product teams and of course the Australian sub. Overall an amazing set of people … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Building Messages in Blend for Visual Studio
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
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)
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
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
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Microsoft Build 2020: Uno Platform + WinUI = Future of Cross Platform Apps
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
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, … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
Dual Screens with Surface Neo (Windows 10X) and Surface Duo (Android)
In October 2019 Microsoft announced a new category of dual screen device with flagship products Surface Neo and Surface Duo. Since then, there has been a massive undertaking by Microsoft to prepare developers of both Windows (UWP and Win32 apps) and Android apps for a new world of dual, or even multiple, screen devices. This … Read more