Pipeline Templates: Building and Deploying Uno Apps for iOS, Android and Windows

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

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 … Read more

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 … Read more

How to Support Multiple Environments in your Mobile Application?

Build Configurations

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

Running Android Device Tests for Xamarin.Essentials on Windows

As a developer working with Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms you should be aware of the Xamarin.Essentials package that Microsoft have been developing that “provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications”. If you haven’t taken the time to look through the source code, it’s well worth cloning the repository and taking a look. Not only … Read more

Content from Former Microsoft WPF and Silverlight Team Member

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

Using the UWP SplitView on iOS, Android and WebAssembly with Uno

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

Optimising Multi-Targeting with Visual Studio Solution Filters

Over time Visual Studio has progressively improved support for solutions that have a large number of projects. MvvmCross used to be over 200 projects to handle each of the target platforms it supports. With the introduction of multi-targeted projects the number of projects dropped significantly to around 50 projects. For example, the core MvvmCross project … Read more

ListView and GridView Templates for Windows (UWP)

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

XAML Control Templates for Windows (UWP) and Platform.Uno

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