Xamarin - Pumping Code

Microsoft Build 2018: App Innovation Highlights

From Monday to Wednesday, //build 2018 conference took place in Seattle. It’s in the nature of Microsoft’s largest and most importantdeveloper conference to announce a bunch of cool stuff and updates to their Cloud, AI, and Frontend developer tools and services. Here are my developer centric highlights

android

Easy tricks to boost the native Android integration of your cross-platform apps

Most mobile developers write their Mobile Apps on a Mac, which makes it super easy to quickly test them in the iOS Simulator. Naturally, this results in prettier iOS than Android apps, as we see discover flaws on iOS more often. Using an Android Emulator mostly, is not an option,

Xamarin

FlexButton: A super flexible button control for Xamarin.Forms

Although Xamarin.Forms includes a Button control with quite a few ways to customize its layout, I needed a more flexible button for a side project, that required two things the default implementation could not deliver: A round shape and a way to catch when a user presses and releases

MacOS

Useful Developer Tools #9: Clean and Zip .NET projects from Finder

If you develop .NET projects, particularly in the Xamarin world, you might find yourself cleaning your projects (delete /bin and /obj folders) from time to time by hand. Especially, when you plan to send code to others as a compressed .zip file, you might want to remove those folders beforehand.

Xamarin

Enable and control iOS 11 Large Titles in Xamarin.Forms

With iOS 11, Apple introduced a bunch of new design elements to its mobile platform. One of them arelarger titles, that sit in the Navigation Bar and can be scrolled away when more space is needed. Large Titles can be enabled with a few lines of code in iOS.

layout

Swipecards: A Tinder-like swipe control for Xamarin.Forms

For a side-project of mine, I created a Xamarin.Forms control, that lets the user wipe away cards in different directions, similar to the popular Tinder app. The control is still work in progress and will be extended over time, but I decided to publish the current version as it

DevOps

Disable Visual Studio App Center when running on a Simulator, Emulator or Test Cloud device

When tracking usage statistics and crashes with Visual Studio App Center, you usually only want real-world data in there and filter out data that gets generated while developing or testing the app. To avoid sophisticated insights like those in the screenshot below, developers need to define, when Visual Studio App

Development

Free self-guided Xamarin workshop

Two days ago, I gave a Xamarin workshop at the Microsoft Technical Summit 2016 conference in Darmstadt (Germany). This was a full-day workshop with a Xamarin introduction at the beginning and a guided workshop experience, where the participants learned how to Setup a Xamarin development environment Create native cross-platform apps

Development

Move your Xamarin.Forms Toolbar to the bottom on Windows

While iOS and Android typically have their toolbars and menus at the top of the page, on Windows you will find it at the bottom in most cases. Unfortunately, Xamarin.Forms renders all toolbar to the top of the page per default, even on Windows. So if you define a

Development

Xamarin free for everyone - What developers need to know

At//build 2016conference, Microsoftannounced to include Xamarin into their existing offers and make the cross-platform solution free for everyone. Now asXamarin is part of Visual Studio 2015, some things are changing for developers so let’s take a look at what how the Xamarin ecosystem will transform.

android

Swipe to refresh your Xamarin Android app

Most apps that deal with online data have implemented a refresh mechanism. If you want to enable your users to trigger this on their own, providing a“swipe to refresh” implementation is a common and intuitive design pattern. Users canpull down from the top of apageto trigger

android

Show a custom dialog in your Xamarin Android app

Sometimes you want to show your users a dialog that contains more than just text and buttons. In those cases the pre-defined <a href="http://developer.android.com/reference/android/app/AlertDialog.html">AlertDialog</a>that come with Android will need some adjustment. Read

Git

Xamarin .gitignore

If you use git as source control for your Xamarin project, you might not want everything but only the necessary files to be commited. Unfortunately most auto-generated .gitignore files like the one from GitHub for example don’t contain Xamarin paths. By adding these lines to your .gitignorefile your

Cloud

Want to create Xamarin.iOS apps without buying a Mac? Rent one!

As a mobile developer you will know that a MacOS device is stringently requiredto build and run iOS apps. Same is with Xamarin: You can write your code wherever you want but when it comes to compiling you need aMac. Fortunately Xamarin ship a tool called Build Host

android

Add a stylish Navigation Drawer to your Xamarin.Android application

These hamburger menus do not only look neat, they also provide a great way of navigating through an application and display additional information or quick settings. Since Google itself uses them in nearly every application users expect one of them when swiping from the left side of the screen. In

Cloud

Upload your UI Tests to the Xamarin Test Cloud

Whenever app development gets more serious and your code becomes more complex, testing your application automatically is a step you need to go to survive.Xamarin provides two neat ways to write UI Tests for your applications. Calabash is a framework you can write tests in Ruby with and Xamarin.

android

How to fix Xamarin Android Player in Windows 10

If you have recently updated your PC to Windows 10 you might have noticed that our beloved Xamarin Android Player does not work anymore. Whenever we try to start it, the error message “Could not configure host-only network. Please reboot the computer and try again.” appears.This problem is caused

Development

Adding Drag and Drop to your Android application with Xamarin

Since touchscreens have conquered our everyday life, drag and drop functionality accompanies us on our way through the digital world. The simplicity of this intuitive design pattern is responsible for its success story. This is why you should enhance you applications by implementing it. And this is easier than you