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

purple

Wallpaper of the month (November 2016): Purple Wolf

I love minimalism and clean desktops anda strong wallpaper without any overlapping icons makes me happy every time I start my computer. That is why I started this series of beautiful wallpapers that I find on my travels through the world wide web. This beauty here makes the start!

azure

Different ways to register devices to the Azure IoT Hub

The Azure IoT Hub is Microsoft’s Internet of Things solution inthe cloud. Beside the commoneventmessage endpoints, it contains a device management system, which allows to register and manage devices that may send data to the IoT Hub. This increases security by generating a unique access key

Design

Useful Developer Tools #5: Facebook's Device Sketches

When creating mockup images for your product presentations, finding cool device images to put your screenshots in can be challenging. Especially, when you are looking for license free images that can be used commercially. Good thing, that Facebook now opened their device mockups to be downloaded for free. While Facebook

color

Useful Developer Tools #4: f.lux

It is no secret, that most developers arenocturnal. That’s why there are many toolsthat makes a coder’s nightlife easier. Dark Mode in IDEs is a good example. But did you know f.lux? This tiny toolmakes the color of your computer’s display adapt to

azure

Manually connect and send data to an Azure Event Hub

Update 04.02.2017: As theMicrosoft.Azure.EventHubs NuGet package since two days finally support every .NET platform, this post go obsolete. Azure Event Hubs provide a neat way to collect loads of data that is pushed against them and holds it until its processing. Microsoft offers an SDK

IoT

Fixing the Windows IoT Core Dashboard device detection when running Windows on Parallels

Just a short tip: When you are running on a Mac Book (like I do) and use Parallels for all your Windows related stuff, you might run into the problem that the Windows IoT Core Dashboard does not find your Windows IoT Core devices. If so, the problem often seems

Development

How to upload your UWP app to HockeyApp right

HockeyApp provides a neat and easy to use service for developers to provide apps to their testers and track anonymous usage data, crashes and feedback. As the Windows 10 (UWP) support is still in preview, the documentation on how to provide a Universal Windows App to your testers right is

android

Analyze a photo with Microsoft's Cognitive Services Vision API on Xamarin.Android

Microsoft’sCognitive Services are intelligent machine trained APIs that analyzed text, images, videos and more for you in the cloud and sends you back meta information about the provided content. They are free to use until a specific threshold and a nice easy to use thing to integrate in

Development

How to install an UWP app distributed with HockeyApp

The HockeyApp platform is one of the most popular ways of distributing pre-release software to testers and collect their anonymous usage data, crashes and feedback. As it is quite easy to install Android or iOS apps on your devices, when it comes to Windows things are getting a bit more

location

How to disable Security Warning for untrusted sources in Visual Studio

Better safe than sorry, no doubt and security is important but sometimes exaggerated care can get annoying. Visual Studio sometimes is a candidate for that in my eyes, especially when asking me if I trust solutions that I created by myself. The warning is absolutely right, you should definately not

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.

Development

Bring your Windows 10 Apps to Xbox One

At Build Conference 2016, Microsoft finally announced that they will open the Xbox One store for your UWP apps in summer. From now on, the developer program for the gaming console is open and we can take a first look at how to bring new or existing Windows 10 apps

Cloud

Your own game server on Azure - Create a dedicated Counter Strike server

It is nearly every gamer’s dream to have an own server that 100% fits his needs and where he canplay god. When I were younger, there were only two waysto get such a personal playground: Installing a server on my home machine and making sure to never

Design

Useful Developer Tools #3: Placeit

If you are a software developer and don’t have an own dedicated design department you sometimes have to create these fancy product images by your own. Your Photoshop skills are as weak as mine? No problem, Placeitcan do that for you. Just upload your screenshots to them and

list

The 5 best Visual Studio extensions, I can't code without

Visual Studio Marketplace recently hit a major milestone – 1 million page views and 250K unique users! Thecommunity is expanding rapidly, with 740 publishers and 711 public extensions available in the marketplace today.Visual Studio is a great IDE, without doubt – the best one, if you ask me. But as

cortana

Cortana Integration #1: Hey Cortana, work with my Windows app!

In the video game series Halo, the relationship between the protagonist and his AI companion Cortana is very close and intensive. On the new Windows platforms, users now also have the chance to interact with Cortana as a personal assistant. But for achieving the same intensive relationship with the user

android

Useful Developer Tools #3 - Final Android Resizer

When developing forAndroid you quickly come to a point where you need images rezised for different screen densities. While most icons you can download comes in different sizes, creating own images could take much time if you need to rezise them manually. The Final Android Reziseris a free

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

random

Useful Developer Tools #2: Random User Generator

Need some demo data for your mocks? You should try out the Random User Generator that does exactly what you would expect from a tool with this name: It generates a detailed user profile including a picture, address, E-Mail and more. Additionally it comes with an API that you can

color

Useful Developer Tools #1: Adobe Color Wheel

Welcome to the first part of our “Useful Developer Tools” series. We would like to present you a set of small tools that makes a developer’s life easier and their results better. Today we want to start with the Adobe Color Wheel. Formerly known as “Adobe Kuler” the color

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