James Montemagno
James Montemagno

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James Montemagno
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Resolving Android Support Library NuGet Installation Issues

Resolving Android Support Library NuGet Installation Issues

Xamarin.Essentials [https://docs.microsoft.com/xamarin/essentials/] has to be my favorite project that I have worked on at Xamarin so far. Bringing together over 30 native platform specific APIs into a single API that creates a linker safe and optimized library that so far has really delighted developers. I did some surveys last week and everyone could not stop saying positive things about the library, which is awesome! One thing stood out though that seems to be causing issues, which is how NuG…

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Welcome to Montemagno.com Version 2.0 & Newsletter!

Welcome to Montemagno.com Version 2.0 & Newsletter!

Nearly a year ago I re-launched montemagno.com [https://montemagno.com/welcome/] with the goal of creating a website rich of developer content, powered by Ghost [http://ghost.org] a great CMS system, and with beautiful branding [http://cinderdesign.co/] and theming that was mobile responsive. Monthly Newsletter Something I have always wanted to have was a newsletter that would allow me to have a closer relationship with my readers than just back and forth on Twitter [http://twitter.com/jamesmon…

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Xamarin.Forms: Official Bottom Navigation/Bottom Tabs on Android

Xamarin.Forms: Official Bottom Navigation/Bottom Tabs on Android

Bottom tabs on Android... Love them... Hate them... it doesn't matter because Google seems to be all in on them. Top tabs were really designed to sort differerent types of data, while bottom tabs make a lot of sense when you want to use them for your entire application's navigation. It also has the perk that it synchronizes your application design and navigation with the iOS counterpart. Since Xamarin.Forms maps to the native controls, when you create a Tabbed Page you get the tabs exa…

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Xamarin.Forms: Drop Shadows on Android Navigation Toolbar

Xamarin.Forms: Drop Shadows on Android Navigation Toolbar

One thing that always bothered me when developing Xamarin.Forms applications for Android is that for some reason the toolbar area looked flat... well because it was flat: See how it just melds together with the rest of the applicaton. Where is that lovely drop shadow that we know and love?!?!?! Well, it is a bit complicated as that elevation drop shadow comes from the Toolbar and Xamarin.Forms applications only have 1 today that you don't really have access to. I have asked to extend the…

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Xamarin.Forms - Icons in Navigation Toolbar

A somewhat common scenario for mobile apps is to place an icon in the center of the Navigation Toolbar. While I am not sure if this is really best practice in 2018 there still seems to be a lot of demand to do this. What if I was to tell you that this is actually pretty easy to do and for iOS it is built directly into Xamarin.Forms with no need for a custom renderer? Let's take the default "Master/Detail" template for Xamarin.Forms in Visual Studio. It has a few tabs and an about…

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Celebrating 100 Episodes of Merge Conflict

Celebrating 100 Episodes of Merge Conflict

It was August 20th, 2013 when I broke out of my comfort zone of sitting behind my desk crushing mobile app code and decided to attend my very first official Xamarin meetup [https://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-is-coming-to-puget-sound/]. I rode my bike over to Bellevue, a place that I rarely explored, and pulled up to Pearl. It took me a few minutes to find parking for my bike because Bellevue isn't the most bike friendly city that we have here in the Pacific Northwest, but I walked around until…

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Continuous Integration & Delivery for Xamarin & .NET Libraries with Azure DevOps (VSTS)

I build a lot of .NET libraries that include simple .NET Standard libraries to fully cross-platform plugins for Xamarin and Windows that target up to 10 different platforms. When I got started building libraries and shipping them to NuGet I went down a simple path of just building everything locally on my machine and manually uploading them to NuGet. This worked great for a single library, but as soon as I took on a second... third... forth... and so on, things got out of hand and I knew I had t…

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Converting Xamarin Libraries to SDK Style & Multi-Targeted Projects

If you are like me you may have a lot of standard Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android libraries sitting around. They aren't plugins [https://montemagno.com/new-plugin-for-xamarin-multi-target-templates-for-visual-studio-2017/] , but they do extend a single platform with custom functionality and controls. Wouldn't it be great if you could update them to the new SDK Style projects which use Package References, auto-NuGet packaging, and load WAY faster?!?!? It is all crazy simple to do just lik…

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James Montemagno

James Montemagno

Tags

Xamarin Xamarin.Forms Coffee Plugins NuGet Visual Studio C# XAML Android iOS Video Games Awesome Podcast DevOps Azure