James Montemagno

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…

James Montemagno

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…

James Montemagno

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…

James Montemagno

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…

James Montemagno

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…

James Montemagno

The Best Coffee in Seattle

I love coffee! I can't go a day without a cup... or maybe four cups and then finish the day with a cappuccino. I make a coffee a desination when I travel, seeking out the finest brew that every city and country has to offer. I fell in love with Seattle on my very first visit in 2010. Walking around there was a special feel to the city, it was alive, it had everything, and coffee was at the core of this experience. While I brew my coffee at home almost every single day, it doesn't mean th…

James Montemagno

Welcome to the Nintendo Dispatch Podcast

When I'm not podcasting [https://montemagno.com/podcasts/]... I am podcasting [https://montemagno.com/podcasts/]! I mean I love it so much that I started a full podcast network, soundbite.fm [https://soundbite.fm], that is now filled with wonderful podcasts and podcasters. You may be used to me talking about programming and technology, but I have always had a passion for video games and I am a huge Nintendo fan. I can't help myself! Ever since the original NES I was all in and have owned…

James Montemagno

Monitoring Android Activity Lifecycle Events: Return of Current Activity Plugin

It has been nearly two and a half years since I wrote about how to easily get access to the current Android Activity [https://montemagno.com/access-the-current-android-activity-from-anywhere/] with just a few lines of code. This code led to the creation of my Current Activity Plugin [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/CurrentActivityPlugin] for Xamarin.Android apps and library creators to easily get access to the current Activity. Since then it has been the core of many of my plugins and has bee…

James Montemagno

Tags

Xamarin.Forms: Drop Shadows on Android Navigation Toolbar

Xamarin.Forms - Icons in Navigation Toolbar

Celebrating 100 Episodes of Merge Conflict

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

Converting Xamarin Libraries to SDK Style & Multi-Targeted Projects

The Best Coffee in Seattle

Welcome to the Nintendo Dispatch Podcast

Monitoring Android Activity Lifecycle Events: Return of Current Activity Plugin

Tags