James Montemagno

October 23rd, 2017

Beautiful Android Launch Screens

I have to admit that I actually really hate launch (or as I call it splash) screen on applications. On iOS and Windows we never had a choice and our apps always have a launch screen. On Android though we have always had the option to integrate a launch screen or not and in the past it was sort of frowned upon to have a launch screen in your app. It meant that your app was a bit slower or had long load times so we rarely saw them in Android apps. That all changed somewhere around a year or two ag…

James Montemagno

Xamarin Live Player - VS 2017 version 15.4 & 15.5 Awesomeness

Last week Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4 and VS for Mac 7.2 were released into the stable channel. They include the very first release of the Xamarin Live Player [http://xamarin.com/live] capabilities in Visual Studios. This means you can simply update Visual Studio, turn on Xamarin Live Player (Preview), and get started visualizing your mobile apps with nothing more than VS and your iOS or Android device! Whenever there is a stable release a new preview release of Visual Studio is not far b…

James Montemagno

iOS 11 Missing Marketing Icon

It is update season for iOS and Android applications with new versions of the operating systems being released. Today, I was on my way to push out a new version of the Xamarin Live Player [http://xamarin.com/live] to Test Flight users and hit this nasty error: > Missing Marketing Icon. iOS Apps must include a 1024x1024px Marketing Icon in PNG format. Apps that do not include the Marketing Icon cannot be submitted for App Review or Beta App Review. What is that?!?!? I swear I uploaded the i…

James Montemagno

Convert Json to C# (and More) with quicktype

How often do you run into the situation where you are reading data from a json file or hitting a RESTful endpoint and pulling down a huge json file that you then need to deserialize? I bet pretty often as I know I do all the time. The next issue of course is that you have this bug json file, but you need to generate the actual data types, POCOs, inside of your C# code. This can be extremely tedious if you try to do it by hand and other websites give you lack luster C# files where you have to add…

James Montemagno

Newman-O's - A Cookie Revolution

I am not a cookie person. Alright, I like cookies, but you wont find me at the store searching around and wanting to buy cookies, especially not Oreo sandwhich cookies. As a kid I am pretty sure I was all about them, but over time they transformed, morphed, got double stuffed, thinned, pumpkin spiced, and just stopped being interesting to me at all. Then last week I was listening to The Talk Show with John Gruber [https://daringfireball.net/thetalkshow/2017/08/25/ep-198] about Android Oreo and h…

James Montemagno

Connectivity Plugin 4.0: Important and Awesome Changes

The Connectivity Plugin for Xamarin [https://www.nuget.org/packages/Xam.Plugin.Connectivity] is my second most installed NuGet package with nearly 600,000 installs at time of writing this. It is easy to see why as it gives developers the ability to check connectivity on any platform with a single line of code, subscribe to events, and see what the current connection type is, with a complete cross platform API for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. I mean look at this thing, it is beautiful: i…

James Montemagno

The New Montemagno.com, a.k.a. MotzCod.es

It has been over 15 years since I started blogging on the internet and nearly 5 years since I started my dedicated development blog, MotzCod.es, focusing on cross-platform mobile development with Xamarin and C#. I have loved each and every moment of running my blogs and being able to write about my true passions in life. Throughout the years the number of blog posts I generated grew, readership grew, and I have also grown a lot in life and my career. With all that growth, I knew it was time for…

James Montemagno

The Xamarin.Android Template Pack Returns for VS 2017

A few years back I published some awesome Xamarin.Android item and project templates [https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bee6442f-8f5a-4bba-8849-e380b61e76b0?redir=0] to simplify development with Android’s AppCompat libraries. The item templates have actually found their way into Visual Studio, which is pretty awesome: What about the project templates? Well I am hoping for this fall to unleash brand new templates for Xamarin.Android directly in the box, but until then I have updat…

James Montemagno

Tags

Beautiful Android Launch Screens

Xamarin Live Player - VS 2017 version 15.4 & 15.5 Awesomeness

iOS 11 Missing Marketing Icon

Convert Json to C# (and More) with quicktype

Newman-O's - A Cookie Revolution

Connectivity Plugin 4.0: Important and Awesome Changes

The New Montemagno.com, a.k.a. MotzCod.es

The Xamarin.Android Template Pack Returns for VS 2017

Tags