James Montemagno

Important OnPlatform Changes in Xamarin.Forms

Last week I blogged about the important changes to Device.OS [http://motzcod.es/post/159463651162/device-os-xamarin-forms-obsolete-runtime-os] in the latest version of Xamarin.Forms. Well, I am back with some other changes from that same exact Pull Request [https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/pull/658] that have to do with OnPlatform in code and XAML that use the new Device.RuntimePlatform. So, what is OnPlatform? It allows you to set properties on elements or run specific code based on…

James Montemagno

Using Visual Studio Mobile Center with a Azure DevOps (VSTS) Code Repo

So, this is pretty awesome! Today, the Mobile Center team rolled out a huge update to Visual Studio Mobile Center [http://mobile.azure.com]enabling you to build your iOS and Android apps in the cloud from any GitHub, BitBucket, or Azure DevOps (VSTS) code repository! This is great because VSTS offers FREE unlimited private repos for your code with a git backend. Mobile Center offers up build, test, distribute, analytics, and backend services for any mobile app written in any language. It couldn’…

James Montemagno

Device.OS is Obsolete in Xamarin.Forms... What to do?!?!

If you just updated to Xamarin.Forms 2.3.4 [https://blog.xamarin.com/announcing-xamarin-forms-stable-release-2-3-4/]you may have noticed and be freaking out that you have tons of green squiggles that Device.OS and TargetPlatform are obsolete. This was all done in regards to the new changes for OnPlatform [https://github.com/xamarin/Xamarin.Forms/pull/658]. We can see here that it says to use RuntimePlatform isntead, which is a string… but how do you use it??!?! If you hover over TargetPlatfo…

James Montemagno

Twitter Lite - Progressive Web Apps - The Good, Bad, & Ugly

Twitter recently launched Twitter Lite [https://blog.twitter.com/2017/introducing-twitter-lite] a stripped down “faster” and more “data friendly” version of their mobile app and refresh to their mobile website. It is more than just a new mobile website, it really is a Progressive Web App (PWA) [https://developers.google.com/web/progressive-web-apps/] that offers up notifications, camera integration, and some of the common features of twitter such as timelines, tweeting, and direct messages. It…

James Montemagno

Unit Testing Plugins for Xamarin

So you love unit testing…. said no one ever, but you are forced to write unit tests and you want to use Plugins for Xamarin which are all singletons and need platform specific implementations or they will throw an exception in your tests…. what to do?!?!? Plugins are all interface based, which means all we have to do is use standard practices to not directly call the singleton, and setup our code to return the instance we want. In unit tests we can return a Mock (or Moq) of the interface, and in…

James Montemagno

Colored Map Markers on Xamarin iOS and Android

I was getting ready for my next Tech Summit presentation and wanted to spice up my Maps for iOS and Android. I didn’t want to create any custom marker images or anything like that, but just wanted a little color flare on it. I knew there had to be an API out there to do it in each of the native frameworks and of course there was, so here is the quick and easy solution. (If you need this for Xamarin.Forms this would make a great Effect most likely). Android - Google Map Markers Surprisingly this…

James Montemagno

Cleaning Up Space on Your Xamarin Development Machine

Today, I officially uninstall Visual Studio 2015 and upgrade to Visual Studio 2017 [http://www.visualstudio.com]!! Whenever I do a major upgrade I usually re-format my machine and get a fresh install, but this time I decided not to and just uninstall and clean up my machine as best as I can. While VS 2015 for sure installs tons of stuff all over the place and I can manually uninstall things, I figured it was a good time to help developers clean up space on their machines. I do this every few mon…

James Montemagno

Setting up Visual Studio 2017 for Xamarin Development

Visual Studio 2017 was just released yesterday, and it is awesome! You can re-live all the keynote and demo deep dives on Channel 9 [https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Visual-Studio-2017-Launch]. There are tons of new features and a huge revamp to installation but things to me still aren’t absolutely perfect in the setup of how I like to develop. So in the spirit of my Cycle 8 [https://montemagno.com/preparing-machines-for-xamarin-cycle] and Cycle 9 [https://montemagno.com/xamarin-c…

James Montemagno

Tags

Important OnPlatform Changes in Xamarin.Forms

Using Visual Studio Mobile Center with a Azure DevOps (VSTS) Code Repo

Device.OS is Obsolete in Xamarin.Forms... What to do?!?!

Twitter Lite - Progressive Web Apps - The Good, Bad, & Ugly

Unit Testing Plugins for Xamarin

Colored Map Markers on Xamarin iOS and Android

Cleaning Up Space on Your Xamarin Development Machine

Setting up Visual Studio 2017 for Xamarin Development

Tags