James Montemagno

Changing iOS's Back Button Text in Xamarin.Forms

iOS is a pretty unique platform. Since no device has a physical hardware back button like Android the navigation bar must fully represent a way for users to navigate back or close a modal page. To craft a great experience with Xamarin.Forms I always like to try to follow the platform guidelines as close as possible. In this post I am going to tackle the standard PushAsync of a page onto the Navigation stack. By default Xamarin.Forms will automatically add a back arrow when the page is pushed, an…

James Montemagno

Build Apps Faster with Plugins for Xamarin!

One of my favorite parts of mobile development with Xamarin is that I am not only creating fully native mobile application on iOS and Android, but that I also have 100% API access on those platforms. That means if I want to do something I can do something. However, after four years of mobile development I found myself doing the same things over and over again to access native APIs from shared code. If I wanted to adjust a setting, vibrate the device, or check connectivity I would abstract out an…

James Montemagno

Simplified iOS & Android Runtime Permissions with Plugins!

TLDR; I created a brand new cross-platform Permissions Plugin for Xamarin [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/Xamarin.Plugins/tree/master/Permissions] to enable anyone to query and request common permissions from shared code. You can watch a video here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7CjzAUoEVI]. Permissions! Blarg! As an Android developer I have felt pretty spoiled over the last few years when it came to getting access to an API that required a permission. Simply check a checkbox in the proj…

James Montemagno

Access the Current Android Activity from Anywhere!

In the world of Android one of my biggest pain points over the years is that often you need access to the apps current Activity when writing libraries or abstracting out common functionality. For years I have been hacking around the issue by setting special Intent flags or more than likely creating a BaseActivity with a static “CurrentActivity” that is set when the page is started up. While this works short term for MY app, it completely falls down when you want to create Plugins or abstract an…

James Montemagno

How To Deliver a Great Technical Presentation

Two years ago marked a major shift in my career as a software developer; I transitioned from a full time mobile C#/.NET developer to a full time developer evangelist at Xamarin. Sure, I had attended a few developer conferences in my days, but I had actually never delivered a technical presentation, which may come to a surprise to some. In the past two years I have learned a lot delivering nearly 200 technical presentations, webinars, and workshops. There are a few things for sure is that I have…

James Montemagno

DataBinding Settings in Xamarin.Forms

For nearly four years now I have been using mycross-platform settings plugin [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/Xamarin.Plugins/tree/master/Settings]to save preferences across all the different platforms. Ever since I pushed it up to NuGet it has been extremely popular with over 18,000 installs! The plugin gives you a very simple way of saving out native settings from shared code. Usually, you will create a native UI for each platform and in the case of Android use the PreferenceActivity to aut…

James Montemagno

See Me Code & Present In Person This Fall!

Sure, I have been live coding all over the interwebz [http://motzcod.es/post/128873145362/one-month-of-live-coding] for the last month and will be doing so again this Friday on MVVM Light, [https://plus.google.com/events/cps4l2j82keara2sr54a4bsejc8] but what about seeing some live coding in person? Well you are in luck as I have a super crazy schedule once again flying all over the beautiful US of A! Over the next two months I will be giving sessions, dev days, workshops, webinars, and sooooo mu…

James Montemagno

One Month of Live Coding!

Just a little over a month ago I decided to start a brand new live video series called Motz Codes Live [http://motzcod.es/post/127109523932/motz-codes-live]. The idea was to cover a random mobile topic that I was investigating or interested in or perhaps a cover from YOU that you wanted to see, and I have to say that so far things have gone AMAZING with a bunch of awesome developers showing up each week and thousands of video views already. Since the launch I have also started a Motz Codes Live…

James Montemagno

Tags

Changing iOS's Back Button Text in Xamarin.Forms

Build Apps Faster with Plugins for Xamarin!

Simplified iOS & Android Runtime Permissions with Plugins!

Access the Current Android Activity from Anywhere!

How To Deliver a Great Technical Presentation

DataBinding Settings in Xamarin.Forms

See Me Code & Present In Person This Fall!

One Month of Live Coding!

Tags