James Montemagno

March 2nd, 2015

A full week of Xamarin in Dallas

I love to travel and talk to .NET developers all over the world who are interested in getting started in mobile development with Xamarin. I love it so much that I actually travel about 6 months out of the year. This upcoming week I have the pleasure of spending an entire week in Dallas, Texas and talk at 4 different events. * NEW DATE: March 9th 6PM: * Plano, TX @ North Dallas .NET Users GroupRegistration Link [http://northdallas.net/meetings/leveraging-net-c-and-xaml-to-create-nativ…

James Montemagno

How To Keep Your Android App Size Down

On my recent visit out to Tonto National Forest [http://www.fs.usda.gov/tonto/] to visit one of my best friends,Luke Karrys [http://www.twitter.com/lukekarrys], I started to realize the importance of trying to keep your app size down when shipping Android apps to Google Play. Working from the middle of the forest is relaxing, productive, and just plain fun, but there is one huge issue, internet and cell reception barely exists in the the middle of no where. When I woke up one morning and saw…

James Montemagno

iOS Tip: Change Status Bar Icon & Text Colors

When iOS 7 was introduced Apple allowed your application to extend all the way up into the status bar region. This was neat because you can scroll content behind it, change the color, and make the entire screen feel completely full. One thing that has upset me is that it isn’t really straight forward as to how to change the color of the time, carrier, battery, and other icons that live in the status bar. So here is my quick tips. Launch Screen Colors In general you can just hide the status bar…

James Montemagno

Hi, I'm James, Developer Evangelist

I have been a .NET developer for over a decade and worked in a wide variety of industries including games, printer software, web services, and more. A little over three years ago I decided to move my entire life from Phoenix, AZ to the most wonderful place in the world Seattle, WA for a brand new job. That new job was to be the lead and only mobile developer at Ceton. My first assignment was to create a series of mobile apps to pair with their DVR hardware and Windows Media Center (Microsoft’s a…

James Montemagno

January 30th, 2015

Force iOS, Android, & WP to Landscape

During this weeks Xamarin.Forms 1.3 webinar I received an interesting question about how you can force your mobile applications to always use a specific orientation. This is actually easy to accomplish on each platform with just a few settings in each project. Let’s take a look: Android First thing to do is open up your MainActivity.cs file. At the very top you will see an [Activity] attribute. This attribute is used to describe your activity to the AndroidManifest file that is built for you…

James Montemagno

Fixing activatedBackgroundIndicator in AppCompat Navigation Drawer

I was overly excited when I got news that our amazing component team had finished the latest binding for AppCompat v7 rev 21 [https://components.xamarin.com/view/xamandroidsupportv7appcompat]! This was exciting to me because this meant that any developer could now introduce material design to their Android app and target older devices all the way back to API 7 (although you should just target API 15). I got busy migrating Bike Now [http://www.github.com/jamesmontemagno/BikeNow] over to AppCompat…

James Montemagno

Load More Items at End of ListView in Xamarin.Forms

I recently published a few blogs on how to add pull to refresh to your Xamarin.Forms iOS [http://motzcod.es/post/87917979362/pull-to-refresh-for-xamarin-forms-ios] and Android [http://motzcod.es/post/103224921992/pull-swipe-to-refresh-for-xamarin-forms-android] applications. This sparked a question from another developer [http://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/comment/95999/#Comment_95999] as to if you could swipe to load more at the bottom of the ListView. My feedback here is that a swipe to lo…

James Montemagno

Lollipop AppCompat PreferenceActivity

I fell in love with material design the moment I saw it and at Evolve 2014 my good friend and co-worker Jérémie Laval [https://twitter.com/jeremie_laval] and I actually gave 2 sessions on the concept and implementation of material design [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=evolve+2014+material+design] in your apps. With the introduction of v7 app compat library rev 21 you are now able to upgrade your apps while maintain compatibility with older versions of Android. If you are looking t…

James Montemagno

Tags

A full week of Xamarin in Dallas

How To Keep Your Android App Size Down

iOS Tip: Change Status Bar Icon & Text Colors

Hi, I'm James, Developer Evangelist

Force iOS, Android, & WP to Landscape

Fixing activatedBackgroundIndicator in AppCompat Navigation Drawer

Load More Items at End of ListView in Xamarin.Forms

Lollipop AppCompat PreferenceActivity

Tags