James Montemagno

Official Pull To Refresh in Xamarin.Forms 1.4.0!

I can not lie when I say I LOVE pull to refresh in apps. Just search my blog and you will see tons of posts on how to implement it in Android, iOS, MVVMCross, and of course my crazy custom implementations for Xamarin.Forms. While those were nice custom renderers that provided a simple API, we finally have something official from Jason and the Xamarin.Forms team in 1.4.0 [http://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/35451/], which released this week. The API looks strikingly familiar: I couldn’t expla…

James Montemagno

Essential Xamarin.Android Templates for Visual Studio

During my Effective Navigation in Android [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hw8tB45kse4] talk at last years Xamarin Evolve I had the opportunity of showcasing my Xamarin.Android Templates Pack for Visual Studio [https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/bee6442f-8f5a-4bba-8849-e380b61e76b0] , which you can get from the Visual Studio Gallery under “Tools->Extensions and Updates”. I like the templates that come installed with Xamarin, however the flexibility of Visual Studio to easily creat…

James Montemagno

Coffee Filter: A C# Powered Android App in 2 Days

I love coffee. You will normally find me riding my bike around Seattle stopping from coffee shop to coffee shop indulging in a 8oz quad lattes, strong black coffee, or probably a shot in the dark. So when I set out to blog about the new Google Maps Lite API [http://blog.xamarin.com/android-tips-faster-maps-with-google-maps-lite/] it was pretty obvious what I needed to do… create an app showing me the closest coffee shops around me. In that moment Coffee Filter [https://play.google.com/store/apps…

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

Tags

Official Pull To Refresh in Xamarin.Forms 1.4.0!

Essential Xamarin.Android Templates for Visual Studio

Coffee Filter: A C# Powered Android App in 2 Days

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

Tags