James Montemagno

Scanning for iBeacons in iOS 8

With iOS 7 you could easily range and scan for beacons in your application with just a few lines of code. `CLLocationManger` took care of all of the heavy lifting for you and things were just enabled for you automatically. With iOS 7.1 your users got prompted that you were going to do some scanning and it required Bluetooth. This was alright since the system took care of it for you automatically. Enter iOS 8 While iOS 8 hasn’t added too many new feature for iBeacons that I can tell thus far, th…

James Montemagno

Enhanced Xamarin.Android Designer with Tools Attributes

The announcement of Android L Developer Preview support [http://blog.xamarin.com/android-l-developer-preview-android-wear-support/] for Xamarin.Android developers brings tons of goodies to start playing around with, but did you know that there has been several updates to the Android designer as well? If you look through the release notes [http://developer.xamarin.com/releases/studio/xamarin.studio_5.3/xamarin.studio_5.3/] of Xamarin Studio 5.3 you will several enhancements such as the new Andro…

James Montemagno

Enhancing Xamarin.Forms ListView with Grouping Headers

Sometimes a plain ListView just isn’t good enough. You can easily spice it up with images [http://motzcod.es/post/88692272607/extending-xamarin-forms-monkeys-app-with-xaml-and] or custom cells [http://motzcod.es/post/93792500152/custom-listview-viewcells-in-xamarin-forms], but what about organizing the data. With C# and LINQ it is easy to sort your list, but how about giving it some visuals? How about some headers? With Xamarin.Forms it is extremely simple to add in headers and to create a cust…

James Montemagno

My Favorite Xamarin Studio Features

There have been a lot of exciting announcements recently from Xamarin for developers. First, is that Xamarin Indie now has a monthly subscription option for just $25 a month [http://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-indie-now-25-dollars-per-month/]! Then there was the release of Xamarin Studio 5.2 [http://blog.xamarin.com/be-more-productive-with-these-new-xamarin-studio-features/] , which brought awesome new features such as side-by-side editing and awesome new NuGet updates. I have been a Visual Studio…

James Montemagno

Custom ListView ViewCells in Xamarin.Forms

I love it when frameworks have built-in cells for lists. It allows me to easily shove some data into a list and get my prototype up and running extremely quickly. However, sometimes I don’t to ship the final app with these cells and I want to do some customization. Xamarin.Forms has 4 built-in cells [http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/controls/cells/] to get you up and running and like everything else in Xamarin.Forms it is extremely easy to customize and create yo…

James Montemagno

Heading Home to Phoenix for 2 Xamarin Talks and Workshop

After several trips around the US in the last few weeks, I am finally heading back to my second home, Phoenix AZ. I will be driving all around the valley visiting and presenting at several local user groups this week. This weekend I will be presenting and helping at a Xamarin workshop to help build a brand new Code Camp mobile app! If you are in the Phoenix area and want to chat Xamarin and other mobile development goodness please swing by an event! Wednesday July 23rd 6:00PM: North West Valley…

James Montemagno

Screen Mirroring for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone

It is unfortunate that we don’t live in a world where we can use an iOS, Android, and Windows Phone emulators/simulators at the same time. Nested virtualization really messes things up and even if that worked the arm emulators for Android are a nightmare. Even on the PC side where I can use the wonderful x86 emulator (read my blog post on setup [http://motzcod.es/post/69602581522/lets-fix-that-x86-android-emulator]) for Android, you have to turn off hyper-v to get things to work, and of course t…

James Montemagno

How to use Xamarin.Forms Messaging Center

The goal of MVVM is to abstract away your Views from your Business Logic. This ensures great code reuse, testability, and is pretty awesome. Many MVVM Frameworks offer tools to enhance this such as data binding [http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/introduction-to-xamarin-forms/] and dependency services [http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/dependency-service/] to make our lives easier. These are built into Xamarin.Forms, which is awesome,…

James Montemagno

Tags

Scanning for iBeacons in iOS 8

Enhanced Xamarin.Android Designer with Tools Attributes

Enhancing Xamarin.Forms ListView with Grouping Headers

My Favorite Xamarin Studio Features

Custom ListView ViewCells in Xamarin.Forms

Heading Home to Phoenix for 2 Xamarin Talks and Workshop

Screen Mirroring for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone

How to use Xamarin.Forms Messaging Center

Tags