James Montemagno

February 11th, 2019

Conference Organizers & Attendees: Donate Your Swag

I consider myself extremely fortunate to be able to attend and present to so many amazing developers at great conferences around the globe. I even get to attend a conference from time to time, but one thing has always bothered me...The Stuff We All Get aka SWAG! Don't get me wrong, I love swag! Who doesn't love a cool bag, mug, or shirt branded with our companies favorite logos? The first time you walk into a conference it is a great feeling to be handed so much awesome free stuff that y…

James Montemagno

Why I Choose Xamarin to Build Cross-Platform Apps

It has been a little over 7 years since I left my day job at Canon crafting wonderful printer workflow management software, to dive into the world of mobile development. At the time it was an extremely tough decision because I had been only working on desktop Windows Forms and WPF applications, and this change meant entering a whole new unknown world of platforms that I didn't know much about. This move was not only changing my main day job, but also the city that I lived in with a fresh sta…

James Montemagno

Super Simple Git Tagging & Releases in Azure DevOps

I am going to be honest with all of you, I never really understood Git tags [https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Basics-Tagging] and releases inside of GitHub. In my old TFVC days I would just create a branch with the name of the release and call that my "tag" so I could always go back to it. What sparked my interest was seeing a bunch of popular projects that I was using combine tags with the GitHub releases. I started reading the documentation and still wasn't sold on it because I…

James Montemagno

Enhanced Mobile App Versioning in Azure DevOps (VSTS) with Mobile Tasks

A little over a year ago, I introduced my Mobile App Tasks Extensions for iOS and Android [https://montemagno.com/introducing-vsts-mobile-build-tasks-extension/] into the Azure DevOps (VSTS) marketplace. For iOS and Android developers it made the tasks of versioning and adjusting package names a breeze. They were written completely in TypeScript with VS Code [https://montemagno.com/building-vsts-tasks-with-typescript-and-vs-code/] and of course are open source on GitHub [https://github.com/james…

James Montemagno

Unique Device & App Installation Identifiers for Mobile Apps

One common query I get all the time from developers is how to get a unique device or application identifier [https://github.com/xamarin/Essentials/issues/61] for their mobile app. After deciding to not include an API for this in Xamarin.Essentials we heard a lot of different use cases for it including: * Client/Server Communication * Login Validation * In-App Purchase Verification * Licensing Purposes The next obvious question that you may have is why didn't we include it in Xamarin.E…

James Montemagno

Android Emulators On Hyper-V Are Pretty Awesome

I have been a mobile developer for 7 years now and since the day I started one of my largest complaints has been the Android emulator. From the very start we had just ARM emulators that were a complete joke to work with as they moved at a snail's pace. From there a bunch of companies attempted to fix the problem by using custom built solutions on top of Virtual Box or Hyper-V. Google has done a lot of work in the last few years to improve the Android emulators with Quick Boot, more customiza…

James Montemagno

Real Time Communication for Mobile with SignalR (Core)

Real Time Communication or RTC as the cool kids call it has always been a hot topic, especially for mobile. In normal mobile development when we wanted to get updates of data we would make a web request to a server, pull down data, and update our user interface. If you wanted to get bits of data on demand and in real time you would have to integrate WebSockets or some sort of push notifications to receive data as it is happening. However, it doesn't have to be anymore with the latest version…

James Montemagno

Upgrading to Xamarin.Essentials from Plugins

Xamarin.Essentials [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/essentials/] is a new official library from Microsoft (that I worked on) that provides developers with over 30 cross-platform APIs for their mobile apps to tap into to access native features. Yes, this may sound similar to Plugins for Xamarin, but it is an evolution that is super optimized for each plaform, provides a consistent API, and is super crazy well documented. And of course it is completely open source on GitHub [https://githu…

James Montemagno

Tags

Conference Organizers & Attendees: Donate Your Swag

Why I Choose Xamarin to Build Cross-Platform Apps

Super Simple Git Tagging & Releases in Azure DevOps

Enhanced Mobile App Versioning in Azure DevOps (VSTS) with Mobile Tasks

Unique Device & App Installation Identifiers for Mobile Apps

Android Emulators On Hyper-V Are Pretty Awesome

Real Time Communication for Mobile with SignalR (Core)

Upgrading to Xamarin.Essentials from Plugins

Tags