James Montemagno
James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code.

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James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code.


Xamarin.Forms - Icons in Navigation Toolbar

A somewhat common scenario for mobile apps is to place an icon in the center of the Navigation Toolbar. While I am not sure if this is really best practice in 2018 there still seems to be a lot of demand to do this. What if I was to tell you that this is actually pretty easy to do and for iOS it is built directly into Xamarin.Forms with no need for a custom renderer? Let's take the default "Master/Detail" template for Xamarin.Forms in Visual Studio. It has a few tabs and an about…

James Montemagno James Montemagno

Celebrating 100 Episodes of Merge Conflict

It was August 20th, 2013 when I broke out of my comfort zone of sitting behind my desk crushing mobile app code and decided to attend my very first official Xamarin meetup [https://blog.xamarin.com/xamarin-is-coming-to-puget-sound/]. I rode my bike over to Bellevue, a place that I rarely explored, and pulled up to Pearl. It took me a few minutes to find parking for my bike because Bellevue isn't the most bike friendly city that we have here in the Pacific Northwest, but I walked around until…

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Continuous Integration & Delivery for Xamarin & .NET Libraries with Azure DevOps (VSTS)

I build a lot of .NET libraries that include simple .NET Standard libraries to fully cross-platform plugins for Xamarin and Windows that target up to 10 different platforms. When I got started building libraries and shipping them to NuGet I went down a simple path of just building everything locally on my machine and manually uploading them to NuGet. This worked great for a single library, but as soon as I took on a second... third... forth... and so on, things got out of hand and I knew I had t…

James Montemagno James Montemagno

Converting Xamarin Libraries to SDK Style & Multi-Targeted Projects

If you are like me you may have a lot of standard Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android libraries sitting around. They aren't plugins [https://montemagno.com/new-plugin-for-xamarin-multi-target-templates-for-visual-studio-2017/] , but they do extend a single platform with custom functionality and controls. Wouldn't it be great if you could update them to the new SDK Style projects which use Package References, auto-NuGet packaging, and load WAY faster?!?!? It is all crazy simple to do just lik…

James Montemagno James Montemagno

The Best Coffee in Seattle

I love coffee! I can't go a day without a cup... or maybe four cups and then finish the day with a cappuccino. I make a coffee a desination when I travel, seeking out the finest brew that every city and country has to offer. I fell in love with Seattle on my very first visit in 2010. Walking around there was a special feel to the city, it was alive, it had everything, and coffee was at the core of this experience. While I brew my coffee at home almost every single day, it doesn't mean th…

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Welcome to the Nintendo Dispatch Podcast

When I'm not podcasting [https://montemagno.com/podcasts/]... I am podcasting [https://montemagno.com/podcasts/]! I mean I love it so much that I started a full podcast network, soundbite.fm [https://soundbite.fm], that is now filled with wonderful podcasts and podcasters. You may be used to me talking about programming and technology, but I have always had a passion for video games and I am a huge Nintendo fan. I can't help myself! Ever since the original NES I was all in and have owned…

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Monitoring Android Activity Lifecycle Events: Return of Current Activity Plugin

It has been nearly two and a half years since I wrote about how to easily get access to the current Android Activity [https://montemagno.com/access-the-current-android-activity-from-anywhere/] with just a few lines of code. This code led to the creation of my Current Activity Plugin [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/CurrentActivityPlugin] for Xamarin.Android apps and library creators to easily get access to the current Activity. Since then it has been the core of many of my plugins and has bee…

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Podcast Equipment, Accessories, Setup, and Recording Guide

In case you didn't know I co-host some pretty excellent podcasts [https://montemagno.com/podcasts] (if I do say so myself) that you should totally subscribe to. Including Merge Conflict [http://mergeconflict.fm] where I talk code and tech with the one and only Frank Krueger and then there is Coffeehouse Blunder [http://blunders.fm] where I chat with my good friend and Chess IM Daniel Rensch about chess, coffee, and life. On top of that I even recently started a podcast network [http://soundb…

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