James Montemagno
James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code.

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James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code.


The $300 iPad: Nearly The Perfect Learning Tool

Apple on Tuesday had a pretty awesome event called "Apple + Education [https://www.apple.com/apple-events/march-2018/]" where they revealed a brand new $300 iPad for students. In addition to this they announced some really great software for students/teachers and a new API called ClassKit for developers to help gamify the classroom and teaching. Frank and I were so excited that we recorded a Special Edition of Merge Conflict [http://www.mergeconflict.fm/special-edition-apple-education-…

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Push Notification Options for Mobile Apps

My good friend Andrew [https://twitter.com/andrew_hoefling] and I recently had a Twitter conversation on what is the best route to take when implementing push notifications in your mobile applications. If you do a quick search there are a lot of options out there and it can be tricky to figure out the best route to take, but having implemented push notifications in several applications I can tell you there are really only two options you need to consider. How Push Notifications Work The reason…

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VS App Center Custom Build Scripts for Production Apps

A few weeks ago I introduced my Mobile App Tasks for VSTS [https://montemagno.com/introducing-vsts-mobile-build-tasks-extension/] to help developers streamline their build and release pipeline for iOS and Android apps. This collection of tasks contains things that almost every app needs at some point. This includes changing app identifiers or names and most importantly bumping version codes and names. So far, feedback of these tasks has been great: The number one question I get is how would y…

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New Plugin for Xamarin & Multi-Target Templates for Visual Studio 2017

It is 2018 and I am all in on Multi-Target projects for building libraries and plugins. I love them so much that I convinced Frank to record a full episode of Merge Conflict [http://www.mergeconflict.fm/85] on why this whole thing is so absolutely amazing. I have slowly been converting all of my plugins over to mutli-targeted projects, which has reduced some of the solutions from 15 project down to 1!!! There is a bit of tiny setup required for multi-targeting and for it to automatically pu…

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Getting Started with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms Q&A

Every day when I open my inbox or look on GitHub there is always a question or ten for me to answer. I recently got a nice long email from Clifton with a lot of questions and I thought that instead of emailing him back directly that I should write up a blog post with all of my answers for the world to enjoy and add some common questions I get all the time. Clifton wrote in and said he is investigating cross-platform development with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms as it is one unified application p…

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How to Convert a Portable Class Library to .NET Standard and Keep Git History

I have had a lot of developers telling me that they have wanted to switch to .NET Standard Libraries, but that they are worried about losing git history. I have also heard fears of compatibility with existing packages. Do not fear! It is so simple to switch over to .NET Standard and takes minutes! Why .NET Standard 2.0 There is simply no reason not to be using .NET Standard 2.0 at this point (you can still target 1.4 if you need older UWP support, but just do 2.0!). It supports all of your favo…

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Paste JSON as Code with quicktype.io in Visual Studio

quicktype! Yes that quicktype [http://quicktype.io] that I blogged about late last year [https://montemagno.com/convert-json-to-any-language-with-quicktype/] on how to convert JSON to C# classes in the browser. I am back talking about it again because they have made tons of great enhancements and just today released a new extension for Visual Studio 2017 [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=typeguard.quicktype-vs]! I should mention here that all of this is FREE. Watch Now, Qu…

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Building Xamarin.Android Apps in Azure DevOps (VSTS) with Hosted Agents!

I recently wrote about how to build any Xamarin.iOS application inside of Visual Studio Team Services [https://montemagno.com/building-xamarin-ios-apps-in-team-services-vsts-with-hosted-macos-agents/] using Hosted macOS Agents for free! I have updated the guide a little bit if you are leveraging .NET Standard libraries to ensure that you build with MSBuild, which is pretty important seeing that all of the new templates will soon use these. That had me thinking "I wonder if there are any sm…

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