Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
It felt like just yesterday we released Cycle 8, which was packed full of good stuff like iOS 10 and Android N. I wrote a full blog post on how to prepare your machines for Cycle 8, and I figure since today we released Cycle 9 it would be a good time to refresh it! 1.) Install the latest JDK 1.8 x64 (currently 8u121) Installing the x64 version on Windows is extremely important because it is needed for custom controls …
James Montemagno
I love Continuous Integration and Deployment for mobile applications and have given several talks on it in the past. It streamlines your entire development process and makes it drop dead simple to simply commit code and have everything you don’t want to do manually be taken care of for you. This means build, test, bump versions, and ship off to testers with integrations like HockeyApp. Notice I mention “bump …
James Montemagno
I get a lot of questions about Xamarin.Forms. One of my most popular blogs was about spicing up iOS tabs with selected and unselected tab colors, and since that day developers have been asking about Android. Well, to be honest I was always against adding icons to material tabs in Android, but developers want to do it, so here is how you can, with a Custom Renderer for a Tabbed Page. Here is what it will look like at …
James Montemagno
This blog is not about coding at all and is more on the personal side of things, which I actually don’t write about too often. So if that isn’t your thing and you just came for code then feel free to scroll past. Or, if you don’t want to read this entire thing: TLDR; On March 4th I am participating in the Play for Planned Parenthood 24 Hour Game marathon and asking for your help by donating a few $$ to my team to …
James Montemagno
I just installed the latest RC for Cycle 9 and was extremely surprised and happy to find some brand new Item Templates for Xamarin.Forms including: Carousel Page List View Page Map Page Tabbed Page Along with the awesome new project template creation! When you add a page it will scaffold out your entire ViewModel too!!! Amazing! Just by adding the ListView Page you get this:
James Montemagno
Sometimes you want to ask your users to rate your application. There are several components out there that will open a dialog box and prompt for ratings, but sometimes you don’t want to stop the flow of your app and throw it in their face. What I do in my application is simply add a section on my settings page asking if they would like to rate the app. When pressed I launch the app store directly to the review page:
James Montemagno
I recently launched Scoreboard for both iOS and Android to help keep score of game scores and it has gone really well as people are using the app and giving really good feedback. When deciding to create Scoreboard I decided to go with an ads based monetization structure with a single ad placed on the main scoreboard page. The first question that came up when friends installed the app was if they could pay to remove …
James Montemagno
I can’t help it, I am super excited for the Nintendo Switch. I have high hopes for the system even though there are minimal games at launch. Before I jump into the standard games and controller list there are a few things to think about. My recommendations may not be the cheapest option, but are based on trusted brands and positive ratings.
James Montemagno
James Montemagno is a Principal Lead Program Manager for Developer Community at Microsoft. He has been a .NET developer since 2005, working in a wide range of industries including game development, printer software, and web services. Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
