Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
Where has James been? It has been a lonely few months here on the blog, which is something that has never happened in the past. I usually bust out two or three blogs a month in addition to the awesome stuff you will find over at the official Xamarin Blog. So where have I been? It isn’t like there is a lack of things I have been wanting to blog about: Effects, Parallax, new Support Packages, and so much more. Well, …
James Montemagno
Today, seems like the perfect day to celebrate what was 2015, the Year of the Goat. Additionally, to usher in and celebrate a new year, the Year of the Fire Monkey!!!! Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece about Developer Evangelism and recapped my first full year working at Xamarin. I am so happy to be able to take a break from coding to reflect on all of the amazing things that happened last year and everything …
James Montemagno
If you have been reading the blog recently then you know that I have been all about iOS on Xamarin.Forms. I love it! I can’t help myself. No more storyboards, no more xibs, and I get to use Grids and StackLayouts! Who would have thought that James Montemagno would be blogging more about iOS then Android on MotzCodes! Well the main reason is that while out of the box Xamarin.Forms iOS apps look pretty darn good there …
James Montemagno
iOS is a pretty unique platform. Since no device has a physical hardware back button like Android the navigation bar must fully represent a way for users to navigate back or close a modal page. To craft a great experience with Xamarin.Forms I always like to try to follow the platform guidelines as close as possible. In this post I am going to tackle the standard PushAsync of a page onto the Navigation stack. By …
James Montemagno
One of my favorite parts of mobile development with Xamarin is that I am not only creating fully native mobile application on iOS and Android, but that I also have 100% API access on those platforms. That means if I want to do something I can do something. However, after four years of mobile development I found myself doing the same things over and over again to access native APIs from shared code. If I wanted to …
James Montemagno
TLDR; I created a brand new cross-platform Permissions Plugin for Xamarin to enable anyone to query and request common permissions from shared code. You can watch a video here. Permissions! Blarg! As an Android developer I have felt pretty spoiled over the last few years when it came to getting access to an API that required a permission. Simply check a checkbox in the project setting and any of the 130+ permissions …
James Montemagno
In the world of Android one of my biggest pain points over the years is that often you need access to the apps current Activity when writing libraries or abstracting out common functionality. For years I have been hacking around the issue by setting special Intent flags or more than likely creating a BaseActivity with a static “CurrentActivity” that is set when the page is started up. While this works short term for …
James Montemagno
Two years ago marked a major shift in my career as a software developer; I transitioned from a full time mobile C#/.NET developer to a full time developer evangelist at Xamarin. Sure, I had attended a few developer conferences in my days, but I had actually never delivered a technical presentation, which may come to a surprise to some. In the past two years I have learned a lot delivering nearly 200 technical …
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.
