James Montemagno - Page 31

Live, Love, Bike, and Code.

Shared Code Projects in VS: Windows Phone, Windows Store, and Xamarin!

At Build, Microsoft announced Shared Code Projects to simplify how developers are sharing code between platforms. We have had official portable class library support for Xamarin apps since late last year and it has been wonderful, however once you mix WP8 into the mix the PCL profiles get a bit limited. Shared Code Projects attempt to fix this by allowing you to create a project that are a shell for code that can be …

James Montemagno

Part 3: My StepCounter Android: Pretty UI!

I am no UI expert that is for sure, but I really like what Michael James did with the iOS version of My StepCounter. He made a nice background that changed colors from Red to Green, had a chromeless UI, and utilized very nice fonts. I want to take advantage of some of the work he did and also customize it for android.

James Montemagno

Part 2: My StepCounter Android: Step Counting in a Bound Service

In Step 1 of bringing My StepCounter to Android I investigate the raw sensor APIs available in Android. It was extremely nice to see that it was easy to tap into the step counter and detectors by simply implementing: ISensorEventListener and register for events. In my first example I was doing this all in my Main Activity, which seems like it would be alright if I was using step counter since it would return a total …

James Montemagno

Part 1: My StepCounter Android: Step Sensors

In February, my fellow Xamarin Michael James published a wonderful app for iOS called My StepCounter. This app uses the new CoreMotion apis in iOS 7 to track your steps on your iPhone 5s. This isn’t a new concept and there are plenty of devices and apps out there that do step tracking, but what makes My StepCounter special is that Michael gave it a beautiful simplistic UI & beautiful animations. On top of that he …

James Montemagno

Xamarin.Android SwipeRefreshLayout for #MvvmCross

I was very excited to see that the latest version of Support v4 for Android was updated to include as most people would says it a “Pull to Refresh”… or as Google would call it a “SwipeRefreshLayout”. It is now available in the Xamarin.Android Support v4 Component so we should probably take advantage of it! This is actually a really slick Layout that you can make the parent of any 1 layout and when the user swipes …

James Montemagno

Xamarin.Android Templates Pack!

Xamarin.Android already ships with a bunch of great project templates for Visual Studio, however I find that there are a few things missing. I usually start a new project with a Navigation Drawer and I am always adding new Menus, but I can never seem to remember every little bit of XML that is needed for some complex menus such as share and search. This is why I have created the Xamarin.Android Templates Pack. This …

James Montemagno

Cross Platform Settings for Everyone!

If you haven’t figure it out by now, I simply love portable class libraries. I have been blogging about them, talking about them on Channel 9, and I even did a 18 city roadshow discussing PCLs and Azure Mobile Services. On my GitHub I have started to build out a lot of applications, sometimes using MvvmCross and sometimes not. One of my most starred repos is my MvvmCross plugin for saving settings on Android, iOS, …

James Montemagno

Portable Class Libraries + HttpClient: So Happy Together!

I was recently on Channel 9’s VS Toolbox talking about Xamarin and Portable Class Libraries where I showed of an expense taking application called My Expenses. This little app uses a portable class library and a SQLite database to store and track all of your expenses. I built out a full app for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone using this single PCL that housed 80%+ of all my code!

James Montemagno
James Montemagno
Author

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.

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