Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
275 posts
Over the last few years I have fallen in love with Azure DevOps (VSTS) for handling all of my application and backend continuous integration, deployment, and release management. Each of these services offer a task based build and release definition that enable you to easily start automating anything. There are a ton of built in tasks, and a whole marketplace where you can install them into your Azure DevOps (VSTS) …
James Montemagno
Let's be honest, every application needs to store data. Sometimes it is settings, configuration, HTTP requests, or a full database. What I was recently looking to accomplish was to make a web request, cache the request locally, and have it expire after a given amount of time. There are a lot of great solutions out there for storing data, but nothing seemed to fit exactly what I was looking for with a minimal amount …
James Montemagno
You read that correct, you can now totally build websites powered by XAML leveraging Xamarin.Forms and Frank Krueger's amazing Ooui library. If you haven't heard about Ooui yet, it is an amazing lightweight cross-platform UI library that brings the simplicity of native UI development to the web. For an in-depth overview take a listen to Merge Conflict Episode 72 - Xamarin.Forms on the Web:
James Montemagno
So, you just got a Nintendo Switch for the holidays, now what?!?! It can be overwhelming to navigate the eShop, which is full of goodies (and not so good junk), as well as trying to figure out what you actually need for your Nintendo Switch. If you are looking to get started be sure to head over to my original guide that still holds up on just Nintendo Switch accessories, but after I tweeted about SnipperClips, I …
James Montemagno
This year I have made a big push towards making Visual Studio Team Services my new continuous everything for my mobile apps, libraries, and any other project that I work on. While Azure DevOps (VSTS) has a lot of built in tasks for mobile applications, there are still a few essential things missing that would really make it a joy to use. The top that stuck out was having the ability to easily bump the version/build …
James Montemagno
Azure DevOps (VSTS) is quickly becoming one of my favorite products that Microsoft creates for developers. It helps any developer writing apps in any language build, test, and deploy their applications. On top of that it has free unlimited private Git repos, work item tracking and kanban board, test, release management, and so much more! What is cool is you can use some of it or all of it, up to you. So if you have …
James Montemagno
I think we all can agree that attempting to do beta testing on iOS is pretty terrible. You can't side load apps easily, provisioning profiles are terrible, and manually adding people to TestFlight is no fun. All I want to do is get my app in users hands! Why do I have to go through so much stress? Well you don't, because fastlane comes in to save the day just like it simplifies provisioning in Visual Studio for Mac.
James Montemagno
I have to admit that I actually really hate launch (or as I call it splash) screen on applications. On iOS and Windows we never had a choice and our apps always have a launch screen. On Android though we have always had the option to integrate a launch screen or not and in the past it was sort of frowned upon to have a launch screen in your app. It meant that your app was a bit slower or had long load times so we …
James Montemagno
