Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
275 posts
During this weeks Xamarin.Forms 1.3 webinar I received an interesting question about how you can force your mobile applications to always use a specific orientation. This is actually easy to accomplish on each platform with just a few settings in each project. Let’s take a look: Android First thing to do is open up your MainActivity.cs file. At the very top you will see an [Activity] attribute. This attribute is used …
James Montemagno
I was overly excited when I got news that our amazing component team had finished the latest binding for AppCompat v7 rev 21! This was exciting to me because this meant that any developer could now introduce material design to their Android app and target older devices all the way back to API 7 (although you should just target API 15). I got busy migrating Bike Now over to AppCompat since it used the navigation …
James Montemagno
I recently published a few blogs on how to add pull to refresh to your Xamarin.Forms iOS and Android applications. This sparked a question from another developer as to if you could swipe to load more at the bottom of the ListView. My feedback here is that a swipe to load more isn’t normal in mobile applications. A quick work around is to have a button as the final cell that is pressed to load more, but even better …
James Montemagno
I fell in love with material design the moment I saw it and at Evolve 2014 my good friend and co-worker Jérémie Laval and I actually gave 2 sessions on the concept and implementation of material design in your apps. With the introduction of v7 app compat library rev 21 you are now able to upgrade your apps while maintain compatibility with older versions of Android. If you are looking to get started integrating the …
James Montemagno
I hope that everyone has been having a wonderful holiday season. Over the last month I have had one large goal; to create a plethora of Plugins for Xamarin. This desire to create plugins started a long time ago when I created my very first NuGet packages for cross platform settings. Once I iterated on the plugin and saw how successful and helpful it was I knew right away that I wanted to create more, which is where …
James Montemagno
Earlier this year when iOS 8 was released I wrote up a quick blog post on how to ensure you can scan for iBeacons with the new CLLocationManager RequestWhenInUseAuthorization flag. However recently I have received a lot of questions about how to scan for iBeacons when the app is in the background or when it has been dismissed completely. Apple has some amazing docs on how this functionality works, but here are the …
James Montemagno
You may have noticed that I am on a big Plugins for Xamarin kick currently. I have always had my Settings Plugin that I have updated over time, but then I blogged about creating plugins for Xamarin.Forms, released a Vibrate Plugin, and then discussed exactly what a Plugin for Xamarin is. I love plugins as they can abstract away features common on platforms into a simple API so you never have to write the same code …
James Montemagno
I am so glad that you asked! I recently blogged about creating reusable plugins for Xamarin.Forms, and it might have caught you a bit off guard. Does Xamarin.Forms or Xamarin itself have plugins? The short answer is YES with the power of PCLs and NuGet. Component vs. Plugin For a long time, Xamarin developers have been able to add rich functionality to their mobile applications by adding Components from the Component …
James Montemagno
