Android

Visual Studio - Unable to launch Google Android Emulators

When developing with Xamarin in Visual Studio you have a lot of options for Android Emulators. You can go with the VS Emulators for Android powered by Hyper-V, Genymotion, or the out of the box x86 HAXM powered Android Emulators from Google (a few are installed for you already). It looks though that with some of the latest updates to Windows and VS when you go to launch them you get an error message that they can’t be launched. If you look at the logs you will see something like this: Error me…

James Montemagno

Getting Started With & Learning C#

In 2006, after years of writing C++ and Java code, while attending UAT an instructor named Phil Miller introduced me to this amazing language called C# and changed my life. It was love at first “Hello World” and I have never looked back. C# is an extremely powerful, mature, and extremely cross-platform programming language that I have been using for decades. The beauty of C# of course is that you get this amazing cross-platform framework called .NET, which gives developers ability to perform RES…

James Montemagno

Cross Platform Photos with Media Plugin

After months of work, contributions, code reviews, testing, new operating system releases, and tons of awesome new features the brand new Media Plugin for Xamarin and Windows [http://github.com/jamesmontemagno/mediaplugin] is ready for mass consumption. Not matter how your developing your applications with Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms you can easily have your users take or pick photos and videos from shared code! Here is the easiest example of taking a photo and displaying it in a Xamarin.Forms i…

James Montemagno

Fix for Unsupported major.minor version 52.0

So, you just downloaded and installed Xamarin and ready to build your first Android application in C#. You select file -> new Android project and then build and get ready to run it on a simulator and BOOM it has either just deployed a beautiful “hello world” app… or you have some cryptic error message about an appt.exe error or more likely a unsupported version 52.0? WHAT? 99.9% of developers probably had this work just fine, but perhaps you already had Android Studio installed or you acci…

James Montemagno

Xamarin.Forms XAML Previewer Design Time Data

UPDATE Checkout my newly updated blog on Design Time Data best practices [https://montemagno.com/xamarin-forms-design-time-data-tips-best-practices/] that are updated for the most recent changes in Xamarin.Forms. Original Post The most annticipated announcement of Xamarin Evolve 2016 had to be the Xamarin.Forms xAML Previewer. Enabling you to see a live preview of your Xamarin.Forms XAML without having to run it on a simulator or device. Simply write some XAML and there it is running on an iOS…

James Montemagno

Xamarin Evolve 2016 App Development Retrospective

Just yesterday we made the Evolve 2016 conference app completely open source on GitHub [https://blog.xamarin.com/browse-through-the-evolve-2016-mobile-app-source-code/] , and feedback has been fantastic with 57 stars, 26 forks, and tons of buzz on Twitter. While you are probably already digging through the code I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the development of the mobile application and some fun statistics of the application when it finally went live. Development The Xamarin Evolve c…

James Montemagno

Simplified iOS & Android Runtime Permissions with Plugins!

TLDR; I created a brand new cross-platform Permissions Plugin for Xamarin [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/Xamarin.Plugins/tree/master/Permissions] to enable anyone to query and request common permissions from shared code. You can watch a video here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7CjzAUoEVI]. 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 proj…

James Montemagno

Access the Current Android Activity from Anywhere!

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 MY app, it completely falls down when you want to create Plugins or abstract an…

James Montemagno

Tags

Visual Studio - Unable to launch Google Android Emulators

Getting Started With & Learning C#

Cross Platform Photos with Media Plugin

Fix for Unsupported major.minor version 52.0

Xamarin.Forms XAML Previewer Design Time Data

Xamarin Evolve 2016 App Development Retrospective

Simplified iOS & Android Runtime Permissions with Plugins!

Access the Current Android Activity from Anywhere!

James Montemagno

Tags