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Hello Again, My Name is James

And...... we are back! Where have I been? Inside, in Seattle! It has been around 5 months since my last update on the site and a lot of things have changed since then. Here is an update. Be safe when you get your coffeeSince my last blog here are just a few things that have happened: * We ushered in a whole new year * A global pandemic broke out [https://bing.com/covid]and continues to impact us every day * We had our largest Xamarin event of the year all online [https://www.youtube.c…

James Montemagno

Azure DevOps Settings for Xamarin iOS 13 and Android 10 Apps

Settings up continuous integration can be tricky when there are new versions coming out. Recently Visual Studio 2019 updated to support Xcode 11, iOS 13, Android 10, .NET Core 3, and C# 8. What a whirlwind of new updates that CI servers got all around the same time! This means that as you were updating your apps your hosted machines also got updated and probably broke your builds :(. My good friend Jonathan Peppers wrote an amazing tool called Boots [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/boots-…

James Montemagno

Is the MacBook Pro 16-inch the Ultimate Developer Laptop?

It seems as though Apple has finally fixed the keyboard on the latest MacBook 16-inch and as a bonus, brought back the escape key! This seems to be what everyone is talking about, but what is really important is the return to PRO for the MacBook Pro. What I mean by this is that finally we can fully spec out a MacBook Pro with as much RAM and SSD space that we could ever want and at a decent price. If you head over to the configuration page [https://www.apple.com/shop/buy-mac/macbook-pro?product=…

James Montemagno

MOK: Brussels Best Coffee Shop & Roastery

In the past, I have talked about my favorite coffee shops [https://montemagno.com/the-best-coffee-in-seattle/] that my hometown of Seattle has to offer. I don't just drink coffee in Seattle, I make coffee a destination in every single city that I travel to. Coffee can bring the best out of a city and turn a gray and gloomy day into a warm and delightful one. On my short stop over in Brussels I took a walk north of downtown to the lovely coffee shop known as MOK [https://mokcoffee.be]. It st…

James Montemagno

Xamarin.Forms Design Time Data Tips & Best Practices

One of my favorite features of building applications with XAML is the ability to use design time data to preview it inside the IDE. Recently in Xamarin.Forms 4.0 the team introduced an official pattern to specify design time properties, controls, or just about anything else. It is a really neat feature that I have been using on my live streams and in my apps. There is some really great docs [https://docs.microsoft.com/xamarin/xamarin-forms/xaml/xaml-previewer/design-time-data?WT.mc_id=designtime…

James Montemagno

Xamarin.Forms: How to Clip Images with Rounded Corners

I love watching trends in mobile design. Currently gradients are all the rage, but two trends that have been around for a while are rounded corners and circular images. A long time ago I created the Circle Image plugin [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/ImageCirclePlugin] for Xamarin.Forms that many developers know and love, but did you know that you can just use built in controls to get a circle or rounded corners? All you have to do is use a frame [https://docs.microsoft.com/xamarin/xamarin-f…

James Montemagno

Get Android Messages, Photos, and Notifications on Your Windows Desktop

As an Android user, I have always been jealous of iOS users that own a Mac, as iMessage is pretty much awesome. The ability to send and receive text messages from your phone or PC and keep them in sync is the dream. I actually lived it for many years as an Android user when I was went all in on Google Voice and after that Google Fi. As long as I had a browser I could easily text or even place a phone call and my phone was aware of everything that was happening. Then late last year I made the big…

James Montemagno

Add ASP.NET Core's Dependency Injection into Xamarin Apps with HostBuilder

Dependency injection(DI) and inversion of control (IoC), have been a recurring theme in questions that I have received over the last six years. Sometimes it is around using constructor injection(), simple service containers, and often around full frameworks such as Prism or MVVM Light. I will be honest with you, I have never been a fan of DI/IoC when building mobile apps. My main reason is that there has never been any official pattern or recommendations from Google or Apple (or Microsoft/Xamari…

James Montemagno

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Hello Again, My Name is James

Azure DevOps Settings for Xamarin iOS 13 and Android 10 Apps

Is the MacBook Pro 16-inch the Ultimate Developer Laptop?

MOK: Brussels Best Coffee Shop & Roastery

Xamarin.Forms Design Time Data Tips & Best Practices

Xamarin.Forms: How to Clip Images with Rounded Corners

Get Android Messages, Photos, and Notifications on Your Windows Desktop

Add ASP.NET Core's Dependency Injection into Xamarin Apps with HostBuilder

James Montemagno

Tags