Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
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 hon…
James Montemagno
A little over a year ago, I introduced my Mobile App Tasks Extensions for iOS and Android into the Azure DevOps (VSTS) marketplace. For iOS and Android developers it made the tasks of versioning and adjusting package names a breeze. They were written completely in TypeScript with VS Code and of course are open source on GitHub. Since the initial release I have received overall positive feedback and a few feature requests to add new features. Over the last year I teamed up with my good friend And…
James Montemagno
One common query I get all the time from developers is how to get a unique device or application identifier for their mobile app. After deciding to not include an API for this in Xamarin.Essentials we heard a lot of different use cases for it including: Client/Server Communication Login Validation In-App Purchase Verification Licensing Purposes The next obvious question that you may have is why didn't we include it in Xamarin.Essentials if everyone seemed to want it? The answer is actually prett…
James Montemagno
A somewhat common scenario for mobile apps is to place an icon in the center of the Navigation Toolbar. While I am not sure if this is really best practice in 2018 there still seems to be a lot of demand to do this. What if I was to tell you that this is actually pretty easy to do and for iOS it is built directly into Xamarin.Forms with no need for a custom renderer?Let's take the default "Master/Detail" template for Xamarin.Forms in Visual Studio. It has a few tabs and an about page that has th…
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…
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…
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. The issue with TestFlight So TestFlight is a bit better now that we can add 10,0…
James Montemagno
Last week Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4 and VS for Mac 7.2 were released into the stable channel. They include the very first release of the Xamarin Live Player capabilities in Visual Studios. This means you can simply update Visual Studio, turn on Xamarin Live Player (Preview), and get started visualizing your mobile apps with nothing more than VS and your iOS or Android device! Whenever there is a stable release a new preview release of Visual Studio is not far behind. That is right, VS 2017…
James Montemagno
I crush code and share it, publish NuGet packages, speak at conferences, upload videos, pretend I am good at playing video games, micro blog, tweet up a storm, drink gallons of coffee, and ride my bike. Checkout my monthly newsletter that you should subscribe to!
