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
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
It is update season for iOS and Android applications with new versions of the operating systems being released. Today, I was on my way to push out a new version of the Xamarin Live Player to Test Flight users and hit this nasty error: Missing Marketing Icon. iOS Apps must include a 1024x1024px Marketing Icon in PNG format. Apps that do not include the Marketing Icon cannot be submitted for App Review or Beta App Review. What is that?!?!? I swear I uploaded the icon to iTunes connect. Well...…
James Montemagno
