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The Connectivity Plugin for Xamarin is my second most installed NuGet package with nearly 600,000 installs at time of writing this. It is easy to see why as it gives developers the ability to check connectivity on any platform with a single line of code, subscribe to events, and see what the current…
James Montemagno
Spicing up your Xamarin.Forms tab can easily be done in a few ways. You can add tint color in Android when the user deselects a tab, which can also be done in iOS in addition to a full swap of a selected image. It was recently pointed out to me that these blogs highlighted a way of adding back a bit of nativeness, but didn't answer a different question of how to actually completely change the icon itself when a tab is selected. This question caught me off guard as I have never really changed th…
James Montemagno
Last week I wrote about Xamarin.Forms Embedding, a great new feature of Xamarin.Forms, that enables developers to convert a Xamarin.Forms ContentPage to an iOS UIViewController, Android Fragment, and a UWP Page. I walked through the current setup and a real world example of adding a Xamamarin.Forms details pages to my Xamarin Native application which previously only had native Storyboards and Android XML pages. When I originally got this setup and working I was blown away by this feature and it…
James Montemagno
You know I love Xamarin.Forms, but I also absolutely love Xamarin Native with iOS Storyboards, Android XML, and all of that UWP goodness. When you want to build an app that opens in sub-2 seconds, super optimized, and takes advantage of every custom control and animation out there (especially with material design) you have to go Xamarin Native. That is why the next evolution and favorite new feature, Xamarin.Forms embedding, of Xamarin.Forms enables you to embed any Xamarin.Forms ContentPage int…
James Montemagno
Yesterday, we announced the Xamarin Live Player for both iOS and Android which include the Live Player Extensions for both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac enabling you to get started with mobile development with just a device! The Live Player apps let you debug your apps and make live edits and see them reflected live on your device. Your code runs inside of the Live Player app, so no emulator or needed and everything happens over WiFi, so you don’t even need to plug anything in.
To get a good grasp of how the app works checkout Miguel and me on stage at Build 2017 on the Future of App Development with Xamarin.
Getting started with the Live Players is super simple and we have AMAZING DOCUMENTATION that you should read to get started.
Now once you have things running be sure to read through the Limitations and the Troubleshooting guide if you run into any issues and join the discussion on the forums.
Update 1: New Xamarin Live Player for Android Walkthrough video:
Update 2: Want to know how the Live Player was built? Listen to Frank and I on Merge Conflict discuss:
Getting started, step by step, in under 15 minutes! Yesterday, we announced the Xamarin Live Player for both iOS and Android which include the Live Player Extensions for both Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac enabling you to get started with mobile development with just a device! The Live Player apps let you debug your apps and make live edits and see them reflected live on your device. Your code runs inside of the Live Player app, so no emulator or needed and everything happens over…
James Montemagno
Last week I blogged about the important changes to Device.OS in the latest version of Xamarin.Forms. Well, I am back with some other changes from that same exact Pull Request that have to to with OnPlatform in code and XAML that use the new Device.RuntimePlatform. So, what is OnPlatform? It allows you to set properties on elements or run specific cone based on specific platforms. This is really nifty for tiny tweaks to UI and can be done completely in the XAML, which is awesome. To make way for…
James Montemagno