iOS

Investing Time in the Xamarin Linker for Smaller App Sizes

When developing an app, 99% of our time goes into writing the code, testing the functionality, and making small UI tweaks to please our end users. Most of this is done in debug mode which optimizes compilation and app size for speed, which makes sense. When we flip that flag to Release with the default settings, we often pay very little attention as to what is happening to our app. We get a nice APK or IPA and ship it up to the app store and we are done. However, if we just spent a little time f…

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 that allows you to manually install dependenci…

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 you will be able to spec out your MacBook Pro with up to…

James Montemagno

Opt-out of Dark Mode on iOS, Android, UWP, and macOS

Everyone can't stop talking about dark mode now that iOS 13 and Android 10 are officially released. To my surprise I have actually really been enjoying dark mode on my desktop and mobile devices. I really want to go through all my apps and add proper dark mode support, however I just haven't had the time. When running apps on iOS 13 or macOS and flipping on dark mode can make your app look.... not so great: This can depend on the framework you are using, hard coded values, or a bunch of other…

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

Enhanced Mobile App Versioning in Azure DevOps (VSTS) with Mobile Tasks

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

Unique Device & App Installation Identifiers for Mobile Apps

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 pret…

James Montemagno

Xamarin.Forms - Icons in Navigation Toolbar

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 t…

James Montemagno

Tags

Investing Time in the Xamarin Linker for Smaller App Sizes

Azure DevOps Settings for Xamarin iOS 13 and Android 10 Apps

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

Opt-out of Dark Mode on iOS, Android, UWP, and macOS

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

Enhanced Mobile App Versioning in Azure DevOps (VSTS) with Mobile Tasks

Unique Device & App Installation Identifiers for Mobile Apps

Xamarin.Forms - Icons in Navigation Toolbar

James Montemagno

Tags