iOS

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 [https://github.com/xamarin/Essentials/issues/61] 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.E…

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…

James Montemagno

Introducing Azure DevOps (VSTS) Mobile App Tasks Extension for iOS and Android

This year I have made a big push towards making Visual Studio Team Services [http://visualstudio.com/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 that would really make it a joy to use. The top that stuck out was having the ability to easily bump the version/build numbers for iOS and Android. The other wa…

James Montemagno

Building Xamarin.iOS Apps in Azure DevOps (VSTS) with Hosted macOS Agents!

Azure DevOps (VSTS) [http://visualstudio.com/team-services] 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, release management, and so much more! What is cool is you can use some of it or all of it, up to you. So if you have your code in GitHub, no problem, want to…

James Montemagno

Streamlined TestFlight Registration with fastlane

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 [http://fastlane.tools] comes in to save the day just like it simplifies provisioning in Visual Studio for Mac [https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/XamarinShow/Epi…

James Montemagno

Xamarin Live Player - VS 2017 version 15.4 & 15.5 Awesomeness

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 [http://xamarin.com/live] 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 b…

James Montemagno

iOS 11 Missing Marketing Icon

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 [http://xamarin.com/live] 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 i…

James Montemagno

Connectivity Plugin 4.0: Important and Awesome Changes

The Connectivity Plugin for Xamarin [https://www.nuget.org/packages/Xam.Plugin.Connectivity] 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 connection type is, with a complete cross platform API for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. I mean look at this thing, it is beautiful: i…

James Montemagno

Tags

Unique Device & App Installation Identifiers for Mobile Apps

Xamarin.Forms - Icons in Navigation Toolbar

Introducing Azure DevOps (VSTS) Mobile App Tasks Extension for iOS and Android

Building Xamarin.iOS Apps in Azure DevOps (VSTS) with Hosted macOS Agents!

Streamlined TestFlight Registration with fastlane

Xamarin Live Player - VS 2017 version 15.4 & 15.5 Awesomeness

iOS 11 Missing Marketing Icon

Connectivity Plugin 4.0: Important and Awesome Changes

James Montemagno

Tags