James Montemagno
James Montemagno

Live, Love, Bike, and Code.

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James Montemagno

NuGet

Building, testing, & shipping My Cadence for iOS in less than a week

My holiday hacking [https://devblogs.microsoft.com/xamarin/xamarin-holiday-season-hack-ideas/] came early this year when I decided to build my own DIY spin bike [https://montemagno.com/building-an-at-home-diy-spin-bike-for-peloton-apple-fitness/]. Soon, after a few rides, my mind started to swirl with app ideas of how to improve my ride. Then when Apple released Apple Fitness+ without support for displaying cadence information from sensors I knew I had to build an app. That app is My Cadence [ht…

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5 Must Install NuGet Packages for New Xamarin Projects

Starting your first project can be a bit overwhelming. I mean heck, I wrote nearly 3,000 words [https://montemagno.com/build-your-first-for-ios-android-app-with-xamarin-and-visual-studio/] breaking down every bit of what to select and what each option means. Oh, and I also have a full video series [https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwOF5UVsZWUiHY1CkRVjYJ6dm0iCvAlfw] walking you through it step by step on my YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/jamesmontemagno]. Before I start writing…

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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…

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Optimizing Xamarin Apps & Libraries with the Linker

The Xamarin linker is one of the most important pieces of technology when building mobile apps, that no one knows exists. It does all of the hard work for you, stripping out all unused code from libraries that you include in your apps. It should only be used in release mode as it takes extra time to compile your app, but means that your app will be smaller: The linker has specific implementations for both iOS [https://docs.microsoft.com/xamarin/ios/deploy-test/linker?WT.mc_id=docs-montemagno-…

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Resolving Android Support Library NuGet Installation Issues

Xamarin.Essentials [https://docs.microsoft.com/xamarin/essentials/] has to be my favorite project that I have worked on at Xamarin so far. Bringing together over 30 native platform specific APIs into a single API that creates a linker safe and optimized library that so far has really delighted developers. I did some surveys last week and everyone could not stop saying positive things about the library, which is awesome! One thing stood out though that seems to be causing issues, which is how NuG…

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Moving Plugins for Xamarin to .NET Standard

I could never imagine the amazing response to Plugins for Xamarin [http://xamarin.com/plugins], those amazing little libraries that abstract away all that platform specific code into a lovely cross-platform API for iOS, Android, and Windows. They sure have grown, with hundreds of plugins being generated by the community and with tons of installs. My plugins alone have now hit 3 Million installations! With all this momentum it is a great time to look to the future, simplify plugins, and take the…

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Cross Platform Photos with Media Plugin

After months of work, contributions, code reviews, testing, new operating system releases, and tons of awesome new features the brand new Media Plugin for Xamarin and Windows [http://github.com/jamesmontemagno/mediaplugin] is ready for mass consumption. Not matter how your developing your applications with Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms you can easily have your users take or pick photos and videos from shared code! Here is the easiest example of taking a photo and displaying it in a Xamarin.Forms i…

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Build Apps Faster with Plugins for Xamarin!

One of my favorite parts of mobile development with Xamarin is that I am not only creating fully native mobile application on iOS and Android, but that I also have 100% API access on those platforms. That means if I want to do something I can do something. However, after four years of mobile development I found myself doing the same things over and over again to access native APIs from shared code. If I wanted to adjust a setting, vibrate the device, or check connectivity I would abstract out an…

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