Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
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…
James Montemagno
I could never imagine the amazing response to Plugins for Xamarin, 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 leap to .NET Standard. What i…
James Montemagno
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 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 image. takePhoto.Clicked += async (sender, args) =&g…
James Montemagno
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…
James Montemagno
I simply love Matt Ward, a wonderful developer who works on NuGet inside of Xamarin Studio. He is always blogging about all of the recent updates to NuGet in XS, so be sure to follow his blog. Matt does so much more though including an awesome add-in for Xamarin Studio to add some awesome new features when using Xamarin Studio. My favorite feature is Solution Level adding of NuGet packages. Why do I love this feature? Well because I use tons of Plugins for Xamarin (and so should you). Installing…
James Montemagno
I hope that everyone has been having a wonderful holiday season. Over the last month I have had one large goal; to create a plethora of Plugins for Xamarin. This desire to create plugins started a long time ago when I created my very first NuGet packages for cross platform settings. Once I iterated on the plugin and saw how successful and helpful it was I knew right away that I wanted to create more, which is where the idea of a cross platform text to speech plugin came from. I didn’t sto…
James Montemagno
I am so glad that you asked! I recently blogged about creating reusable plugins for Xamarin.Forms, and it might have caught you a bit off guard. Does Xamarin.Forms or Xamarin itself have plugins? The short answer is YES with the power of PCLs and NuGet. Component vs. Plugin For a long time, Xamarin developers have been able to add rich functionality to their mobile applications by adding Components from the Component Store. While you might consider these “plugins” of sorts, let me define what a…
James Montemagno
From @SharpDevelop comes a long awaited update to the Xamarin Studio NuGet Manager Plugin. I wrote about this plugin before, but with this update brings updated support for NuGet including PCLs for Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS. It is extremely easy to add this functionality to Xamarin Studio and I made a short video to get you going. Unable to display content. Adobe Flash is required.…
James Montemagno
I crush code and share it, publish NuGet packages, speak at conferences, upload videos, pretend I am good at playing video games, micro blog, tweet up a storm, drink gallons of coffee, and ride my bike. Checkout my monthly newsletter that you should subscribe to!
