James Montemagno
James Montemagno

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James Montemagno

Visual Studio

Developing Android Apps on Windows Arm Devices

I have gone all in on Arm devices! My main MAC machine is a Mac Book Air M1 and now my main driver at work is a Windows Dev Kit 2023 (aka Project Volterra). One tricky thing for developers is getting all the software we use to work properly on Arm. Things have come a long way since the original release of Arm devices for Mac and Windows. I have a full setup guide for my M1 for Xamarin and now .NET MAUI development, but what about Windows? Visual Studio 2022 recently released a full native Arm v…

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Code Generation from XAML in Visual Studio is Mind-blowing Awesome

The more and IDE or code editor can do for you the better I say. Visual Studio has been crushing it with new refactorings, IntelliSense, and IntelliCode [https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/services/intellicode/], one of my favorite features ever. One thing that I have always been hoping for as a XAML developer is deeper connectivity between the XAML and the View-Model. We have seen increased IntelliSense in this area, but with the release of Visual Studio 2019 v16.9 [https://devblogs.microsoft.c…

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New Plugin for Xamarin & Multi-Target Templates for Visual Studio 2017

It is 2018 and I am all in on Multi-Target projects for building libraries and plugins. I love them so much that I convinced Frank to record a full episode of Merge Conflict [http://www.mergeconflict.fm/85] on why this whole thing is so absolutely amazing. I have slowly been converting all of my plugins over to mutli-targeted projects, which has reduced some of the solutions from 15 project down to 1!!! There is a bit of tiny setup required for multi-targeting and for it to automatically pu…

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How to Convert a Portable Class Library to .NET Standard and Keep Git History

I have had a lot of developers telling me that they have wanted to switch to .NET Standard Libraries, but that they are worried about losing git history. I have also heard fears of compatibility with existing packages. Do not fear! It is so simple to switch over to .NET Standard and takes minutes! Why .NET Standard 2.0 There is simply no reason not to be using .NET Standard 2.0 at this point (you can still target 1.4 if you need older UWP support, but just do 2.0!). It supports all of your favo…

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Paste JSON as Code with quicktype.io in Visual Studio

quicktype! Yes that quicktype [http://quicktype.io] that I blogged about late last year [https://montemagno.com/convert-json-to-any-language-with-quicktype/] on how to convert JSON to C# classes in the browser. I am back talking about it again because they have made tons of great enhancements and just today released a new extension for Visual Studio 2017 [https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=typeguard.quicktype-vs]! I should mention here that all of this is FREE. Watch Now, Qu…

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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…

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My Favorite C# 7 Feature: More expression-bodied members

I can’t help myself, I love Expression-Bodied Members from C# 6! Combined with other powerful C# features it took this code: public void OnPropertyChanged(string name) { var changed = PropertyChanged; if(changed == null) return; changed(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name)); } to this: public void OnPropertyChanged(string name)=> PropertyChanged?.Invoke(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(name)); This is amazing! However, in C# 7 things get even better. Take our goo…

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Setting up Visual Studio 2017 for Xamarin Development

Visual Studio 2017 was just released yesterday, and it is awesome! You can re-live all the keynote and demo deep dives on Channel 9 [https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Visual-Studio/Visual-Studio-2017-Launch]. There are tons of new features and a huge revamp to installation but things to me still aren’t absolutely perfect in the setup of how I like to develop. So in the spirit of my Cycle 8 [https://montemagno.com/preparing-machines-for-xamarin-cycle] and Cycle 9 [https://montemagno.com/xamarin-c…

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