Xamarin.Forms
Xamarin.Forms XAML Previewer Design Time Data
UPDATE Checkout my newly updated blog on Design Time Data best practices [https://montemagno.com/xamarin-forms-design-time-data-tips-best-practices/] that are updated for the most recent changes in Xamarin.Forms. Original Post The most annticipated announcement of Xamarin Evolve 2016 had to be the Xamarin.Forms xAML Previewer. Enabling you to see a live preview of your Xamarin.Forms XAML without having to run it on a simulator or device. Simply write some XAML and there it is running on an iOS…
James Montemagno
Xamarin Evolve 2016 App Development Retrospective
Just yesterday we made the Evolve 2016 conference app completely open source on GitHub [https://blog.xamarin.com/browse-through-the-evolve-2016-mobile-app-source-code/] , and feedback has been fantastic with 57 stars, 26 forks, and tons of buzz on Twitter. While you are probably already digging through the code I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the development of the mobile application and some fun statistics of the application when it finally went live. Development The Xamarin Evolve c…
James Montemagno
TintColor & Selected Tab Images in Xamarin.Forms iOS
If you have been reading the blog recently then you know that I have been all about iOS on Xamarin.Forms [http://www.xamarin.com/forms]. I love it! I can’t help myself. No more storyboards, no more xibs, and I get to use Grids and StackLayouts! Who would have thought that James Montemagno would be blogging more about iOS then Android on MotzCodes! Well the main reason is that while out of the box Xamarin.Forms iOS apps look pretty darn good there are still a lot of small tweaks that can add that…
James Montemagno
Changing iOS's Back Button Text in Xamarin.Forms
iOS is a pretty unique platform. Since no device has a physical hardware back button like Android the navigation bar must fully represent a way for users to navigate back or close a modal page. To craft a great experience with Xamarin.Forms I always like to try to follow the platform guidelines as close as possible. In this post I am going to tackle the standard PushAsync of a page onto the Navigation stack. By default Xamarin.Forms will automatically add a back arrow when the page is pushed, an…
James Montemagno
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…
James Montemagno
DataBinding Settings in Xamarin.Forms
For nearly four years now I have been using mycross-platform settings plugin [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/Xamarin.Plugins/tree/master/Settings]to save preferences across all the different platforms. Ever since I pushed it up to NuGet it has been extremely popular with over 18,000 installs! The plugin gives you a very simple way of saving out native settings from shared code. Usually, you will create a native UI for each platform and in the case of Android use the PreferenceActivity to aut…
James Montemagno
One Month of Live Coding!
Just a little over a month ago I decided to start a brand new live video series called Motz Codes Live [http://motzcod.es/post/127109523932/motz-codes-live]. The idea was to cover a random mobile topic that I was investigating or interested in or perhaps a cover from YOU that you wanted to see, and I have to say that so far things have gone AMAZING with a bunch of awesome developers showing up each week and thousands of video views already. Since the launch I have also started a Motz Codes Live…
James Montemagno
