Xamarin

Google Plus Services, Login and +1 in Xamarin.Android

I have been dabbling around recently with integrating Google Play Services [https://developers.google.com/+/mobile/android/#recommend_content_with_the_1_button] into Android applications. Play Services are pretty interesting as they offer up a nice set of functionality including a G+ Sign In button and +1 sharing on G+. This is pretty intriguing to me because I have been building out a podcast streaming app for the Dot Net Rocks show. I wanted to build out a small sample to test what the detail…

James Montemagno

Modern Apps Roadshow Stop #1: Boston!

Today was a pretty awesome day here in Boston. In addition to being my 1 month anniversary working for Xamarin it was also the very first day of the .NET Rocks/Modern Apps Roadshow [http://xamarin.com/modern-apps-roadshow]. Over the last month I have been preparing and getting an amazing demo ready that I got to show off today, which showed off using Xamarin to create a cross platform app in C# for Windows Store, iOS, and Android using PCL and a Azure Mobile Service backend. I also got to finall…

James Montemagno

Beautiful Android Compat Roboto Fonts in Xamarin.Android

In android 4.1 and 4.2 Google did something amazing, which was add the roboto [http://developer.android.com/design/style/typography.html] fonts as a default font family that you can switch between. It is as easy as setting “sans-serif”, “sans-serif-light”, “sans-serif-condensed”, and “sans-serif-thin” as the android:FontFamily. However the obvious issue here is that this is only available in 4.1+ (with thin only being available in 4.2). So if you want to target older platforms you have to do s…

James Montemagno

Effective Navigation in Xamarin.Android: Part 1 - Navigation Drawer

When designing your app you have probably wondered about what type of navigation is the best to use. Dashboards, navigation lists, spinner drop downs, tabs, and fly out menus are all still prevalent and valid choices, however, Google has recently made a huge push to use their new standard Navigation Drawer control. So what is a Navigation Drawer? Similar to a flyout menu made famous by Facebook, the Navigation Drawer is designed to be swiped out from the left side of you application. The main…

James Montemagno

NuGets Everywhere! VS or XS!

Alright so a quick follow up to that huge blog I just wrote about PCLs. So PCLs are great for your core, but are also great because you can share PCLs with people and they will work everywhere. On Visual Studio there is a great Nuget Package Manager [http://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/27077b70-9dad-4c64-adcf-c7cf6bc9970c] already that you can grab and install. If you are using Xamarin Studio you have a pretty great option as well with THIS Addin [https://github.com/mrward/monodevelop…

James Montemagno

Xamarin + PCL + MAC Xamarin Studio + Visual Studio #LetsDoThis

This blog is now obsolete as official PCL support has been added to Xamarin.Android and Xamarin.iOS for both Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio. There is no longer a need to do any file copying or anything fancy, simply hit File->New Project -> PCL. I have a webinar: you can find here [http://blog.xamarin.com/webinar-recording-native-app-development/] So last night at the Xamarin [http://xamarin.com/] drinkup in Bellevue there was a lot of discussion about PCL and also bout MVVM frameworks…

James Montemagno

ProgressButton for Xamarin.Android

I was browsing through some Android Views [http://www.androidviews.net] and stumbled across a very familiar view, the ProgressButton [http://f2prateek.com/progressbutton/]. I have seen this plenty of times in just about every Google Play app. It is very simple with multiple arches of color and a drawable resource to let you know if you have pinned it or not. So last night and this morning I decided to port it over to Xamarin.Android. It is extremely easy to use as part of my MonoDroid Toolkit…

James Montemagno

LegacyBar: Your MonoDroid ActionBar

Android is kind of a beast, interesting and complex. One of my favorite features of Android has to be their implementation of the Actionbar, which they started in ICS 3.0. If you are a native Java programmer using the action bar is great, and if you need to target android 2.X devices there are some great libraries that give you backwards compatibility. If you are like me, a C# developer using Mono for Android [http://www.xamarin.com] then it isn’t that easy. When I started developing apps I s…

James Montemagno

Tags

Google Plus Services, Login and +1 in Xamarin.Android

Modern Apps Roadshow Stop #1: Boston!

Beautiful Android Compat Roboto Fonts in Xamarin.Android

Effective Navigation in Xamarin.Android: Part 1 - Navigation Drawer

NuGets Everywhere! VS or XS!

Xamarin + PCL + MAC Xamarin Studio + Visual Studio #LetsDoThis

ProgressButton for Xamarin.Android

LegacyBar: Your MonoDroid ActionBar

James Montemagno

Tags