Live, Love, Bike, and Code.
Microsoft Build 2019 is right around the corner (not only from where I live, but also it starts next Monday), so what better time to plan some meetups with awesome .NET developers <3. There will be tons of awesome sessions, the Xamarin booth, but also tons of coffee drinking with me, and even a b…
James Montemagno
It has been a little over 7 years since I left my day job at Canon crafting wonderful printer workflow management software, to dive into the world of mobile development. At the time it was an extremely tough decision because I had been only working on desktop Windows Forms and WPF applications, and…
James Montemagno
I am going to be honest with all of you, I never really understood Git tags and releases inside of GitHub. In my old TFVC days I would just create a branch with the name of the release and call that my "tag" so I could always go back to it. What sparked my interest was seeing a bunch of popular projects that I was using combine tags with the GitHub releases. I started reading the documentation and still wasn't sold on it because I have a full CI/CD pipeline setup for all of my projects…
James Montemagno
A little over a year ago, I introduced my Mobile App Tasks Extensions for iOS and Android into the Azure DevOps (VSTS) marketplace. For iOS and Android developers it made the tasks of versioning and adjusting package names a breeze. They were written completely in TypeScript with VS Code and of course are open source on GitHub. Since the initial release I have received overall positive feedback and a few feature requests to add new features. Over the last year I teamed up with my good friend And…
James Montemagno
One common query I get all the time from developers is how to get a unique device or application identifier for their mobile app. After deciding to not include an API for this in Xamarin.Essentials we heard a lot of different use cases for it including: Client/Server Communication Login Validation In-App Purchase Verification Licensing Purposes The next obvious question that you may have is why didn't we include it in Xamarin.Essentials if everyone seemed to want it? The answer is actually prett…
James Montemagno
I have been a mobile developer for 7 years now and since the day I started one of my largest complaints has been the Android emulator. From the very start we had just ARM emulators that were a complete joke to work with as they moved at a snail's pace. From there a bunch of companies attempted to fix the problem by using custom built solutions on top of Virtual Box or Hyper-V. Google has done a lot of work in the last few years to improve the Android emulators with Quick Boot, more customization…
James Montemagno
Real Time Communication or RTC as the cool kids call it has always been a hot topic, especially for mobile. In normal mobile development when we wanted to get updates of data we would make a web request to a server, pull down data, and update our user interface. If you wanted to get bits of data on…
James Montemagno
Xamarin.Essentials is a new official library from Microsoft (that I worked on) that provides developers with over 30 cross-platform APIs for their mobile apps to tap into to access native features. Yes, this may sound similar to Plugins for Xamarin, but it is an evolution that is super optimized for…
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!
