Xamarin

Enabling C# 9 in Xamarin & .NET Standard Projects

Whoa! .NET 5 is out and C# 9 is out! This means you are ready to use records, new pattern matching, and more! But wait a second... your apps haven't been upgraded to .NET 5 yet or are a project type that don't support .NET so you don't have access to the new C# 9 features :( Or do you!?!?!?! Yes, of course you do! Most new features in C# are compiler based and not necessarily runtime based. When you create a new project the compiler determines a default C# language based on these rules: Targe…

James Montemagno

Shrink Your Android App Size with One Setting

When you are developing Android apps your app size can grow really fast. We can get so caught up in the day to day that we forget how important it is to keep down the app size of our app. It may not seem like a 20MB APK is that much, but when you have limited internet or reception it can be a real pain. As an Android developer you have to develop for multiple ABIs, add a ton of resources and translations, and of course you have you have all of your source code and dependencies. You may have a…

James Montemagno

Setting Android Status Bar Background & Icon Colors

Over the past few months, I have been attempting to figure out the best ways to implement a light theme and dark theme in my Hanselman.Forms app. Working closely with my friend Kym Phillpotts we came up with a very nice theme changer for Xamarin.Forms, that allowed us to change all of the colors dynamically. The result is a very nice looking application that allows the users to pick their theme or use system defaults. One thing that bugged me in the original implementation for Android, was th…

James Montemagno

Investing Time in the Xamarin Linker for Smaller App Sizes

When developing an app, 99% of our time goes into writing the code, testing the functionality, and making small UI tweaks to please our end users. Most of this is done in debug mode which optimizes compilation and app size for speed, which makes sense. When we flip that flag to Release with the default settings, we often pay very little attention as to what is happening to our app. We get a nice APK or IPA and ship it up to the app store and we are done. However, if we just spent a little time f…

James Montemagno

Azure DevOps Settings for Xamarin iOS 13 and Android 10 Apps

Settings up continuous integration can be tricky when there are new versions coming out. Recently Visual Studio 2019 updated to support Xcode 11, iOS 13, Android 10, .NET Core 3, and C# 8. What a whirlwind of new updates that CI servers got all around the same time! This means that as you were updating your apps your hosted machines also got updated and probably broke your builds :(. My good friend Jonathan Peppers wrote an amazing tool called Boots that allows you to manually install dependenci…

James Montemagno

Is the MacBook Pro 16-inch the Ultimate Developer Laptop?

It seems as though Apple has finally fixed the keyboard on the latest MacBook 16-inch and as a bonus, brought back the escape key! This seems to be what everyone is talking about, but what is really important is the return to PRO for the MacBook Pro. What I mean by this is that finally we can fully spec out a MacBook Pro with as much RAM and SSD space that we could ever want and at a decent price. If you head over to the configuration page you will be able to spec out your MacBook Pro with up to…

James Montemagno

Use C# 8 In Any .NET Project Today

C# 8 was officially released in September at .NET Conf along side .NET Core 3 & Visual Studio 16.3 (8.3 on Mac). It is packed with tons of amazing new features that truly everyone should be using. However, there is a lot of confusing as to if you can actually use C# 8 if you aren't using .NET Core 3 or .NET Standard 2.1. Short answer: YES! You can use it today. Long answer: YES! You just have to turn it on and perhaps add a NuGet package or two for certain features. When you create a new ap…

James Montemagno

Free C# and Xamarin for Beginners Videos Series

Last week Hanselman announced all of the great new videos that are available at dot.net/videos. However, he forgot to mention that there is an entire new getting started series for iOS & Android development with Xamarin! The lovely developer advocate's and friends Matt Soucoup and Brandon Minnick just released the 11 part series! If you are new to C# then don't worry as there is a full C# 101 series. It has never beena better time to get started learning C# and building mobile apps with Xam…

James Montemagno

Tags

Enabling C# 9 in Xamarin & .NET Standard Projects

Shrink Your Android App Size with One Setting

Setting Android Status Bar Background & Icon Colors

Investing Time in the Xamarin Linker for Smaller App Sizes

Azure DevOps Settings for Xamarin iOS 13 and Android 10 Apps

Is the MacBook Pro 16-inch the Ultimate Developer Laptop?

Use C# 8 In Any .NET Project Today

Free C# and Xamarin for Beginners Videos Series

James Montemagno

Tags