Xamarin

Converting Xamarin Libraries to SDK Style & Multi-Targeted Projects

If you are like me you may have a lot of standard Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android libraries sitting around. They aren't plugins [https://montemagno.com/new-plugin-for-xamarin-multi-target-templates-for-visual-studio-2017/] , but they do extend a single platform with custom functionality and controls. Wouldn't it be great if you could update them to the new SDK Style projects which use Package References, auto-NuGet packaging, and load WAY faster?!?!? It is all crazy simple to do just lik…

James Montemagno

Monitoring Android Activity Lifecycle Events: Return of Current Activity Plugin

It has been nearly two and a half years since I wrote about how to easily get access to the current Android Activity [https://montemagno.com/access-the-current-android-activity-from-anywhere/] with just a few lines of code. This code led to the creation of my Current Activity Plugin [https://github.com/jamesmontemagno/CurrentActivityPlugin] for Xamarin.Android apps and library creators to easily get access to the current Activity. Since then it has been the core of many of my plugins and has bee…

James Montemagno

Push Notification Options for Mobile Apps

My good friend Andrew [https://twitter.com/andrew_hoefling] and I recently had a Twitter conversation on what is the best route to take when implementing push notifications in your mobile applications. If you do a quick search there are a lot of options out there and it can be tricky to figure out the best route to take, but having implemented push notifications in several applications I can tell you there are really only two options you need to consider. How Push Notifications Work The reason…

James Montemagno

VS App Center Custom Build Scripts for Production Apps

A few weeks ago I introduced my Mobile App Tasks for VSTS [https://montemagno.com/introducing-vsts-mobile-build-tasks-extension/] to help developers streamline their build and release pipeline for iOS and Android apps. This collection of tasks contains things that almost every app needs at some point. This includes changing app identifiers or names and most importantly bumping version codes and names. So far, feedback of these tasks has been great: The number one question I get is how would y…

James Montemagno

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…

James Montemagno

Getting Started with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms Q&A

Every day when I open my inbox or look on GitHub there is always a question or ten for me to answer. I recently got a nice long email from Clifton with a lot of questions and I thought that instead of emailing him back directly that I should write up a blog post with all of my answers for the world to enjoy and add some common questions I get all the time. Clifton wrote in and said he is investigating cross-platform development with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms as it is one unified application p…

James Montemagno

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…

James Montemagno

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…

James Montemagno

Tags

Converting Xamarin Libraries to SDK Style & Multi-Targeted Projects

Monitoring Android Activity Lifecycle Events: Return of Current Activity Plugin

Push Notification Options for Mobile Apps

VS App Center Custom Build Scripts for Production Apps

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

Getting Started with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms Q&A

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

Paste JSON as Code with quicktype.io in Visual Studio

James Montemagno

Tags