Expecting someone geekier

Jim Bennett


Mobile developer at EROAD, Xamarin MVP and Certified Developer, Microsoft MVP, author of Xamarin In Action, blogger, speaker, father and lover of beer, whisky and Thai food. Opinions are my own. Auckland, New Zealand
Xamarin in Action from Manning Publications

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Using LiveXAML to improve your Xamarin Forms UIs

Featured Jim Bennett 17 Oct 2017 xamarin, xamarin.forms, technology, UI, xaml

One of the downsides to UI development is how long it takes to get a good looking UI. You spend an inordinate amount of time setting up the UI, running your app to see how it looks, tweaking the UI, running again, tweaking again, running again. Then of course you have to repeat on multiple devices with different OSes or screen sizes. For Xamarin Fo…

Introduction to UI Testing with Xamarin

Featured Jim Bennett 20 Aug 2017 xamarin, xamarin.android, uitest, test, Technology, xamarin.ios, book, xamarin in action

This article is an excerpt from Xamarin in Action. Save 37% off the cover price using code fccbennett at http://xam.jbb.io. One of the great things about the MVVM design pattern is that it allows us to maximize the code in our cross-platform model and view-model layers. This means we’ve written the bulk of our code and we’ve also written u…

Firewall issues with iOS simulators

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Aug 2017 xamarin, xamarin.ios, Technology, firewall

I keep getting an annoying issue with my iOS simulators. When I run an app in a simulator that needs any form of network connection I get a dialog box popup from the built in Mac firewall asking if I want to allow incoming connections. Even though I click 'allow', I get asked this every time and it's getting tedious. The issue seems to be in the…

Game of Phones - Winter is coming

Featured Jim Bennett 07 Jun 2017 xamarin, Technology, winter is coming

Winter of Xamarin - register now at http://aka.ms/winterofxamarin.…

Stay warm with Microsoft & Xamarin!

Featured Jim Bennett 01 Jun 2017 xamarin, Technology, events, socks, prizes, swag

For those in New Zealand, Microsoft and Xamarin have announced some cool events: Brr! It’s getting cold outside. Microsoft has a plan to get you through winter with some awesome Xamarin events and competitions and apparel! Are you ready to sharpen your skills in a fun, fast-paced environment? Microsoft is hosting FREE Xamarin training events around…

Specflow support in Visual Studio for Mac

Featured Jim Bennett 01 Jun 2017 xamarin, Visual Studio, Mac, Technology, add-in, extension, specflow

Love Specflow and Visual Studio for Mac? Well you are in luck as there is now a working extension for Visual Studio for Mac to enable full specflow support including generating feature files with syntax highlighting. It's all open source and built upon the amazing work by Mike Jones. You can find it on GitHub at https://github.com/straighteight/Spe…

Opening multiple solutions in Visual Studio for Mac

Featured Jim Bennett 24 May 2017 xamarin, Visual Studio, Mac, Technology

One area Macs are very different to Windows PCs is in the way documents are opened. Mac apps manage documents internally instead of being able to tap a start button again and open a second instance of your app to load a new document. This means that on Windows Xamarin developers can open multiple instances of Visual Studio at the same time, allowin…

Upcoming talks

Featured Jim Bennett 10 May 2017 xamarin, xamarin.forms, talks, Technology, conference

I'm excited to announce that I'll be talking at a couple of major conferences this year: MonkeyFest 2017 NDC Sydney At both of these conferences I'll be talking about adding platform specifics to Xamarin Forms apps. Hope to see you there!…

Nugetizer 3000

Featured Jim Bennett 10 May 2017 xamarin, Technology, nuget, Visual Studio, Mac

One cool new feature in Visual Studio for Mac is the ability to create NuGet packages from your projects automatically whenever you compile. This new feature is thanks to a cool project started by Xamarin called the Nugetizer 3000 (I do love Miguel's naming conventions). It's really easy to turn this on. From your project open the project pro…

Be quick - 50% off Xamarin In Action for one week

Featured Jim Bennett 25 Feb 2017 Technology, xamarin, xamarin.ios, xamarin.android, xamarin in action, mvvmcross, mvvm

The MEAP of my book, Xamarin In Action, has just been updated to include a new chapter covering building cross-platform view models. This chapter talks about how you can use view models to increase the amount of cross-platform, unit testable code in your Xamarin app by moving UI logic away from the platform specific layers down into your cross-plat…

MvvmCross extension for Visual Studio 2017

Featured Jim Bennett 21 Jan 2017 Technology, mvvmcross, Visual Studio, vs2017, xamarin, mvvm, windows

Update - it's now on the marketplace! Link here: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=JimBobBennett.MvvmCrossforVisualStudio The awesome team at Microsoft have got it all working, so I've managed to upload the VS2017 version to the marketplace. You can now download it from Extensions and Updates. Thanks to everyone on the VS extensio…

MVVM – the design pattern for Xamarin apps

Featured Jim Bennett 13 Jan 2017 xamarin, Technology, mvvm, xamarin in action

This article is an excerpt from Xamarin in Action MVVM is the most popular design pattern for cross-platform apps built using Xamarin, and has a history of being a very successful design pattern for building Windows desktop apps using WPF, WinRT apps, and Windows 10 UWP apps – even web frameworks like knockout.js are using it. When Xamarin design…

MvvmCross Extension for Visual Studio for Mac

Featured Jim Bennett 10 Jan 2017 xamarin, xamarin.ios, xamarin.android, mvvmcross, Visual Studio, Mac, Technology

I've been working to update the MvvmCross Xamarin Studio add-in to work with Visual Studio for Mac. The add-in has been updated thanks to some help from Matthew Robbins, the author of the awesome MFractor add-in, which if you don't have you MUST get, it's awesome. This add-in is now available from the VS for Mac extension manager!…

Animating Xamarin Forms progress bars

Featured Jim Bennett 05 Jan 2017 xamarin, xamarin.forms, Technology, UI, animation

Don't you just hate boring UIs? With no animations to bring them to life? Me too! Especially progress bars - they increment or decrement instantly giving a dull UI. As you can see from the image above, as the progress bar changes value, the UI updates instantly and it looks a bit dull. What would be nicer is if the progress bar smoothly animated…

Missing Xamarin Studio add-ins

Featured Jim Bennett 29 Nov 2016 Technology, xamarin, add-in, mvvmcross

In the latest Stable Xamarin Studio (6.1.2) there is a problem with add-ins - the add-in gallery is empty - the add-in endpoint for 6.1.2 is not returning any add-ins. This means if you are planning on using my Xamarin Studio MvvmCross add-in then you won't be able to find it. Luckily there are a number of workarounds: Use the Alpha channel - on 6.…

Expecting someone geekier

Auckland, New Zealand