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…
Read MoreLove 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…
Read MoreOne 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…
Read MoreI'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!…
Read MoreOne 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…
Read MoreThe 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…
Read MoreUpdate - 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…
Read MoreThis 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…
Read MoreI'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!…
Read MoreDon'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…
Read MoreIn 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.…
Read MoreOur Xamarin Dev Days has been immortalized in a YouTube video! Thanks to Peace of Dreams for filming on the day.…
Read MoreXamarin.Forms is pretty awesome, it provides an abstraction over the UI layer of iOS, Android and UWP apps allowing you to define you UI once either in code (C# or F#), or using XAML - an XML markup language. Write your UI once and it works natively on all devices rendering your UI using the native controls for each platform. The upside is write-on…
Read MoreI'm a huge fan of iBeacons (and if you're coming to MS Ignite NZ 2016 then you can hear me talk about them) and they are pretty easy to get started with on iOS. The most basic use case is beacon monitoring - when your app detects a signal from an iBeacon it can wake up and do some processing in the background. Some of the time this processing might…
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