We had a huge turnout today in Dallas for Xamarin Dev Days. Here we have @JamesMontemagno and @shawnweisfeld performing an equipment check. View from the back as James was opening the day. We had a really good turnout and the sponsors kept us fed and watered so that the chance of cannibalism simply was not […]
Continue readingIf you had any Visual Studio projects using the Shared Project model, you probably noticed that the installation of the Azure SDK 2.6 broke Visual Studio’s ability to work with, or create new, Shared Projects. This was first posted on this thread in the Azure forums on May 1st and it is an absolute show-stopper. […]
Continue readingThe Xamarin.Forms.VisualElement class has a property called InputTransparent, that: Gets or sets a value indicating whether this element should be involved in the user interaction cycle. The documentation states: When set to true, the element will be able to receive input. false if element should not receive input and should pass inputs to the element […]
Continue readingLast week I got into a conversation with Christine Blanda on the Xamarin Forms forum about creating a page that had a built-in Activity Indicator that could be enabled/disabled by just setting properties. It turns out that I was at a point in one of my projects where I needed just such a component so […]
Continue readingThere were a couple of threads (here, and here) this week regarding querying an Internet-based time server using Xamarin forms. The first thing you need to do is download Sockets for PCL from Nuget, written by Ryan Davis. The source may be found here. Using Ryan’s updated sample code from the second formum thread, I’ve […]
Continue readingOne of my current projects makes used of ListView Grouping and for quite some period of time, I could not understand why my custom header template was not working, when code from other people’s projects that I had seen worked just fine. So yesterday, I decided I had had enough and spent a couple of […]
Continue readingThere was a really great thread on the Xamarin Forms forum yesterday regarding taking screen shots of your mobile application. I thought I would share this information here to summarize the conversation. From Outside the Application Greg Shackles wrote a great article about using Xamarin UITest to generate screen shots using the built-in functionality of […]
Continue readingXamarin is holding contest to get ideas of how beacons (iBeacons) can be used to context-aware mobile applications. I have been doing a lot of research on beacons so I thought I’d share some of my ideas. The Concept: Find my friends You are at a conference and need help locating your friends who are […]
Continue readingThe Xamarin.Forms Grid layout has three methods for adding Child views to the grid. Two of them allow you to specify the location: Children.Add(left, top); Children.Add(left, right, top, bottom); The first variant is fairly simple: It just takes a column and a row. But the second variant, is a little more complicated. It was probably […]
Continue readingSometimes it is the simplest things that make me happy. I was digging through some Xamarin.Forms code on Github when I noticed the use of the Scale property on a view and I thought to myself, “Does that do what I think it does?” Sure enough, it does. It will change the scale a view […]
Continue readingWay back in 2006 I write an article, Cascading Style Sheet Color chart, with a link to a site that created a set of colors that matched the Behr Premium paint swatches. I thought that might be valuable in my Xamarin.Forms work so I converted their work and created an Extended Color Palette structure using […]
Continue readingXamarin.Forms v1.3.0 has a really great addition which allows us to scroll to a specific location within a ListView. ScrollTo works by performing a linear search for an individual item, or an individual item within a specified group. There are two variations: ScrollTo(object, ScrollToPosition, bool) Scrolls the ListView to the item. object is an item […]
Continue readingI picked up a really cool tip from Rui Marinho and @DhirendraKumar in answer to a forum post last month. Suppose you want to add a view with a semi-transparent background, like this: I personally really like this look at you can see it in many different applications. Here is all it takes: var […]
Continue readingLike most Xamarin developers I have a Mac setting on my desk. Unfortunately I do not find myself to be as productive on a Mac keyboard as I do on the Windows Keyboard. When Xamarin’s Visual Studio integration was released, and it became stable enough to develop with Visual Studio on my Windows workstation instead […]
Continue readingNuget is the direction that may developers, including Xamarin, are moving as far as pushing components into solutions written using Visual Studio or Xamarin Studio. I have a love/hate relationship with Nuget. When it works, it works great. When it doesn’t work, it is worse than the DLL Hell we used to endure way back […]
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