Blogs

Yesterday and today I had some weird things happening with Xamarin, so I thought it was work documenting them in case anyone else has the same issue. First - Build errors. I upgraded to the latest Xamarin and suddenly building for an iPhone using Visual Studio was failing with an odd error: Failed …

Patrick from NDepend reached out to me today to ask me to review NDepend. Having dabbled with it a while ago, I was more than happy to say yes and try out the latest version. If you’ve never heard of NDepend before, it’s a code quality tool. It analyses your code and provides a number of …

Xamarin.Forms depsite being very cool is stil a bit lacking when it comes to not only a good range of controls, but also to the abilities of those controls. One example of this is the Entry control - a simple text box. One thing you can’t do with the out of the box implementation is to set the …

Today I’ve finally moved to the world of continuous deployment - albeit for one of my projects only so far, but it’s a start. For my JimLib open source API I’ve automated the whole deployment process so after checkin it builds and deploys to NuGet automatically. Steps in the …

For my mobile app development work, I’ve been building a Node.js website with a REST api that my apps can use. It’s hosted at MooMoo.io and is running using a free Heroku account - I don’t have anything useful on my site or many users of my API at the moment, so their free single …

My second NuGet package is now available: JimLib.Xamarin. This contains a selection of helpers to make developing iOS apps with Xamarin easier (WinPhone/Android will come later when I have an Android license/Android device/Windows Phone device to test on). It’s all open source - code is on …

Xamarin.Forms provides a lot of cool features to use for mobile app development, and the documentation is pretty good - but sometimes the cool features you want to use are a bit lacking in docs. There are example projects but it can be hard to interpret what you need to do to get something working. …

Since releaseing JimLib onto NuGet, I’ve been dogfooding it as much as possible for my own development. One area I noticed was lacking was in symbol support - if I wanted to view the inner workings of my classes I had to decompile the source using ReSharper. Not an ideal situation. Luckily …

When developing for iOS there are a number of different image sizes needed. Just for the springboard icon you need different sizes for iPhones and iPads, both retina and normal versions. When you add spotlight icons (again both retina and normal), iTunes icons the list gets huge. To help with this …

Todays bubble tea is banana milk tea with bubbles. Quite nice, but a bit too sweet and the banana taste is a bit artificial. I also snapped a quick photo of my lunch yesterday being cooked fresh for me. One of the great things about thai street food is a lot of it is cooked in front of you so you …

More bubble tea today. Coffee milk tea with bubbles. Tastes of sweet coffee with an aftertaste of tea - weird but not unpleasant. Nice chewy bubbles.

For pretty much every project I’ve worked on I’ve used the same set of extensions and helper classes to make my life easier. For example: Fluent API on strings myString.IsNullOrEmpty() instead of string.IsNullOrEmpty(myString). An ObservableCollectionEx<T> class that allows adding …