Blogs

Prefer to watch instead of read? - https://youtu.be/3sjInlJcpBs It’s currently just after Christmas, and my 4 year old daughter has received a fair few cuddly toys from Santa. These bring her total collection up to way too many, and like most parents I have a hard time remembering all their …

I’ve recently been looking at the authentication offered by Azure for use in a mobile app, specifically using social auth providers like Facebook to allow a user to sign up for my app. The auth setup is incredibly easy, with Azure taking care of a lot of the hard stuff. There are also loads of …

In the first part of this set of posts I looked at creating a dotnet new project template, and in the second part I showed how you could easily add this to a Visual Studio for Windows extension. Lets now look at adding it to a Visual Studio for Mac extension, so that our template is available …

In the first part of this set of posts I looked at creating a dotnet new project template. These are great if you like the cli, but if, like me, you’d rather be able to do File->New then dotnet new is not much use. Instead you need a Visual Studio extension that provides a new project or …

In this article, excerpted from chapter 15 of Xamarin in Action, we’ll be looking at using Visual Studio Mobile Center’ mobile-optimized lifecycle to build, test, deploy, and monitor applications. Save 37% off Xamarin in Action with code fccbennett at manning.com. Introducing Visual Studio Mobile …

I’ve recently updated my MvvmCross templates to support .NET Standard to be ready for the awesome future. Unfortunately this meant a complete rewrite of my templates as the out of the box Visual Studio project template extensions on both Windows and Mac don’t support .NET Standard. As it …

Inspired by Satya Nadella’s Hit Refresh, a book well worth reading, I thought I’d write about my Hit Refresh moment. Hit Refresh is inspired by refreshing your browser - it doesn’t reload everything, instead it just reloads part of the page. This is reflected in how we can change …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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

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? …