Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
One of the things I find frustrating is that for every new project we seem to have to recreate the build and release pipeline. In each case we step through the same steps, run into the same, albeit familiar, issues and end up with a pipeline that looks incredibly similar to the pipeline we setup … Read more
In my last couple of posts (here and here) I talked a bit about using the ApkTool to repack an Android APK in order to update an Android application to target different environments. To make this easier I’ve just published a preview of an extension for Azure DevOps. The ApkTool Build and Release Task extension … Read more
Following yesterday’s post on repacking an Android APK, I was pointed to an awesome post by Daniel Causer entitled Build Once Release Everywhere – APK. Daniel’s post goes into a lot of detail on how to setup your build and release process. Specifically the scripts that he’s created for automating the repacking process I described in … Read more
In my previous post talking about targeting different environments I ended with the proposition that what we need to be able to do as part of the release pipeline for an app is to adjust the configuration file that’s included in the app package. In this post I’m going to manually walk through what this … Read more
I’ve posted previously on using visual states in Uno and how they can be used to effectively manage the different visual layouts a page can take on. These may be changes in layout due to the application being resized, or perhaps due to different data loading states. I’ve recently created a Uno build of the … Read more
Whether you’re developing an Android app in Kotlin, a cross-platform app in Flutter or Xamarin Forms, or an Xbox app in C#/XAML, supporting multiple environments when building an app, is just not as easy as it should be. For example the different environments might be dev, test, staging, prodution etc to align with your dev, … Read more
As a developer working with Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms you should be aware of the Xamarin.Essentials package that Microsoft have been developing that “provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications”. If you haven’t taken the time to look through the source code, it’s well worth cloning the repository and taking a look. Not only … Read more
Last week was a huge week for the Uno platform with their inaugural Uno conference, #UnoConf. As the technology continues to mature, I’ve no doubt that Uno will become a viable solution for building applications to target all sorts of markets. This includes support being progressively added by the various Mvvm frameworks. Following my previous … Read more
I’ve covered this topic previously in my post Create, Build and Publish a Flutter Web App but things have changed a little now as web support has been merged, making it easier to build a single application that runs on iOS, Android and Web. To find out more you can check out the Flutter docs … Read more
Following my previous post on Mvvm Navigation with Xmarin.Forms Shell there were a few things that I felt I hadn’t addressed adequately. Loading Data on Appearing The first thing is how to load data when navigating to a page, and perhaps to do something when the user navigates away from the page. Since it’s the … Read more
In this post we’re going to look at the Text widget in Flutter and some of the options you can tweak when displaying text within your app. If you’re after a more detailed discussion of strings, characters and how they’re displayed, you should check out the post, Mastering Styled Text in Flutter. To get into … Read more
One of the topics that I find a bit contentious amongst app developers is how navigation is handled, specifically when it comes to MVVM. Should navigation be done in the code behind of the page? or in the ViewModel? and should navigation be based on a path/URL or based on what ViewModel you want to … Read more
One of the things that I don’t like about the web is that I have to access everything via the browser. Whilst favourites and bookmarks are all well and good, one of the nice things about apps is that I can do things like pin to start/taskbar (Windows) or add to homescreen (Android). Sure I … Read more
Using Flutter for building iOS and Android applications brings with it some advantages over other cross platform solutions such as Xamarin.Forms or React but one of the more interesting developments to keep an eye on is the support for running Flutter apps on the web. In this post we’re going to create a basic Flutter … Read more
Rukesh has put together a great post, entitled Using C#, XAML + Uno Platform to Build One Codebase, Cross-Platform Apps, that provides a great walk through of getting started with the Uno Platform. It goes through grabbing the Uno extension for Visual Studio and then creating a new multi-platform application using just C# and XAML. … Read more
Someone pointed me in the direction of a series of great blog posts that have recently been migrated to a github repository. The posts are quite old, dating back to a period between 2005 and 2013 when Beatriz Stollnitz worked for Microsoft as part of the WPF and Silverlight teams. Here are the links to … Read more
There is plenty of documentation on how to build a Flutter application and more importantly the significance of widgets. Most articles you’ll read about widgets talk about what a StatelessWidget is and what a StatefulWidget is and how you can inherit from these to create your own widgets. However, what happens when you want to … Read more
In this post we’re going to cover one of the basics of app navigation which is the use of the UWP SplitView. If you’re coming from iOS and Android development you might be thinking “huh, I don’t even know what that is.” Well the good news is that it’s actually something you’re already familiar with. … Read more
This post will cover the basics of how to get started with Flutter. It’ll provide you with an overview of your first Flutter app and will give you some pointers on how to get familiar with Flutter, Dart, the tools and ecosystem around building apps using the Flutter SDK. Enough about what you’ll take out … Read more
In this post we’re going to cover creating a custom control that uses a control template to define how it looks, aka a Templated Control. The principles of templated, or lookless, controls have been adopted by most of the XAML based technologies but for the purpose of this post we’re going to start by building … Read more