Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
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
Over time Visual Studio has progressively improved support for solutions that have a large number of projects. MvvmCross used to be over 200 projects to handle each of the target platforms it supports. With the introduction of multi-targeted projects the number of projects dropped significantly to around 50 projects. For example, the core MvvmCross project … Read more
In my previous post I discussed Control Template in Windows development (UWP and Platform.Uno). I feel the topic of templates warrants at least one follow up post. So, in this post I’m going to walk through ListView Templates and GridView Templates. As both ListView and GridView inherit from ListViewBase, I’m actually going to focus my … Read more
Recently there has been a lot of discussion about using code to declare the user interface of an app. Such as a recent post I did following the announcement of SwiftUI by Apple. In the Xamarin.Forms world the hashtag CSharpForMarkup has become the latest distraction. CSharpForMarkup encourages developers to move away from XAML to defining … Read more
In just under a month some of the biggest names in the Xamarin community will be presenting alongside a prominent members of the Microsoft Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms teams at the Xamarin Developer Summit. Whilst I’m not going to be able to make it across to the summit I wanted to do a bit call out … Read more
One of the most important aspects of an app is the flow or journey that the user takes through the app. Apps are often described in terms of pages, or screens, and navigating between them. In this post I’m going to cover dividing your application into routes, and how to work with the Flutter navigation … Read more
Shortly after Apple announced SwiftUI a twitter thread erupted discussing a hypothetical Sharp UI. It was positioned an alternative for declarative ui development, across Xamarin applications in C# or F#. If Apple has SwiftUI, perhaps we’ll Microsoft rollout # UI (Sharp UI) for as a new method for building user interfaces in @xamarinhq apps with … Read more
This morning I set out to explore the most recent ramblings on app navigation. I expected to come across a bunch of designers talking about their sliding, popping, whirling interface. How they are going to radicalize the way we interact with mobile applications. The first thing I was struck with was that I needed to … Read more
I think I’ve been living under a rock as I’ve only just come across dnSpy, a decompiler for .net! I’ve been building apps and services with .NET for a long time, so a Twitter thread talking about decompilers amused me. David Kean’s comment pretty accurately reflects my sentiment regarding Reflector. You can pry ildasm from … Read more
Debugging Http/Https Traffic using Fiddler for Xamarin iOS, Android and Windows (UWP) Applications
Side Note: Links on how to setup your iOS, Android or Windows device for remote debugging
Working with Self Signed Certificates (Certificate Pinning) in Android Applications with Xamarin.Forms