Building amazing multi-platform solutions for iOS, Android, Mac, Linux and Windows
I’ve been a long time supporter of the work that the team at Uno Platform have been doing. The announcement today of v3.0 of the Uno Platform comes hot on the heals of releases 2.3 and 2.4 that introduced AndroidX and MacOS support. This isn’t just any old announcement, v3 aligns the Uno Platform with … Read more
Earlier this year I published a pre-release version of an Azure DevOps extension that wrapped the ApkTool for extracting and re-packing Android APK files. Having spent more time working with Azure Pipelines, I realised that most of what I was doing with the extension could actually be done with one or more templates. Today I … Read more
In October 2019 Microsoft announced a new category of dual screen device with flagship products Surface Neo and Surface Duo. Since then, there has been a massive undertaking by Microsoft to prepare developers of both Windows (UWP and Win32 apps) and Android apps for a new world of dual, or even multiple, screen devices. This … Read more
My last post was a bit of a long one as it covered a bunch of steps for setting up the bits and pieces required for signing an application for different platforms. In this post I just wanted to provide a complete example that shows a single multi-stage (6 in total) Azure Pipelines pipeline for … Read more
In my previous posts covering the Pipeline Templates I’ve discussed building a Xamarin.Forms apps for iOS, Android and Windows (UWP) and subsequently deploying them to AppCenter. In this post we’re going to look at doing the same with a Uno application. Given that Uno is built on top of the core Xamarin functionality, the process … Read more
Wow, that title’s a mouthful, and I didn’t add in there that I’ve just pushed v0.2.0 release of the Pipeline Templates repository. In this post we’re going to add stages to a YAML based Azure DevOps pipeline in order to deploy a Xamarin.Forms application to AppCenter for testing. We’ll also be using on the of … Read more
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
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
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
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
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
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
Accessing ASP.NET Core API hosted on Kestrel over Https from iOS Simulator, Android Emulator and UWP Applications.