Why can’t I use the “dynamic” C# keyword in Xamarin.iOS?

Occasionally I see this question pop up in various forms; usually an app developer has written some fairly clever code that relies on the dynamic keyword in C#. Their code runs swimmingly on every other platform—and it also compiles just fine for iOS. But when they run the app on a physical iPhone or iPad…

Creating a Secondary (bottom) iOS Toolbar in Xamarin Forms

Xamarin Forms is a really great platform for mobile app development – we have used it on several apps now and had much better results than when trying to use the native SDK’s directly. Every now and then though you run up against a roadblock with the default renderer implementations where some feature (perhaps a…

Understanding Native Image Sizing in Xamarin Forms Apps

This post is about probably my least favorite part of mobile app development – figuring out and assembling all of the various images needed to build an application and publish it into the stores. Each platform has its own requirements for this, and often you will need to provide multiple resolution versions within each platform…

Cloud Saturday Atlanta – a Call for Speakers

Cloud Saturday is a new event for the Atlanta area, and we are currently looking for speaker submissions. The event is being planned for 9/26, and will be held in Alpharetta at Microsoft’s regional training facility. While Microsoft is a sponsor, this event is open to ALL cloud platforms. Amazon, Google, Microsoft and any other…

Xamarin at CodeStock 2015

As Dave Baskin posted earlier this week, several of us from Wintellect were in attendance at CodeStock 2015 in Knoxville this weekend. Wintellect is proud to have been a sponsor of this year’s event, and we were also thrilled to have several of our consultants selected as speakers. Dave, Josh Carroll, Joel Cochran and myself…

Lighting up Native Platform Features in Xamarin Forms – Part 2

In the previous post I implemented a custom attached property to be used in Xamarin Forms XAML when a built-in accessory view is desired on a table cell. In this follow-up we will continue and build out the iOS renderer that is responsible for actually enabling the feature in our running application. What about Android…

Lighting up Native Platform Features in Xamarin Forms – Part 1

In my last few posts I introduced a simple app that lets you browse the various built-in font variations supported by Xamarin Forms. If you recall, the application adopted a “stack navigation” design, which is quite common in mobile applications. However, there is one small flaw with our implementation so far – on the iOS…

Consistent Mobile UI Theming

Xamarin Forms allows us to write code once that targets all three major platforms – iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. But the default color palette for the platforms differ – iOS prefers a light background with dark text, while the default themes for Android and Windows Phone are the opposite of that. And unfortunately for…

Hiding the Android Activity icon in Xamarin Forms

In my previous post, I introduced a simple demo app that used the Stack Navigation Pattern. This is a standard pattern frequently used on all phone platforms to present hierarchically organized pages of information. In my demo app, it was used to navigate to each of the three detail pages from a main starting page.…

Built-in Text and Font Styles in Xamarin Forms

Xamarin Forms provides a great foundation for building cross-platform native mobile applications. It eliminates a lot of mundane platform-specific work that would otherwise need to be done multiple times (and in different ways), and it lets me focus on the actual business value that my mobile application is intended to provide. The reality of most…

Keith’s List

I am a huge believer in ongoing education. In fact, I regularly enroll and complete university MOOC courses that have nothing to do with software engineering (currently enrolled in 2 active courses and just recently completed another 2). I typically enroll in the edX courses (nearly all of which can be audited for free): https://www.edx.org/.

But I also really believe in (proactive) ongoing education throughout one’s career. Sure, it’s nice to have an employer who is willing to foot the bill for regular classroom training (we offer that too, by the way), but even without access to a classroom we all still have ample access to a wide range of career-centric education options – including the large (and growing) catalog of developer-focused online training material available through the WintellectNOW platform.

In the past I’ve mostly watched the occasional training videos in my spare time, but now I’d like to try something a little different and more deliberate. My plan is to pick two videos every week or so from our growing catalog, watch them over the weekend, and then post a quick review here of the highlights of those videos. If you would like to follow along but don’t have a WintellectNOW subscription then you can activate a trial using the code ROME-13 during registration.

For this first week I will be starting with:

  1. Building Apps with Unity by Russ Fustino
  2. Node.js for the Confused by Josh Lane.

I’ve not worked with either of those technologies before, so this should be a good use of a couple hours of my time this weekend!


BTW, if you are curious, the MOOC courses I am currently taking are:


These two were completed recently: