How To|Sep 18, 2015

Tasks are (still) not threads and async is not parallel

    I talk to a lot of developers who are either new to .NET or are moving from an older version to the newer platform and tools. As such I’m always trying to think of new ways to describe the nature of Tasks vs Threads and async vs parallel. Modern .NET development is steeped…
Read More→
Survey|Sep 10, 2015

Will Windows 10 Continuum Lure Developers Back to Windows Phone?

Microsoft is pushing Windows 10 into every corner of the globe with more than 75 million devices running Windows 10 across 192 countries.  It’s next big push coming ostensibly as part of their October hardware announcement will be Windows 10 on phones, and with new hardware comes a feature called Continuum.  Continuum allows the latest…
Read More→
Blogs|Sep 9, 2015

Implementing Sharing in Xamarin Forms

One thing you may want to do within your Xamarin application is to allow users to share items that your application may capture, such as photos. While this isn’t quite trivial in Xamarin Forms as it’s different for both iOS and Android, this isn’t too hard to implement with the power of renderers. We’re going…
Read More→
Blogs|Sep 2, 2015

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…
Read More→
News|Aug 31, 2015

Make Seamless Office App Interfaces with Office UI Fabric

Whether you want to build apps that run in the Office ecosystem or just look like they do, Microsoft has released a new framework to help called Office UI Fabric.  This framework consists of JavaScript and CSS that allows you to style your applications using the same styles used by Microsoft for Outlook.com, OneDrive, and Delve.  …
Read More→
News|Aug 19, 2015

Windows Server 2016 Preview with Containers Support Released

Microsoft has released its latest Technical Preview for Windows Server 2016 which includes support for Docker Containers baked in as well as new features and functionality in its Nano Server edition. Today we are excited to release the first preview of Windows Server Containers as part of our Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3 release.…
Read More→
News|Aug 18, 2015

Windows Phone Developers Can Get Xamarin for Free

The folks at Xamarin are showing some love for Windows Phone developers with an offer for a free Xamarin licenses.  The offer is targeted at individual independent Windows Phone developers who have currently have an App in the Windows Phone app store. This free community edition includes Xamarin.iOS and Xamarin.Android as well as Visual Studio…
Read More→
Blogs|Aug 14, 2015

Unit Testing Your Xamarin Forms Applications with F# and FsUnit

One of the best and easiest ways to use F# in your projects is to use it for unit testing and the same can be said for your mobile applications with Xamarin. While C# has FluentAssertions as well as Should (I prefer the syntax of FluentAssertions between the two) F# has FsUnit to give more…
Read More→
Blogs|Aug 12, 2015

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…
Read More→
News|Aug 11, 2015

Windows 10 IoT Core Released

Microsoft has released another Windows 10 version this week with support for the Rasberry Pi2 and MinnowBoard MAX devices.  Dubbed IoT Core, it’s designed for embedded devices which may or may not include a screen.  This version doesn’t include the usual user shell experience and so you have to write a Universal Windows App as…
Read More→