News|Apr 30, 2015

Microsoft Details Bridges to Windows Universal Apps

The rather lackluster Day 2 keynote from Build 2015 was short on big announcements as they looked to drive home the message of the power of the Windows Universal Platform including a few more details on the bridges they are building for Web, Android, and iOS developers to move their apps to Windows. Day 2…
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Azure and Cloud Computing|Apr 29, 2015

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…
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News|Apr 27, 2015

The Calm Before the Storm – Preparing for Microsoft Build 2015

Things have been fairly quiet on the developer front as Microsoft gets ready to put on its really big show in San Francisco, Build 2015.  Here’s a few things we’re looking forward to learning more about. Microsoft’s Build 2015 starts on Wednesday and its promising to be quite a show.  With a new version of…
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Blogs|Apr 27, 2015

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.…
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Blogs|Apr 23, 2015

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…
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Blogs|Apr 22, 2015

Implementing John Conway’s Game of Life in Xamarin Forms

John Conway’s Game of Life, presented to the world in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American magazine, is one of the most popular computer simulations of all time. In it, you draw a pattern of cells in a 2-dimensional grid. Then you “evolve” the cells from one generation to the next. Whether a cell…
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Blogs|Apr 18, 2015

Supercharging Xamarin Forms with Custom Renderers, Part 4

If you’ve read the previous posts in this series, you’re aware that custom renderers are the keys that unlock the doors to advanced customizations in Xamarin Forms. In Part 1, I presented custom renderers for rounding the corners of and placing borders around Button controls. In Part 2, I used custom renderers to stylize the…
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News|Apr 9, 2015

Amazon Unleashes New Cloud Offerings at AWS Summit

Amazon has announced several new cloud services during their AWS Summit as well as some new features on existing cloud services. Today’s AWS Summit Keynote included announcements for four new cloud services; Amazon EFS (Elastic File System), Amazon Machine Learning, AWS Marketplace for Desktop Apps, and Amazon Workspaces Application Manager.  They also showcased new features for EC2 including…
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Blogs|Apr 7, 2015

Supercharging Xamarin Forms with Custom Renderers, Part 3

One of the limitations of Xamarin Forms that frequently pains developers is the fact that the Label control supports text wrapping and text truncation, but it doesn’t support both at the same time. Specifically, Label’s LineBreakMode property can be set to LineBreakMode.WrapText to wrap text, or it can be set to LineBreakMode.TailTruncation to replace text…
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Blogs|Apr 6, 2015

Supercharging Xamarin Forms with Custom Renderers, Part 2

In Part 1 of this series, I introduced custom renderers in Xamarin Forms and presented a pair of custom renderers – one for Android, and one for Windows Phone – that extended the Xamarin Forms Button control to honor the BorderRadius, BorderWidth, and BorderColor properties on all platforms. In Part 2, we’ll use what we…
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