Installing VSTS Build Agents on macOS

If you’re doing Xamarin, macOS (OS X), or iOS development work you’ve likely discovered that you need a way to automate the build of your code from Visual Studio Team Services. If you’re not familiar with setting up a private build agent macOS, the installation instructions provided by Microsoft can be a bit confusing. This…

Xamarin: From Zero to Certified

I have been interested in mobile development for several years now. I have dipped my toes into the waters of mobile development here and there. Recently, I have completed my Xamarin certification exam; so now I am legit. I would just like to highlight a bit of that journey. In the Beginning My interest for mobile…

Xamarin Forms for Windows Developers: Tips, Tricks and Lessons Learned, Part 1

The Confession Okay, right off the bat, I’m going to admit I’m a Microsoft “bigot” or in less unfriendly terms, a Microsoft “super-enthusiast” with severe “Microsoft is actually better at everything” leanings. I’ve spent most of the last 30 years writing Microsoft-based solutions with Microsoft tools and technologies for clients who are Microsoft “shops.” Still,…

Xamarin Mobile Development: Building Cross-Platform Apps for IOS, Android & Windows Devices

Xamarin Mobile Development Wintellect held a live hand’s-on webinar on Xamarin mobile development for building cross-platform apps including IOS, Android and Windows Devices. The agenda included an interactive and coding presentation from Jason Bell, including the mobile landscape and development options, the Xamarin development platform, Xamarin application architectural options and building shared application components. The event…

Free Xamarin Training for Your New Year’s Weekend

New Year’s Eve weekend is a time to party, but for the geeks among us, it may also be a good opportunity to curl up with some dev training videos. Enter Microsoft/Xamarin with their on-demand recordings of Xamarin Dev Days sessions. The mobile development training event takes place periodically in cities around the world, and…

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…

.NET Core 1.0 Released, Visual Studio 2015 Updated

.NET Core 1.0—the open-sourced, cross-platform version of Microsoft’s web development framework—is now generally available. The release Monday caps two years of effort, in which nearly 10,000 developers participated, according to Microsoft. .NET Core 1.0 will allow developers to create web apps, micro-services and libraries that work on OS X and Linux as well as Windows.…

Using XAML in F# Xamarin Forms – A Screencast

Now that we’ve seen the awesome new stuff in Xamarin Studio for F# let’s go a bit further and actually use some of those improvements to our advantage. However, instead of just a regular blog post, I thought it’d be worthwhile to do a screencast for y’all. You can view the demo code directly on…

F# Improvements in Xamarin Studio

With the (almost) stable release of Xamarin Studio 6 comes a ton of great new improvements. I absolutely love the new dark theme! However, some huge improvements were made to the IDE for F# support, as well. Improvements that I feel may have gone without much notice. So I wanted to help get those improvements…

Microsoft Open-Sources Xamarin SDK, Adds New Developer Tools

Microsoft today announced that it has open-sourced the Xamarin SDK for iOS, Android and Mac, making good on a promise it made during Build 2016. The source code released to the .NET Foundation under the MIT license includes native API bindings for all three platforms, command line tools and Xamarin.Forms, the company’s cross-platform UI framework.…

Free Xamarin, and Other Goodies for Developers From Build 2016

On Day Two of Build 2016, Microsoft made the announcement that developers have been hoping for since the company acquired Xamarin in February: Xamarin tools will now be free for all Visual Studio users. Subscribers to both paid and free tiers of Visual Studio will have access, which lowers considerably the cost of developing native apps…