news|Mar 28, 2016

Games, HoloLens, Cloud Services Highlight Build 2016 Schedule

It wouldn’t be a developer conference without some surprises, and Microsoft is already getting us in the mood for Build 2016 with a mysterious description in the event schedule of a session on ‘Something Awesome.’ We’ll have to wait until Build kicks off this Wednesday for details, but the rest of the schedule promises a…
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News|Feb 26, 2016

Microsoft Scraps Android-to-Windows Bridge, Tells Developers to Use Xamarin Instead

It’s official: Project Astoria, Microsoft’s effort to create a bridge for porting over Android apps to Windows 10, is no more. Just one day after announcing its acquisition of multiplatform app development company Xamarin, Microsoft released an update to developers on the company’s bridge projects, which reads in part: “We…decided that we would focus our…
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News|Feb 25, 2016

Microsoft Buys Xamarin, Bets on a Cross-Platform Future

The past year has seen Microsoft take a number of strides towards realizing CEO Satya Nadella’s “cloud-first, mobile-first” vision. Once laser-focused on its own devices and operating systems, the company is increasingly platform-agnostic: It wants business customers and developers to use its cloud-based software, no matter what OS they prefer. On Wednesday, Microsoft took those…
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xaml|Nov 23, 2015

Connect() 2015 Videos Available

Microsoft’s Connect() conference last week included not only the keynote with the announcements but more than 60 individual breakout sessions on technologies from Azure to Office365.  Those videos are available now for streaming on Channel 9.  The format for the videos include several Q&A sessions with the keynote speakers such as Scott Guthrie, Anders Hejlsberg,…
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How To|Nov 6, 2015

First Impressions of the Xamarin Inspector

One of the pain points of using Xamarin Forms is that, just to see updates of any UI updates via XAML, you still need to save your changes, recompile, and relaunch the application. What’s more, is that you’d have to do this on each platform you’re targeting to make sure the UI looks good on…
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Blogs|Sep 24, 2015

Automating Xamarin Builds with FAKE – Part 1: Introduction and Setup

Being a .NET developer, I’m sure one of your pain points throughout the development process in any project has been trying to setup automated building, testing, and even deploying. However, build tools have been evolving much like other development tools and have been getting much, much better. I’m sure most of you have heard of…
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news|Sep 22, 2015

Xamarin Studio Adds Roslyn Support

Xamarin Studio now supports Microsoft’s Roslyn compiler-as-a-service features found in Visual Studio 2015.  They’ve also announced a new project model that integrates with Microsoft’s MSBuild system. In previous versions of Microsoft’s Visual Studio, they had their C# compiler, but they separately had to write and maintain all of the code that supplied Intellisense, refactoring, red-squiggles,…
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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…
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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…
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