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…
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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…
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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…
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Uncategorized|Aug 3, 2015

Wintellect Becomes Premier Xamarin Consulting Partner

It seems that all roads in software development today lead inevitably to mobile apps. Building apps that span multiple mobile platforms is no easy task, but Xamarin makes bridging those environments much easier. And so it’s with great pleasure we announce that Wintellect has become a Premier Xamarin Consulting Partner. Wintellect employs a dedicated team…
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wintellect-blogs|Jul 14, 2015

Wrapping Up CodeStock 2015

Wintellect has been glad to be a sponsor of CodeStock for several years now. This year Josh Carroll, Keith Rome, and myself presented on AngularJS and Xamarin topics. It was great having such a larger audience this year (over 900 people attended!) Thanks to all the CodeStock staff and support folks that made this year overwhelmingly successful! If you…
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Xamarin Development|Jul 3, 2015

From Zero to Hero in Xamarin Forms in 53 Minutes

Looking for a fast way to get up to speed on Xamarin Forms? There are tons of learning resources out there, including a series of articles I published this spring, the first of which can be found here. But while some developers prefer learning by reading, others find video training the best learning medium. Which…
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developer-lifestyle|Jun 17, 2015

Wintellect’s Jeff Prosise Interviewed on Twit.tv!

Wintellect Co-Founder Jeff Prosise was recently a guest on the latest episode of Coding 101 on Twit.tv.  Father Robert Ballecer who calls himself the “Digital Jesuit” interviewed Jeff with Lou Maresca from Microsoft and they covered many topics starting with how Jeff got started with computer science having come from an engineering background before getting caught up…
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Blogs|May 20, 2015

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…
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Blogs|May 19, 2015

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…
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Azure and Cloud Computing|May 14, 2015

Combining F# and Xamarin Forms to Create Mobile Applications

While we certainly have been busy getting our hands dirty with Xamarin I’ve been doing some of my own. However, I’ve been messing around with using Xamarin with F#. I mentioned in a previous post that F# can be used very well for enterprise applications. Here’s an in depth look at F# with Xamarin for…
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Blogs|May 2, 2015

Supercharging Xamarin Forms with Custom Renderers, Part 5

Making Xamarin Forms Richer with Custom Visual Elements The BoxView class is handy for drawing rectangles in a Xamarin Forms UI. On Windows Phone, a BoxView renders a Rectangle element. On iOS and Android, it paints a rectangle onto a graphics context and a canvas, respectively. But what about other graphics primitives such as ellipses…
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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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