Inter-App Communications in Xamarin.iOS and Why OpenUrl Freezes for 10+ sec

9th of March, 2016 / / No Comments

Inter-App Communications

Mobile apps are meant to communicate using multiple channels, but the most popular, recommended, and widely used is using Scheme Uri. If you have not used Scheme URI then you should consider adding them to your app, it takes less than a minute to add support to your app, and it provides you a great way to get users to your app.

Setting the Stage

One scenario that I had was App A was launching App B and querying data, App B was in turn looking up the request, and returning data to App A.… [Keep reading] “Inter-App Communications in Xamarin.iOS and Why OpenUrl Freezes for 10+ sec”

A Journey of Hunting Memory Leaks in Xamarin

8th of March, 2016 / / 2 Comments

My client was reporting performance issues with an existing app that was developed internally, and I had to find the problems. So, here is my journey on finding the issues and resolving them. The resolution was a reduction of the memory usage to 1/4 of what it was and usage was stabilised to this level (1/4). I am hopeful that this blog post can help you too in refining your app and pro-actively resolving any performance issues.… [Keep reading] “A Journey of Hunting Memory Leaks in Xamarin”

Why you should use Git over TFS

8th of March, 2016 / / 3 Comments

I have been an advocate of git for long time now and I might be biased a little bit, but take a moment to read this and judge for yourself whether git is the way to go or not.

If you are starting a new greenfield project, then you should consider putting your code on a git repository instead of TFS. There are many reasons why git is better suited, but the two main ones in my perspective are:

Cross-Platform Support
Git tools are available for all platforms and there are many great (and FREE) GUI tools like GitExtensions or SourceTree.… [Keep reading] “Why you should use Git over TFS”

Taking Advantage of The (iOS 9) Universal Links on Xamarin iOS apps

3rd of November, 2015 / / 3 Comments

What is Scheme URI?

In the context of mobile apps, Scheme URIs are used for communicating between mobile apps. Mobile developers can register a unique URI for each app in the application manifest (info.plist). The operating system would then use that to launch your application once the user clicks on a link that matches your uri. For instance, I could have my-cool-app:// as my scheme uri. I could then generate links (should start with my-cool-app://) to send in my email to my app’s users and once clicked, my app will be launched.… [Keep reading] “Taking Advantage of The (iOS 9) Universal Links on Xamarin iOS apps”

PIN Number Password Fields for Windows XAML

22nd of October, 2015 / / No Comments

In Windows XAML world, a bad design decision was made to have PasswordBox and TextBox as different objects, meaning that the PasswordBox does not inherit common properties from the TextBox. As a consequence, you cannot do many of the things that you normally do with a textbox such as customising the appearance of the password textbox (say you want to make the text centre-aligned, or you want to bind the number keypad instead of the alpha keyboard).… [Keep reading] “PIN Number Password Fields for Windows XAML”

Handling Complex Object Persistence and Messaging on Mobile

21st of October, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Data persistence and messaging is a very common task that you almost certainly need in your apps. Mobile platforms have come a long way in supporting data persistence mostly through the SQLite engine which has become the standard on all mobile platforms. However, SQLite is (as it’s name suggests) a lightweight engine and does not offer as many features as a full RDBMS.

This should not be a problem on a mobile device where persisting data is intended mostly for caching until the data reaches its ultimate destination on a backend server.… [Keep reading] “Handling Complex Object Persistence and Messaging on Mobile”

Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS

7th of August, 2015 / / 4 Comments

Azure Application Insights (AI) is a great instrumentation tool that can help you learn about how your application is doing during run-time. It is currently in Preview mode, so bear that in mind when developing production ready apps. It gives you the ability to log lots of different kinds of information like tracing, page views, custom events, metrics and more.

Azure AI supports multiple platforms, but unfortunately they have not released a Xamarin package yet. There is one library which is for Xamarin.Forms… [Keep reading] “Azure Applications Insights for Xamarin iOS”

Sharing HTTP sessions between WebView requests and HttpClient on Windows Phone

15th of July, 2015 / / 1 Comment

Introduction

I have been working on a hybrid mobile application that requires displaying/containing a few mobile apps in a WebView control. In the background, some HTTP requests need to go through to collect data and do further processing. We need to maintain the same session in all of the web requests going through the mobile app. This means all web (HTTP) requests originated by the Webview as well as our background (HttpClient) requests need to share cookies, cache, etc.… [Keep reading] “Sharing HTTP sessions between WebView requests and HttpClient on Windows Phone”

Let’s Hack It: Securing data on the mobile, the what, why, and how

6th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Here is the presentation of tonight’s talk. It was great to see so many passionate developers and business people at Melbourne Mobile. I have embedded the slides below and I hope you find it useful.

Talk Summary

This presentation is basically a summary of what I have learned and the experience I have had going through my recent project. In trying to secure the users data on the mobile device, I have come to learn quite few common flaws in the security implementation, I have learned more reasons why you need to protect the data on your mobile app, and have come to know and use few useful open source projects.… [Keep reading] “Let’s Hack It: Securing data on the mobile, the what, why, and how”

Announcing KeyChain.NET: a unified API for using KeyChain on many platforms

6th of May, 2015 / / No Comments

Storing and accessing private keys and passwords can be a tricky task. How far do you need to go to protect your (and the user’s) data? This is where KeyChain on iOS comes in handy. It allows you to store keys in a (arguably) secure database. This has seen great improvements since iOS 8 and iOS devices (since iPhone 5S) equipped with a special A7 chip designed particularly for holding your keys. More on iOS KeyChain can be found on Apple’s website here.… [Keep reading] “Announcing KeyChain.NET: a unified API for using KeyChain on many platforms”