Reactive Properties in Xamarin Forms

23rd of May, 2019 / Pulkit Sethi / No Comments

In this post, we will look at using Xamarin Forms in a more reactive manner, which will give more control over validation and synchronous UI updates, with potential to easily add custom animations.

The primary components for a Xamarin Forms mobile app are view models, presenters, services, repositories, business layers, DTOs etc. All interaction with a mobile app can be thought of as a series of asynchronous events handled by the view model. All interactions with the underlying layer, i.e… [Keep reading] “Reactive Properties in Xamarin Forms”

Versioning of Android app (Dev, Stage, and Prod) using same code base – Xamarin Forms

28th of April, 2018 / Divikiran Ravela / No Comments

We will be continuing our journey into App versioning, this time for Android. Similar to iOS, in Android, we have to create Compiler symbols too. For those who have missed iOS versioning blog, click on below is the link.
Versioning of iOS app (Dev, Stage, and Prod) using same code base – Xamarin Forms

Set different configurations

Similar to iOS, setup all the required configurations as shown below,

Dev

Staging

Prod

Compiler symbols options

Double-clicking on Android project should prompt with Project Options, go to compiler tab under Build section.… [Keep reading] “Versioning of Android app (Dev, Stage, and Prod) using same code base – Xamarin Forms”

Versioning of iOS app (Dev, Stage, and Prod) using same code base – Xamarin Forms

27th of April, 2018 / Divikiran Ravela / 1 Comment

App versioning based on same code base is the favorite feature of most of the clients I worked for various reasons. Usually, this feature is requested to cater App to the different set of departments or support multi-tenancy that client want to support. When creating a complex app, there are n-number of teams working together to build it, which includes dev testers, beta testers, or even a client who wants to demo a product before actually purchasing it.… [Keep reading] “Versioning of iOS app (Dev, Stage, and Prod) using same code base – Xamarin Forms”

Xamarin Application Architecture

17th of January, 2018 / Pulkit Sethi / 1 Comment

In this post, I will talk about strategies for developing a cross-platform Xamarin application with a focus on code sharing, increasing testability, and reducing overall development and maintenance efforts.
The application architecture is itself problem specific, but there are certain design patterns that can guide the overall structure of the application. The ones I mostly work with are Model-View-Controller, Model-View-Presenter, and Model-View-ViewModel.
MVC should be adopted for small applications or proof of concept. Since Android and iOS both natively support MVC, it will mean fewer roadblocks and faster implementation.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin Application Architecture”

Xamarin Forms: Mircosoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite issue with Physical devices

13th of December, 2017 / Divikiran Ravela / 3 Comments

Introduction

Building Xamarin Forms apps using .Net Standard 2.0 is still pretty much new to industry, we are just started to learn how differently we have to configure Xamarin setting to get it working when compared to PCL based projects.
I was building a Xamarin Forms based App using Microsoft’s Entityframeworks SQlite to store app’s data. Entity framework using sqlite is an obvious choice when it comes to building App using .Net Standard 2.0

Simulator

Works well on pretty much on all simulators without any issue, all read/write operations works well.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin Forms: Mircosoft.EntityFrameworkCore.Sqlite issue with Physical devices”

Xamarin forms using .Net Standard 2.0

9th of December, 2017 / Divikiran Ravela / No Comments

Introduction

All Xamarin developers, please welcome Net standard 2.0. This is the kind of class library we were waiting for all these years. The .Net standard 2.0 specification is now complete and it is included with Net core 2.0, Net framework 4.6.1 and up to latest versions. It can be used using Visual Studio versions 15.3 and up. Net Standard 2.0 obviously supports C# and also F# and Visual Basic.

More APIs

Net Standard 2.0 is for sharing code via various platforms.… [Keep reading] “Xamarin forms using .Net Standard 2.0”

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

9th of March, 2016 / Has AlTaiar / 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 / Has AlTaiar / 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”

Any device, any platform, one Microsoft

29th of February, 2016 / Simon Waight / 1 Comment

Only a few years ago you’d have been hard pressed to have mentioned the following four words in a single blog post where you weren’t arguing for / against a way of doing things: Microsoft, iOS, Android and development.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will no doubt have seen Microsoft’s announcement on their intent to acquire Xamarin, a business very much about cross-platform application development.

For those of us working in this space this has really been a case of
“what took you so long?”… [Keep reading] “Any device, any platform, one Microsoft”

Google Cloud Messaging using Azure Notification Hub

8th of November, 2015 / Ben Martin / 3 Comments

The Xamarin team have provided a very helpful tutorial to get started with setting up Android notifications – I suggest using this to get the basic implementation working, and ensure you’re using the GcmRegistrationIntentService version, and avoid using the depreciated GCM Client.

To get a complete end to end solution up and running there is a fair bit of additional information required. Here’s a guide for using Microsoft Azure Notification Hub.

Set up Google Cloud Messaging service

Log into the Google Developer Console (https://console.developers.google.com/… [Keep reading] “Google Cloud Messaging using Azure Notification Hub”