Issue 143

GETTING STARTED

Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms

If you are getting started with Xamarin.Forms and looking for a bit of a leg-up Joe Meyer provides some good resources to check out.

I also have some resources for Staying Up To Date with Xamarin Development and Xamarin Tools and Resources

Those links should help you get started!

Getting Started with Xamarin.Forms – The Fundamentals by Joe Meyer

Staying Up To Date with Xamarin Development and Xamarin Tools and Resources by Kym Phillpotts

DESIGN

ERROR: Your messages suck!

English is hard. Writing good error messages is even harder. In this article, Marina Posniak gives you some ideas for writing clearer, more helpful messages.

The art of the error message by Marina Posniak

TOOLS

Infragistics AppMap

Infragistics AppMap allows you to lay out your entire Xamarin.Forms application using a familiar Microsoft® Visio®-style diagram interface.  Design your app in minutes by dragging and dropping pages, child relationships, and navigation instructions onto the design surface.  Once you're happy with your application layout and flow, AppMap will generate all the Views, ViewModels, and navigation code based on a best-practice Prism MVVM architecture.  Creating mobile apps has never been easier!

Infragistics AppMap by Infragistics

IOS

iOS11 SearchBar

There are a lot of interesting little tweaks you should start integrating into your iOS11 apps. Including Large Titles and Search Bar in the title. Let Brad Umbaugh help you get started.

Add a Search Bar to Your Xamarin Apps in iOS 11 by Brad Umbaugh

iOS Code Signing demystified

iOS code signing can be pretty mystifying. In this series, you'll learn why it's so important to understand its inner workings and walk through the process.

iOS Code Signing: Part 1, Getting Started by Shashikant Jagtap

XAMARIN FORMS

Super-charge your Android Xamarin.Forms apps!

Jonathan Peppers shares some amazing links and tools for making your Xamarin.Forms Android applications sing. Including some techniques for Benchmarking performance and a bit of a dig into Bitmaps in Android (everyone's favourite topic).

Xamarin.Forms Performance on Android by Jonathan Peppers

Putting Video in your Forms Apps

If you want to put video in your apps, there is an excellent library called ExoPlayer with Xamarin bindings created by the Martijn van Dijk. In this article, Alex introduces how to get started using the library.

Xamarin Forms Android – using ExoPlayer in your app by Alex Pshul

Get your Package Identity an Version Information

Here is an interesting little way of getting your Package ID and version number for your platforms and displaying them in Xamarin.Forms

Read package identity and version from platform project with Xamarin.Forms by Marco Siccardi

Back to the Future!

A good UX practice is to use a relative time formatting instead of showing dates using normal date formats. It helps the user to have a quick sense of the timeframe without having to calculate exactly when it happened, also provides a better look and feel to your app.

Relative time formatting in Xamarin Forms by Rendy Del Rosario

Grids in Xamarin Forms Made Simple

Grids are an awesome way to layout Xamarin.Forms pages. If you aren't a Grid Guru (TM), check out this article by Charlin Agramonte where she covers off the key things you need to know to be productive.

Grids in Xamarin Forms Made Simple by Charlin Agramonte

.NET

PCL --> netStandard

James walks through how to move from PCL projects to .NET Standard libraries. In this case without completely nuking your git history. Are you ready to hack your .csproj files? Let James show you how.

How to Convert a Portable Class Library to .NET Standard and Keep Git History by James Montemagno

Async all the things

Bar Arnon has been collecting useful utility classes and extension methods related to asynchronous programming into a library: AsyncUtilities

Introducing AsyncUtilities by Bar Arnon

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

Xamarin Podcast - Episode 52

Xamarin Podcast is back with the latest news from around the Xamarin world.

Xamarin Podcast - Episode 52 with Pierce Boggan and James Montemagno

Merge Conflict - Episode 84

Did we just become web developers? This week we slip over to the ASP.NET Core side of things as we build out web apps with Razor Pages, Ooui, and all sorts of C#/.NET goodness. We discuss the ups and down of getting started with web development and how far it has come since the early days of ASP. Join use as we explore the world of web development

Merge Conflict 84: Accidental Web Developer Podcast