Andrew Hoefling

Xamarin.Forms provides a great set of controls for building cross-platform apps including Flyout Menus. Often the default controls don't meet your design needs and you need to build something custom. Xamarin.Forms provides rich APIs for styling and animating just about anything you can imagine. Let's build a fancy animating Flyout Menu!

Dependency Injection is a great technique to leveraging native code in the context of your shared code. In Xamarin.Forms you typically create a custom renderer which gives you native access. If you need to run some native code from the shared context you can easily do this with the built-in Dependency Injection tooling.

Mastering Xamarin.Forms the Third Edition is a great book for both seasoned Xamarin developers and beginners just starting a Xamarin.Forms project. It is a great resource for many techniques needed to solve the complex problems of Xamarin.Forms application development. 

The Zebra TC70x is a mobile touch computer or android device with a built-in hardware barcode scanning. This allows developers to create rich barcode scanning capable apps without using the camera. If you have ever built a barcode scanning app that uses a camera there is a lot of switching back and forth between the camera and the page. This really isn’t ideal when the app requires scanning multiple barcodes in sequence.

Debugging an Android App over wifi opens up new scenarios that you can't simulate with an emulator or connected device via USB. If you are like me and have custom hardware that requires a large charging cradle, it makes it even harder to test a device in your hand. See my blog about the Zebra TC70x which shows you the kind of device I am currently working with.

FontImageSource is a new way to use web fonts to render common images such as action buttons in your app. Before this was added into the platform in version Xamarin.Forms 3.6 you would have to create resources for each platfrom and treat it as an image. Now in Xamarin.Forms version 4.2 there is a brand new Markup Extension to simplify your XAML

Xamarin Saturday 2019 was held at BSI Labs in Toronto, Ontario, Canada this year on August 24th. The community organized event by the Toronto .NET Mobile Developers User Group. A full day of either hands on learning or presentations from Xamarin Community leaders from around the world descending on Toronto.

This month is Xamarin UI July and this article is the July 8th 2019 Featured Blog where we will learn about the Cartesian Coordinate System and how it applies to Computer Graphics, Xamarin.Forms and the different platforms that our mobile app run on. 

Xamarin.Forms 4.0 brings new enhancements to the platform that has Xamarin Developers excited. My favorite new feature is Xamarin Shell which creates simple APIs for building powerful apps that include Tab Bars, Flyout Menus and more! The tooling builds an Application Shell and let's the developer focus on buidling their application.

At Microsoft Build this week (May 6th) the App Center Team announced new features that allow you to use App Center to manage your Authentication and Data. As well a more complete Push Notification story if your App outgrows the capabilities of App Center. AppCenter is trying to be your 1 stop for everything Mobile and with the addition of these new features they are doing a great job!