Andrew Hoefling

Xamarin.Forms provides a simple control for adding tabs to any application but the standard implementation has some limitations. With a little knowledge of how iOS and Android work you can start creating beautiful Tabs in your Xamarin.Forms applications that support custom colors and custom text.

Many programmers, open source developers, hardware gurus and IoT masterminds have been taking their craft to online streaming platforms such as Twitch.tv to share with the world what they are doing. Some people are running their live coding sessions as a tutorial and others are just coding. People are watching, and it is really fascinating to watch how other people write software.

When adding custom animations to your Xamarin Applications don't immediately jump to the custom renderers and platform specific code, it is not needed. Often overlooked the Xamarin.Forms Animation APIs can usually handle your mobile apps animation needs. The APIs are built right into the platform so you can be confident your code will work across the platforms your application is being built for.

When building Xamarin Apps there is no easy out of the box mechanism to control your enviornmental settings such as web service url as your app migrates through the different environments such as Development, Staging and Production. With a little work we can add a configuration file very similar to how you would update a web.config or appsettings.json in an ASP.NET or ASP.NET Core application

Xamarin.Forms 3.2.0 released a new feature that is sure to be a favorite among many developers. The TitleView allows developers to quickly customize the Navigation Bar like they never had to before. You can easily add custom images, controls, content, etc. Before the TitleView it was a very long process of creating a custom renderer and platform specific implementations.

It is a good practice to sign your source control commits especially if you work in Open Source Software. On popular Open Source platforms it is very easy for someone to impersonate you by using your name and email address. Those impersonated commits will then end up linking to your account. The easiest way to prove identity is by signing your commits which will add a nice little verified badge next to each commit.

Deploying a .NET Framework WebJob to Azure is easy enough, but as of writing this blog the tooling is lacking for .NET Core. Many organizations are making it an initiative to migrate their .NET Framework projects to .NET Core which is a good idea. The tooling limitation for .NET Core WebJobs should not be a barrier, following this guide you will be able to deploy your .NET Core WebJobs to Azure

Installing Microsoft SQL Server on Windows Server Core for any of your enviornments should not be a daunting task, even for a developer that doesn't have an IT Team. Let's go through the simple steps you need to follow to get the installer on the server installing it. Once installed we can make sure we have our Azure Firewall configured correctly if it is a development server.

Using Windows Server Core has some big advantages and to our business the advantage is performance since there is no desktop experience. This makes configuring anything you do more complicated if you are not familiar with the equivelent commands in PowerShell. As you would expect there is no way to use the IIS Wizard for completing a Certificate Request and installing the correct certificates needed to server SSL traffic. With a few commands you will have your traffic ready to be served over SSL with Cloudflare.

A how-to guide by a Developer for IIS and ASP.NET Core on Windows Server Core

Increasing performance on your Windows Server may be as easy as getting rid of the desktop enviornment, now your server is focusing more on running your apps instead of the desktop enviornment.