Andrew Hoefling

When building cross-platform applications one of the most important features is platform specific features. Such as rendering particular controls on Android vs iOS vs WASM vs UWP vs etc. This gives the application developer the most control to conform to platform design best practices but work in a 100% shared code. Uno Platform has a very impressive API access for platform specific rendering, even in the XAML you can define controls that will only render on the platforms you want.

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!

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.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.

Xamain.Forms contain many Animations API that is accessible in the shared code. Most animation sequences can be leveraged in the shared code reducing the need to implement any platform specific code to handle animations. Scaling animations can add a lot of context to your sequences that provide context to your animations.

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.

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.