Andrew Hoefling

Speaker | Mentor | Coder | Leader

Tabbed pages is a best practice in modern application development which holds true especially for the smaller form factors such as mobile apps. Uno Platform is a UWP bridge for building cross platform apps in Windows, iOS, Android, MacOS, Web Assembly, and more. There are predefined controls built into the UWP library and WinUI that simplify this task, which enables you the developer to worry about business rules.

Uno Platform is a cross-platform app development platform that uses C# and the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) to allow developers to build powerful apps for iOS, Android, Windows and the Web. In other words it is a WinUI bridge that enables developers to take their existing UWP skills to the other platforms. 

C# developers experienced with WPF, UWP, Xamarin.Forms, Uno Platform and anything that involes the ICommand interface are familiar with async void. A quick trick to call Task based asynchronous methods that interact with some type of User Interface interaction. We all know this is bad, but still implement code this way because it doesn't cause immediate problems.

STOP IT! async void is bad

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!

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.

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!

Microsoft Build 2019 was this week and lots of big announcements are coming from Microsoft with what the future of .NET and the ecosystem of developer tools looks like. This year there was a HUGE announcement about the future of .NET with the introduction of .NET 5.

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.