Blogs|May 5, 2015

Using F# for Enterprise Applications

Though I have posted a few times on some of the awesome things F# can do for your code, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s always good choice for each of your applications. You may look at the code features and and some sample code and think This is great, but I can’t see this being…
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Blogs|May 4, 2015

API Convergence Gets Real in Windows 10

Last year, I wrote a universal app named Pic Me (later renamed to “Picture Me”) for Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8.1. The main reason I wrote it was that my daughter said “wouldn’t it be cool to have an app that shows you all the photos you’ve been tagged in on Facebook, and that…
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Blogs|May 2, 2015

Using AdaptiveTrigger to Build Adaptive UIs in Windows 10

Like a lot of developers, I’ve been watching the development of Windows 10 and digesting all the features Microsoft announced at BUILD. And I’m eager to build apps that target the Universal Windows Platform (UWP). UWP is a new model that allows you to write apps that run on a wide range of Windows devices,…
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Blogs|May 2, 2015

Supercharging Xamarin Forms with Custom Renderers, Part 5

Making Xamarin Forms Richer with Custom Visual Elements The BoxView class is handy for drawing rectangles in a Xamarin Forms UI. On Windows Phone, a BoxView renders a Rectangle element. On iOS and Android, it paints a rectangle onto a graphics context and a canvas, respectively. But what about other graphics primitives such as ellipses…
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Azure and Cloud Computing|Apr 29, 2015

Consistent Mobile UI Theming

Xamarin Forms allows us to write code once that targets all three major platforms – iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. But the default color palette for the platforms differ – iOS prefers a light background with dark text, while the default themes for Android and Windows Phone are the opposite of that. And unfortunately for…
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Blogs|Apr 27, 2015

Hiding the Android Activity icon in Xamarin Forms

In my previous post, I introduced a simple demo app that used the Stack Navigation Pattern. This is a standard pattern frequently used on all phone platforms to present hierarchically organized pages of information. In my demo app, it was used to navigate to each of the three detail pages from a main starting page.…
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Blogs|Apr 23, 2015

Built-in Text and Font Styles in Xamarin Forms

Xamarin Forms provides a great foundation for building cross-platform native mobile applications. It eliminates a lot of mundane platform-specific work that would otherwise need to be done multiple times (and in different ways), and it lets me focus on the actual business value that my mobile application is intended to provide. The reality of most…
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Blogs|Apr 22, 2015

Implementing John Conway’s Game of Life in Xamarin Forms

John Conway’s Game of Life, presented to the world in the October 1970 issue of Scientific American magazine, is one of the most popular computer simulations of all time. In it, you draw a pattern of cells in a 2-dimensional grid. Then you “evolve” the cells from one generation to the next. Whether a cell…
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Blogs|Apr 18, 2015

Supercharging Xamarin Forms with Custom Renderers, Part 4

If you’ve read the previous posts in this series, you’re aware that custom renderers are the keys that unlock the doors to advanced customizations in Xamarin Forms. In Part 1, I presented custom renderers for rounding the corners of and placing borders around Button controls. In Part 2, I used custom renderers to stylize the…
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