Blogs|May 19, 2015

Lighting up Native Platform Features in Xamarin Forms – Part 1

In my last few posts I introduced a simple app that lets you browse the various built-in font variations supported by Xamarin Forms. If you recall, the application adopted a “stack navigation” design, which is quite common in mobile applications. However, there is one small flaw with our implementation so far – on the iOS…
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wintellect-blogs|May 16, 2015

Hey, Who Stole All My Memory?

Sometimes a little piece of seemingly innocuous code can cause a significant amount of trouble: Doesn’t look like much, but I’m sure we have all written something like this and paid it no mind. In fact, most of the time, code like this isn’t a problem. This little method becomes a problem when that object…
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wintellect-blogs|May 14, 2015

Combining F# and Xamarin Forms to Create Mobile Applications

While we certainly have been busy getting our hands dirty with Xamarin I’ve been doing some of my own. However, I’ve been messing around with using Xamarin with F#. I mentioned in a previous post that F# can be used very well for enterprise applications. Here’s an in depth look at F# with Xamarin for…
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how-to|May 12, 2015

Azure Bits #1 – Up and Running

  As Steve Porter mentioned in his blog post, How Wintellect Uses Microsoft Azure, we are making pretty heavy use of many offerings in the Azure toolset for our internal and client-facing web properties here at Wintellect and have been doing so from the early days of Azure. As we continue to experiment with new…
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wintellect-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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wintellect-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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wintellect-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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xamarin-development|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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wintellect-blogs|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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