As the Pull Request to Xamarin Forms continues in its holding pattern I thought about what else I can do with it. I had neglected the original codebase for a while but I’ve spent some more time with it recently providing some much needed updates. The latest which was added to NuGet today adds a […]
In creating an IOBluetooth binding for Xamarin Mac I learned about Objective Sharpie and binding libraries. There is little documentation on this but it is fairly similar to Xamarin iOS and for that there is a lot more source material. The output from Objective Sharpie gives you binding definitions which you can use in a […]
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Update to Xamarin Forms MediaElement
Things are progressing with the Xamarin Forms Pull Request but it’s a big change and I’ve had feedback on how quickly (or not) it’s going. For this reason I’ve decided to post an update to InTheHand.Forms to port some of the advances and compile for Xamarin Forms 4.0. The new release is marked as a […]
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32feet.NET and Audio
There are a few different Bluetooth profiles which handle audio, but they all work in a very similar way. There are two connections open between the client (usually a phone) and the server (some kind of audio device such as a speaker or car entertainment system). The first of these is an Rfcomm channel which […]
In the previous Alexa post I talked about building a List skill to integrate with a third-party list provider. This gives you a mechanism to react to changes in Alexa’s lists and write them to your external provider, but what about implementing a two-way sync? When you setup account linking for your skill the user […]
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WebAuthenticationBroker and GitHub
WebAuthenticationBroker is a component of Windows 10 which facilitates Oauth authentication with services from a client app. It handles the presentation and navigation of the authentication pages and returns control to your app along with a returned token or an error code. It’s a UWP API and integrates neatly with modern apps, however what may […]
When I was building my Microsoft To-do Alexa skill I found Matteo’s series of blog posts on Alexa + Azure very useful. However I needed to go beyond the functionality described there and knew I’d need to delve deeper into the Alexa Skills Kit documentation. The first item I thought I’d blog about is the […]
Following on from Part 1, this post will briefly discuss the Android approach to Fast Renderers. Again there isn’t really any documentation for control builders, but there are examples within the Xamarin Forms source to work from. Xamarin Android like iOS uses an IVisualElementRenderer interface which is very similar to the iOS equivalent. The differences […]
A Xamarin Forms Renderer provides the device-specific logic to display a Xamarin Forms control using platform-native UI. Traditionally this was done using the ViewRenderer<T,T> base class. What this actually creates in the UI hierarchy is two controls – the outer being a basic place-holder providing layout logic and the inner control being the desired native […]
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Talking About Tasks
Back in 2010 Microsoft released Windows Phone 7. It was a huge change from the Pocket PC/Windows Mobile OS which had preceded it and while it brought a modern UI and app-store infrastructure it missed a number of pieces of core functionality from the older phones. One of these was support for Tasks. I set […]
In The Hand Ltd 