Categories
Xamarin

Building a Better Button

I’ve used the Xamarin.Forms Button in a number of projects and while it has slowly improved (adding support for images etc) it’s still lacking in a few areas. Recently I needed to add support for wrapping and truncation options and these are mysteriously absent from the stock control. For inspiration I looked at the Label […]

Categories
Xamarin

InTheHand.Forms Updates

I’ve updated the InTheHand.Forms NuGet package with a few new features:- .NET Standard support. Stretch property to define how to handle cropping/zooming of the video to fit the MediaElement size. NaturalVideoWidth and NaturalVideoHeight allow you to adjust your UI based on the actual aspect ratio of a video file at runtime. Removed obsolete OnPlatform2 as […]

Categories
Windows 10 Xamarin

GitHub Latest

While I prepare to refresh my main machine with Windows 10 Creator’s Update and the latest Visual Studio and Xamarin updates I thought I’d throw together a summary of open-source progress since I last blogged:- Since the announcement of CodePlex’s upcoming retirement I’ve been moving projects across to GitHub. 32feet and my Compact Framework archive […]

Categories
Xamarin

Forms Previewer and Custom Controls

Recent versions of Xamarin include the Forms Previewer which generates a live representation of your XAML as it will appear on iOS or Android. I noticed one slight problem when working on my MediaElement control… The Android renderer instantiates a MediaController object. This is a standard Android class but the Forms Previewer would throw an exception […]

Categories
Xamarin

Playing Media with Xamarin Forms

Xamarin Forms has quite a rich set of controls which work natively across platforms however a big gap in the functionality is the ability to play audio or video content. You can create custom controls for Xamarin and from the platform-specific renderers you have full access to the APIs provided by that platform to create […]

Categories
Xamarin

Xamarin-certified

I’ve just completed and passed the exam and am now a Xamarin-certified Mobile developer. Having been working with Xamarin since the days of Mono for Android and MonoTouch I should have probably have got around to doing this earlier. Now it’s done I can relax and concentrate on the important task of making a chocolate […]

Categories
Tizen Windows Xamarin

Pontoon – Yet More Platforms

What started as a Windows project (unifying the then separate Phone and PC APIs) has since expanded through the Xamarin platforms (iOS and Android) and beyond. The latest NuGet package adds Apple tvOS, macOS and the recently announced Tizen .NET Preview. The usual caveat applies that not all platforms support all functionality but there is […]

Categories
Windows Xamarin

Pontoon – Available Functionality

As with the Universal Windows Platform itself, Pontoon has a rich API which supports functionality which may not be available on all platforms. There are two reasons for this – either the platform doesn’t natively support the feature or I just haven’t got around to implementing it yet. There is a simple mechanism to test […]

Categories
Desktop Code Windows Windows Mobile Xamarin

Introducing Pontoon – A flexible bridge to the Universal Windows Platform

I first created the “Charming” libraries for Windows Phone in order to add some APIs which were added to Windows 8 but not available on phone. Many of the early ones replicated the “Charms” related functionality (Sharing/Search/Settings) hence the silly name. When I created version 9 about a year ago I consolidated lots of separate libraries into […]

Categories
Xamarin

Xamarin Forms Navigation Awareness

Xamarin Forms offers a NavigationPage control which allows you to do linear navigation and integrates with the native Back button on Android and Windows. However from the individual Page it isn’t possible to tell how you arrived at the page. I had a situation in a project where I needed to know whether a page […]