In The Hand Ltd
I’ve been asked a number of times about the process to ask for Bluetooth permission for your app. I’ve been meaning to create something reusable for some time but it has languished on the To Do list for rather too long. I recently noticed that as of .NET 8.0, MAUI will incorporate a Bluetooth permission […]
I was recently looking at migrating some code from Xamarin Forms to Uno Platform and one of the big changes when moving from Xamarin Forms to .NET 6 and later is a move towards using Microsoft.Extensions.DependencyInjection on all flavours of .NET. The key difference between this approach and DependencyService is that you have one shot […]
There is a particular issue when writing any code which will run on Android which presents external UI through an Intent or uses broadcasts in that you need to have a reference to the current Activity. I covered this in my last post. Following on from that I moved the code to a new library […]
Natively, Android apps are built around activities. These are distinct parts of an application which include UI and are designed to perform a particular task. Android allows you to start activities and pass data between them. A number of system dialogs are just activities which run and return a result. Across Platforms When using a […]
I’ve been working on adding macOS support to 32feet.NET and there are two frameworks in macOS for Classic Bluetooth – IOBluetooth and IOBluetoothUI. I soon discovered that neither of these had bindings in the standard Xamarin.Mac package which is referenced by all Xamarin Mac applications. I decided to build binding libraries for both APIs and […]
An ongoing issue with 32feet.NET is that it wouldn’t work inside Unity. The reason is that the System.Net.Sockets classes behave slightly differently in the Mono runtime to the desktop .NET framework and you can’t create a Socket using the Bluetooth specific address family. In order to work around the issue it was necessary to P/Invoke […]
Xamarin Forms doesn’t have a specific PasswordBox control – instead you use the Entry (Think TextBox) and set IsPassword to true. Normally this works as expected and provides a masked entry box. However there is a known issue on Windows Runtime (Phone and Desktop) where AutoSuggest and Auto Capitalisation are not disabled for a Password […]
In case you missed it there is a great blog post on .NET 4.6 which is a part of Windows 10. Among the various performance and Hi-DPI improvements there are some more subtle enhancements. Perhaps as a nod to Microsoft’s new openness to other platforms there are some helper methods on DateTimeOffset for converting to […]
Recently Xamarin Forms has been expanded to support Windows Phone 8.1 and Windows 8.1. There are instructions online for adding a Windows Phone 8.1 app to your solution and plugging it all together here:- http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/windows/getting-started/phone/ However there is a small omission which will lead to a build error – #6 tells you to remove the […]
Firstly, just to clarify, I don’t rap – this is a post about a useful Remote Desktop server for OSX. Wait, I hear you cry, you’re a Windows developer! Well that is true but I also use Xamarin to produce apps for iOS and Android and to build and deploy iOS apps you have to […]
In The Hand Ltd 