Previously in this column, I've written about unit testing iOS apps, but what can you do when unit tests just won't cut it? If you're a Web developer you're probably already familiar with libraries like Selenium, which allow you to drive automated testing of your Web app's front-end. Xamarin offers a library named Xamarin.UITest that enable the similar possibilities for your iOS and Android apps. In addition to being able to run those tests locally…

Like many others right now, we're in the process of migrating our testing infrastructure from TestFlight to HockeyApp before the TestFlight shutdown next week. As we did in the past with Xamarin and HipChat, we also open sourced the FAKE helper we made for uploading builds to HockeyApp. For example, to upload a build to HockeyApp and then send a notification to a room in HipChat you can do: HockeyApp (fun p -> {p with…

When navigating to a new view controller in iOS there are two primary ways to do so: pushing it to the navigation stack (the standard way), or "presenting" it which results in a modal-like experience where the new view comes up from the bottom of the screen. This interaction can be useful to convey context to the user, since it feels like a modal interaction that will return them to the current screen afterwards,…

In my last couple posts on this subject I've mentioned using fragments on Android for navigation. By default MvvmCross will use activities on Android, but as I hope you've learned by now, you can use presenters to customize this sort of thing as much as you'd like. I've found it very difficult (or impossible) to properly achieve the types of fine-grained navigation control I want in my apps by using activities for all my views, which…

In my last presenter post I showed how you can use presentation hints to tell the presenter to clear the view stack prior to showing the next view. That is probably the most common custom navigation pattern I've seen used in MvvmCross apps, but I also wanted to note another similar pattern I've used as well. When I'm mapping out the navigation paths through my apps, I try to be very conscious of the state of…