We've been using Xamarin's UITest framework quite a bit, both for standard test automation as well as some other tasks (more on that to come). Things had been working great, but after some recent upgrades to the latest versions of Xcode and the iOS tools, we were seeing our automated tests get stuck in one specific spot in the app's flow. Nothing particularly interesting was happening in this spot: it was making a network call out…
Extending Xamarin Studio's mdtool For Fun and Profit
In Xamarin Studio, if you look in the About dialog you'll find all sorts of information about the versions for all the various tools involved in building your apps. There's so much more to compiling an app than the version of Xamarin you have installed. There's the version of OS X, Android tools, Xcode, etc. Any one of these things is a significant data point in any app release you have. Every time we do a…
Polyglot Apps for iOS, Android and Beyond
It's well known by now that you can use C# to write apps for iOS and Android by leveraging Xamarin tools, especially if you've been following this column. It's also well documented that you can take a lot of that C# over to other platforms such as Windows Phone and Windows Store, but did you know you can use F#, Visual Basic, Razor, HTML, and JavaScript in your apps, as well? View the full post over…
Auto-Formatting Text Inputs with MvvmCross and Value Converters
Value converters are one of the powerful features you get with an MVVM framework, and can be a lot of fun to experiment with. In my app I have many different types of text entry, and wanted to have an easy way to do automatic formatting for things like phone numbers and credit card numbers. Value converters to the rescue! Achieving this behavior using value converters was actually quite trivial. Here’s an example of a…
Elegant UITextField Placeholders in Xamarin.iOS
Every so often you come across something related to UI/UX that seems so simple, elegant, and obvious, that you can’t help but think “how did I not think of this?”. That’s how I felt when I stumbled on a new repository from my good friend Jared Verdi called JVFloatLabeledTextField, based on a design by Matt D. Smith. Naturally I wanted this in my own apps, so I decided to port it over to…