It's been a few years now since Xamarin.Forms was released into the world, and it continues to be a popular and evolving framework choice for Xamarin developers. Later this year Microsoft is planning to release Xamarin.Forms 3.0, its third major release of the framework, which is slated to ship with a lot of exciting features and improvements. While it certainly won't be comprehensive, as the feature set is large and still in motion,…

If you're building a mobile app, there's a lot of things you need to set up. How do you build and distribute your app? How do you authenticate your users? Do you have some sort of backend set up to store your data? How are you monitoring errors and usage? The list goes on and on. Microsoft has a lot of different offerings targeting these very needs. There's Xamarin Insights for crash reporting and monitoring, Test…

A couple years back I wrote an article covering how you could leverage many different languages in your Xamarin apps. In it, I included an F# portable class library that was referenced by the main application written in C#. That's still a completely valid approach, but I thought it was a good time to follow that up with a look at how, these days, you can use F# to build the entire app, and why it's…

In the early days of Xamarin.Forms, if you wanted to start customizing any of the built-in controls in ways beyond what were explicitly exposed on those controls, you probably found yourself creating a lot of custom renderers. Renderers can be a great way to hook into the Xamarin.Forms rendering pipeline and inject your own customizations, but it can quickly get unwieldy if you do it a lot, and is often a larger hammer than…

Recently I was reading a blog post by Scott Guthrie about the new syntax for HTML encoding output in ASP.NET 4, where he said the following: This enables you to default to always using <%: %> code nuggets instead of <%= %> code blocks within your applications. If you want to be really hardcore you can even create a build rule that searches your application looking for <%= %> usages and flags any cases it…