With a white label app platform like ours at Olo, generating screenshots for every app we publish can be a real chore. It makes sense for us to use simulators/emulators to do this, given the large number of device sizes we need to generate for, so it's not something we can easily farm out to a non-engineer to do manually without them spending an obscene amount of time on it. If you haven't noticed already,…

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…

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…

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…

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…