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…

Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Jesse Liberty on Yet Another Podcast about a variety of topics, ranging from Azure Functions, Alexa skills, Azure Mobile Center, F#, and more. Check it out here: Yet Another Podcast – #168: Greg Shackles Enjoy!…

Since it's been a long time since I've updated FloatLabeledEntry I thought it would be fun to make a quick little enhancement to add designer support so that it can be used in storyboards. You can head on over to NuGet and update to version 1.1.0 to get it. Right now I've just made the label colors editable in the designer, since unfortunately there's no support for editing the font property in Xamarin at…

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…

There are a lot of ways to approach building APIs for your apps, and no shortage of arguments that ensue whenever discussing them. One of the more standard approaches is to go with a RESTful design (cue the obligatory argument on what this actually means...), which has its advantages but can also lead to needing to make several requests to get the data you want, and can sometimes have a negative impact on mobile performance. Similarly,…