If you want to simulate the multitouch with the Xamarin Android Player, testing – for example – pinch and zoom feature, simply press ALT key + left mouse button on the emulator. Check what happens:
Enjoy!
This is the first post about the new features included in Xamarin.Forms 2.0, released with Xamarin 4 a week ago.
In the previous versions of Xamarin.Forms when you made some mistakes in XAML, like a wrong property or a wrong value, you can’t catch the error until start a new debug session. Xamarin.Forms 2.0 adds a new attribute that allows checking XAML at compile-time. You have only add that code in the AssemblyInfo.cs file:
using Xamarin.Forms.Xaml;
[assembly: XamlCompilation(XamlCompilationOptions.Compile)]
Now you got a compile-time error in case of wrong XAML:
The compile-time xaml check is not the only benefit of XamlCompilation. Precompiled XAML will produce a smaller app file, since the XAMLs are no more embedded, and thus a much more fast app by removing the XAML load time.
Amazing!
Last friday I’ve made a talk about Xamarin in Catania, Sicily, during the EtnaDev 2015 event. I can say that was really fun to take part of that and was really great to meet the OrangeDotNet user group members. They are really amazing!
So, great friends, great food, great weather, great talks … what else?
Thank you guys, see you next year!
In my talks, speaking about Xamarin.Forms, the most common question is: “Wonderful technology! But … when Xamarin.Forms is the preferred choice? Why (and when) I should use it instead of native apps?”
My answer: “It depends!”
Xamarin.Forms is really a great and fast way to develop mobile apps by abstracting controls in XAML, a simple description on what we want to do. That controls are then “magically rendered” in native controls. With this in mind, it’s impossible to abstract all the things completely, so sometimes it’s necessary to extend the framework with custom renderers. This means that you must know the target OS environment. No way.
In his post “How to success with Xamarin Forms”, Daniel Hindrikes says that you must don’t care if your app “doesn’t look perfect from the beginning. When you have created your app and built all the business logic, then you can start to look at how to make the app perfect.”. While I totally agree with him, I would add another step: after building all the business logic and the first UI version, evaluate if Xamarin.Forms is the right the framework for your app.
For the six year in a row I was awarded as Microsoft MVP. Thanks to all the italian communities and, obviously, thanks to the DotNetSide community.
And now, we are ready for the next year!
Just after the Microsoft announcement, Xamarin has released its first preview for iOS and Android developers. To start using the SDK you can download it from the Xamarin Component Store.
Check out documentation and samples here.
Xamarin announcement here.
The Italian Community Days is, since 2006, the most important event organized by all the .NET italian communities. 3 Days of sessions, labs, workshop, 5 parallels tracks, a lot of speaker, a lot of people, a great event!
For the first time in Italy me, and my friend Pasquale Fersini, have made a presentation about Xamarin Robotics, an incoming library that “simplifies the task of building complex .NET Microframework (MF) powered robots and communicating with them from within Xamarin apps”.
The library split in two main platform stack:
Following the slides from our talk:
Enjoy!
Sparrow is one of the most currently used framework to develop games for iOS and this book is absolutely a nice guide to start with it. Sparrow is an easy-to-use framework and is intended for 2D games and multimedia applications with built-in support for animation, managing objects on the screen, and touch support.
This book offer a good practical introduction to the various concepts of game development applied by the Sparrow framework, starting from “how to move objects in a scene” to “how we can use artificial intelligence”. The book is for beginners in game development, this means that you have to already to know XCode, Objective-C and the principles of object-oriented programming. All code samples are written only in Objective-C, no one is written in Swift.
Here the complete list of table of contents:
Every chapter ends with three questions about what you have learned (correct answers are reported in the last pages of the book), a good way to test your improvements.
The book is well written and provide a good and complete guide to all the game development stages, from concept to the process of publish our game. If you want to learn the Sparrow iOS Game Framework, this is absolutely a book for you.
Last saturday I’ve talked about Xamarin.Forms at the first Developers Open Talks organized in Bari. A great event with a lot of people interested and fashinated about the Xamarin technology. Here the slides I’ve used during the talk (in italian):
In this brand new blog, I would like to start with a new series of books review. If you are looking for a fast and easy way to learn and apply immediately what you are learning, then iOS Development with Xamarin Cookbook is the perfect book for you.
This book is a cookbook, it follows the simple pattern Problem-Solution with the addition of a deep explaination about the implementation and why it works in that way. As any other Packt publication, the style is clean and fluid. I’ve read the e-book version, then I can’t say a lot about the printed version.
Topics in the book are well organized. The first few chapters explain in an easily way the basics of iOS development, usage of development tools and the different concepts of iOS, and this makes the book suitable for beginners. More detailed topics are covered in the second part of the book. Personally, I would have liked to read a more extensive discussion of multitasking and others recipes in the Graphics and Animations chapter.
Finally, the book covers all the topics in a perfect way so it could be useful for both beginners and intermediates who look for fast solutions and expand on some themes.