Introduction

Before you actually start developing a mobile app, you have to make various decisions. This includes, for example, the choice of the framework. At the time of creating the app which will be transformed, there was a requirement to create an app for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. That is why the decision to use Xamarin Native was made at the time. It was possible to share the business logic between the three apps and only the UI for the different platforms had to be developed separately. Over time, the choice of Xamarin Native was questioned, so that a platform…

This blog post is a part of Luis Matos’s Xamarin Month, where this months topic is Code Snippets. For more information take a look at this blog and see the list of all the other authors who are participating. There you can find a lot of cool snippets to speed-up your development process.

What are code snippets?

Code snippets are small blocks of reusable code that can be inserted in a code file using a right-click menu (context menu) command or a combination of hotkeys. …

Introduction

I’ve already written a short story about using FontAwesome within an Xamarin.Forms app. With the latest release of Xamarin.Forms it is way easier to add a custom font to your application. I will show you step by step how this is done with Xamarin.Forms 4.5 or later.

Add font to Xamarin.Forms app

First of all we need to get a font. For my example I will use a Google Font, like Indie Flower. Just visit the page and download the file by using the Download family link in the upper right corner.

Just unpack the zip file and you will find the ttf file in…

Introduction

If you are working with Xamarin.Forms to create a mobile application for Android and/or iOS you have lots of predefined controls which you can easily integrate into your app. But sometimes these controls don’t fit your actual needs and so you need to think about creating your own controls.

In this blog post I want to show you how I’m creating a custom control using the default controls for Xamarin.Forms which work on Android and iOS.

Initials View

For my own project I was searching for a solution that shows the initials of a person inside of a colored circle. By default…

Introduction

If you are working with Xamarin.Forms to create a mobile application for Android and/or iOS you have lots of predefined controls which you can easily integrate into your app. But sometimes these controls don’t fit your actual needs and so you need to think about creating your own controls.

In this blog post I want to show you how I’m creating a custom control using the default controls for Xamarin.Forms which work on Android and iOS.

Labeled Switch

Xamarin.Forms has an control included which is called Switch. We want to extend this control by adding a title and a detail label to…

I’m sure that most of you have heard about the language idiom “A picture is worth a thousand words”. With this in mind it is sometimes easier to show an icon instead of writing text. For example a plus icon is associated with adding a new item or a trash bin is associated with deleting something. In this article I want to show you how we can use FontAwesome in our Xamarin.Forms application. As the name suggests, FontAwesome is a font consisting of icons. …

In this article I will give a brief introduction in simple animations which you can easily use within your Xamarin.Forms application. But first of all let’s talk about the question why we should use animation in our app. Sometimes an app needs some time to get all the necessary data which should be shown on a page, but this will take maybe a little bit due to a limited internet connection or parsing large json files. In this case it would be perfect to show some kind of loading animation. For sure there is the ActivityIndicator class on Xamarin.Forms, but…

If you start creating a mobile app these days, one of your goal will be that the app is runnable and available many different platforms like Android, iOS or even UWP. In this case I will prefer the usage of Xamarin.Forms, because the approach of Xamarin.Forms is to minimize platform specific code and write your business logic and UI layer only once.

Sometimes this isn’t easy for example if you need to know the current position of the user. Here are some limitations because each platform has its own approach and its own API. You must also set the permissions…