Thursday, June 13, 2019

Test Xamarin Forms app for Android 10 and iOS 13

Google and Apple have both released their new OS for mobile. Google with Android Q and Apple with iOS 13.  Have a quick look at the new features of iOS 13 and of Android Q.

I work on Xamarin Forms and I was eager to test my app on the new releases. So these steps are specific to Xamarin development with Visual Studio on Windows and Visual Studio for Mac.

Let's start with iOS.

iOS 13 Setup

To use the iOS 13 simulator, you would need to install xCode 11 beta. You can download this from the apple developer website. 

Once you install the XCode 11 beta you can configure the new simulators for iOS 13. 

If you open with Visual Studio it will not show you the iOS 13 simulators for your iOS project. To make them available, we would need to change the SDK to point to xCode-beta. To change the SDK location Goto Visual Studio - Preferences - Projects - SDK Locations - Apple and change the Xcode location to xCode 11 beta as shown in the image below. 


Apple SDK location

You will need to restart Visual Studio.

Monday, January 7, 2019

4th day with Xamarin

The 3rd day of Xamarin was spent configuring MVVM, Dependency Injection and a Dialog Service in the application. Also, I had a working application for both Android and iOS.

Now, that I have a working app I would like to set up CI/CD for my Android and iOS apps.

I am going to use AppCenter to build and distribute my app. Check out video "Continuous Integration With App Center Build for Xamarin Apps" on Microsoft Developers channel.

You can create a free account on AppCenter but, it will have some restrictions. However, If you are going to use it as an Individual then it should be enough for you.


If you follow the video you should be able to create a project for both Android and iOS project.

Wednesday, January 2, 2019

3rd day with Xamarin

The second day with Xamarin was spent setting up the permissions and Azure build Pipeline to build the Android and iOS projects.

Today I am planning to do
  • MVVM in the app 
  • Setting up Dependency Injection 
  • Dialog Service

MVVM


MVVM is Model-View-ViewModel and you can read about it on Microsoft website Here. It is an application pattern that allows us to build de-coupled components. I would suggest reading through the article to get a better understanding of  MVVM components before reading ahead.

Monday, December 10, 2018

2nd day with Xamarin

The first day with Xamarin I able to create a new Xamarin app and integrated google maps and able to run it in the simulator.

If you read the previous post. I did make it work on the simulator using the Plugin.Permissions. However, when I ran the application in the simulator it did work but I did not see any messages requesting for access permissions.

So, I am going to try to run the app on the device and see what happens.

The device I am going to use is Moto X running Android version 6.0.1. I am not gonna bore you with how to setup the device as you may not be going to use the same device. Just the basic stuff you need

  • USB drivers for the device
  • A USB cable with data pins. Normal charging cables won't work.
  • Put the device in the debug mode.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

1st day with Xamarin

I started to create an app in Xamarin as I have been reading creating-mobile-apps-xamarin-forms by Microsoft. As a beginner, I can say that it has taught me well.

Today I thought to try and spin up a simple app using Xamarin Forms. Let's start from the start I will be putting up all the issues, bus, Environment Setup steps I had to do while doing it.

Let’s get started.

Few conventions

  • #: Issue faced and resolution

First I would suggest going through my friend Kael's blogs to get you started with the Android SDK setup. Few things which are important for Simulator.