Taming the Android Activity, Part 3

In the parts one and two of this series I covered how to use a Fragment to maintain state through configuration changes and how to launch a new Activity and wait for its results using async/await. In the third part I take this a step further and show how to get direct access to a new (in-process) Activity instance so that you can call methods on it, use events, or whatever else you need to do.

Blurred Image Renderer for Xamarin.Forms

In response to a recent Xamarin forum post I spent some time building a custom Xamarin.Forms renderer for a blurred image on iOS and Android. Read on to learn how I did it.

Taming The Android Activity, Part 2

In part one of this series I covered how to use a Fragment to maintain state through configuration changes. In part two I will cover how to launch a new Activity (in-process or not) and wait for its results using C#'s async/await feature.

Objective-C Categories in Xamarin.iOS

One of the cool things about Objective-C is how dynamic it is. This includes the ability to add methods to classes that already exist even at runtime. Categories are a feature of Objective-C that can be used to do all kinds of things that might otherwise be difficult or impossible, but until very recently this feature has been inaccessible from C#. This post will explain what categories are, what they're used for, how to use them in C# using Xamarin.iOS 8.10, and a useful example.

Taming The Android Activity, Part 1

The Activity is a core building block in an Android application, but in some cases it can be a pain to work with. This article is part one of a series showing how to deal with some of the complexities of the Activity in a clean way using some of the capabilities of C# available to Xamarin.Android developers.

Decoupling Views In Multi-Screen Sequences

In my previous post I explained how to decouple individual views and why that is a good idea. In this post I will take that idea further and explain how to use this concept in more advanced UX scenarios involving multi-screen sequences.

Decoupling Views

One of the most common design mistakes that I see people make in mobile applications is coupling their views together. In this post I will explain why this is a problem and how to avoid it.

Checking For iOS Layout Gotchas With Roslyn

Markus Schiller at App & Mensch did something awesome. He created a Roslyn Diagnostic Analyzer to look for one of my iOS Layout Gotchas. Check out his blog post explaining how.

Roslyn is going to be a boon to static code analysis, and I can't wait to see what else we can do with it.

View Controller Lifecycle

New iOS developers are often confused about the life cycle of view controllers. In this post I will walk through the various life cycle methods and explain how to use them and some common mistakes to avoid.