Creating a Scorecard App with .NET MAUI – Part 1: Initial Creation

This is the first in a series of blogs about creating an app using .NET MAUI. All code can be found in my GitHub repo. I haven’t yet had the chance to create a full app using .NET MAUI, the evolution of Xamarin Forms. So I thought a scorecard app would be a good starting […]

Using ngrok to debug your API’s from your Xamarin Forms App

Sometimes, you want to see what is going on when your nice shiny new App is supposed to connect to your awesome API and get some data from it/to it. Unfortunately – your App will (mostly) not connect to your API when it’s running on localhost. Android provides a nice little get around by using […]

Xamarin Forms Converters

I love Converters in Xamarin Forms. They give you a nice, easy way to display something through your XAML based on a value in your binding data. And they are so easy to set up. All converters inherit from IValueConverter and must implement two methods: Convert and ConvertBack.

Mimicking a modal in Xamarin.Forms

Control Templates are a versatile element in Xamarin Forms. A good description can be found in the Microsoft documentation. Recently I wanted to try and save some screen space on an app where I have some help text that, especially on smaller phones, takes up more room than I would like. Using a Control Template […]

Xamarin.Forms & a Cheat Flyout

I’ve been brought in to help on a customer app, written in Xamarin Forms. The app is pretty much complete and ready to go live. On the home page, I was asked to add a flyout menu. Normally, a flyout menu would suggest a Master-Detail setup or even the new AppShell, but the app is […]

Xamarin.Forms Shell – Expanding with tabs

In my previous post, I set up a Xamarin Forms Shell project and had the basic Flyout Menu working. Now I want to expand on that. This post will look at how tabs are implemented with Shell. I’ve fleshed out my Flyout Menu items to include the remaining categories for the puzzles, adding the associated […]

Xamarin.Forms Shell – Getting Started

With the release of Xamarin Forms 4.0 and Shell enabling developers to build a navigable app more quickly, I thought I’d take the opportunity to convert one of my apps written in Apache Cordova into Xamarin Forms and see whether Shell would make things simpler. To start with, I create a new Xamarin Forms project […]

Data Lake Analytics and Nullable DateTime fields

My first solo foray into Data Lake Analytics on Azure had me stumped for a while so I thought I’d share in case anyone came across the same problem. I had created a CSV file from some live data extracted from SQL Server which contained several nullable DateTime fields. The upload to Azure Data Lake […]

Test Driven Development – Getting Started

Test Driven Development (TDD) has been around for years, but I have only recently started using it myself. Previously when working on a project I would write the code for the project, then create unit tests after. With TDD you reverse your thinking. Think less about the code you intend to write and instead about […]

Creating Octopus Templates*

*Also known as “how to miss the obvious” I have been doing a lot of work with Octopus lately, as our company has started to use it for automated deployment of projects to our staging and UAT environments. Unfortunately, a lot of live deployments to customers require sending packages for them to deploy, rather than […]