Progrunning

App Store Connect Api with Azure DevOps and fastlane

Apple has enforced 2FA for all App Store Connect users, which broke my iOS Azure DevOps CD pipeline

Xamarin.Forms Android App Bundle (aab) DevOps YAML Pipeline

In my previous post I went through the process of creating a DevOps CD pipeline for Xamarin.Forms Android applications. I've received some feedback that even after following the blog post to the letter, build pipeline wasn't working for some of you. That got me thinking...

Xamarin.Forms

Create Xamarin.Forms Android App Bundle (aab) and release it to Google Play Store with DevOps

I've decided to update my DevOps CD pipeline for one of my applications to produce the aab package instead of the apk. Why you might ask? Mainly because I wanted to decrease the size of my app package, which in turn should potentially result in more downloads and/or less uninstalls.

Xamarin

How to upload .ipa app package to Apple Store Connect

Recently Apple decided to discontinue Application Loader and therefore took the only GUI tool from the developers to upload their application packages to TestFlight/Apple Store.

Xamarin.Forms

Xamarin.Forms - Working with Visual States (Part I - Binding)

There's multiple ways of handling visual states of your app pages, views or controls. Depending on how you utilize these techniques, they all might be fine to use. Moreover, you don't need to stick with just one way of handling your states, they all have there pros and cons.

Xamarin.Forms

Xamarin.Forms - Android App Performance and Package Size Reduction #XamarinChallenge

In the spirit of the #XamarinChallenge and the fact that I've recently been dealing with reducing the size of my application, I've decided to see what are the other means of getting your app package to decrease in size and potentially improving its performance .

Xamarin.Forms

Fixing Xamarin.Forms linker issues

We all want our app packages to be as small as possible. Quite efficient way of decreasing the size of the app bundle is to use Linker. That's usually easier said than done.

Xamarin.Forms

Creating custom Xamarin.Forms loading indicator with animations

It's inevitable that, as a mobile app developer, you will need to show a loading indicator in your app. These are mostly used to inform users that the application needs to do some "thinking" and the users are required to wait until the process is completed.

Xamarin.Forms

Reusing Xamarin.Forms StaticResources

It's important to be consistent with how you use spacing, fonts, colors and other resources across your entire app. You should aim to have exactly the same Margins or Paddings, use the same font families and the same Color palette on every page of your app.

Xamarin.Forms

Organising Xamarin.Forms StaticResources

Having just one XAML ResourceDictionary file with all of your globally available StaticResources defined in it can easily expand to enormous sizes and get very messy. This makes every developer's life unnecessarily harder.

Xamarin.Forms

Customizing Frame corner radius with Xamarin.Forms Android and iOS

I've recently needed to customize Frame corner radius to have just the top or bottom corners rounded, whereas the rest corners should stay rectangular. The problem is that CornerRadius property on a Frame element takes a float as the argument, meaning that the value will apply to all of the corners.

Xamarin.Forms

Best way to create a splash screen in Xamarin.Forms Android project

It is vital for every mobile app to have some sort of indication of the fact that the app has been started and it's loading the content. Ideally, the waiting time would be reduced to 0 and user would see the landing page of the app straight after hitting the app's icon.

Xamarin.Forms

Xamarin.Forms - Hiding label on the TabbedPage tabs (Part I - Android)

In my previous post I have explained how to deal with selected and unselected state of the TabbedPage tabs. This post will be a continuation on the topic of TabbedPage customisation. I will show you how to remove the label from the tabs on Android.

Xamarin.Forms

Xamarin.Forms – Selected and Unselected colors for iOS and Android TabbedPage tabs

It’s very simple to set selected and unselected colors for Android devices. You can take advantage of the available platform specifics. Whereas on iOS it's a bit more complex.

Xamarin

MvvmCross, SyncFusion SfChart and UWP .NET Native tool chain compilation

I ran into an issue where my Xamarin.Forms UWP app, which uses MvvmCross and SyncFusion SfCharts stopped showing charts once I created the app package for the Windows Store (i.e. created *.appxupload package with .NET native tool chain).

Android

Google Play Store – Can’t install app (Error code: -504)

I did a brief search on the Internet what could be causing such behaviour and majority of posts were pointing at some issues with cached data by Google Play Store and/or Google Play Services somehow breaking installation process. They were suggesting cleaning cache of these to solve the problem.

How to use SQLite database in Windows 10 UWP applications

This topic is going to be sort of continuation of my previous post about BuildIt SQLite, where I show how to use it with code examples

SQLite Wrapper for Windows 10 UWP applications

The idea for SQLite Wrapper was purely dictated by the demand. We, at BuiltToRoam – company that I work at – are dealing with all types of universal application projects (Universal Apps for Windows 8.0-8.1 and Windows Phone 8.0-8.1 or UWP for Windows 10) that are required to use database(s)

Requested Windows Runtime type ‘Lumia.Imaging.StorageFileImageSource’ is not registered

This issue stroke me suddenly and without any reason (at least I couldn’t find one). One day code that rotates picture, which was captured from camera, started to throw exceptions. I was really surprised, because I didn’t change much in the project since the time it was working just fine..

MdilXapCompile.exe failed with error code 1004

Another blog post about my struggles with weird compilation errors of universal app solution.

Windows Phone - Image control and its Source property

Recently I was struggling with trying to set images (being a byte[] and/or being an Asset file and/or being an IsolatedStorage file) as an Image.Source.

Windows Phone positioning ListView scrollbar, GridView scrollbar, ScrollViewer scrollbar at the edge of the screen

Almost all of the Windows Phone apps have got a small offset on left and right side. I believe that, it’s got something to do with better user experience. As a layman in this matter, I can just guess that it makes human eye more comfortable to look at content which doesn’t touch edges

Blend for Visual Studio - Design view is unavailable for x64 and ARM target platforms

It annoys me the same way it annoys you, but I don’t think there’s any way to get rid of it, permanently. There is a quick cure though, because it happens only when you open a project in Visual Studio that has its configuration set to x64 or ARM

Windows Phone not able to receive MMS messages aka Get media content now (<x_amount> KB) or Can't send message Try again

The other day I got prompted or just checked that update for my Windows Phone 8.1 is available. I wasn’t thinking much and just clicked Update. Everything when smoothly, no problems with installation whatsoever.

One of the most annoying behaviours of Visual Studios search dialog - removing unwanted "default" values for Visual Studio search di

Have you found yourself frustrated about Visual Studio acting retarded on the values specified in search dialog? I sure did. It was so frustrating when I wanted to search through whole project, no matter what file extensions and without ‘Word match’ option turned on.