Whenever we load images from the web, there is a chance that the loading fails. For a better user experience, having a placeholder mechanism ready is essential. In this post, I will show you how I extended my fork of Xamarin.Forms.Nuke to achieve this goal on iOS.

What is Xamarin.Forms.Nuke?

Xamarin.Forms.Nuke is a Xamarin.Forms implementation of Nuke, one of the most advanced image libraries on iOS today. The Xamarin.Forms implementation focuses heavily on caching only, while the original library has a bunch of more features. …

What is glidex.forms?

The glidex.forms library is a Xamarin.Forms implementation of Glide, which is one of the quasi standards for imaging on Android (it is even recommended by Google). Luckily, Jonathan Peppers from Microsoft has a passion to improve Xamarin.Android, and Xamarin.Forms takes a big advantage from that as well. He made the Xamarin.Android Binding library as well as the Xamarin.Forms implementation. Like before with Xamarin.Forms.Nuke, I learned about that library because I am substituting my former image caching solution with Akavache.

Why do we need to extend the library?

If you want to load a placeholder that is stored in the resources of your Android project — there is no…

In this second post of my series about sending push notifications from WordPress to Xamarin apps via Azure, we’ll have a look at the Azure Function that handles our newly created Webhook.

First, let’s have a look at the lineup of this series once again:

• Preparing your WordPress (blog/site)
• Preparing the Azure Function and connect the Webhook (this post)
• Preparing the Notification Hub
• Send the notification to Android
• Send the notification to iOS
• Adding in Xamarin.Forms

Creating a new Azure Function in Visual Studio

The most simple approach to create a new Azure Function (if you already have an Azure account) is adding a new project to your…

It is no secret that push notifications help to keep your users engaged. There are a bunch of options out there if you have a WordPress blog. This is the first post of a new series that shows you to send them from a self-hosted WordPress installation to your Xamarin mobile app via Azure.

Overview

Choosing the “right” solution for sending push notifications isn’t easy if you have a WordPress blog. There are quite a bunch of options to choose from, and the right one for you might differ from my decision. I am using the most generic solution — a…

In this second post of my #XfEffects series, I am going to show you how to make the text of a Label grow and shrink within a defined range, based on the Xamarin.Forms.NamedSize enumeration.

Why do I need this?

When working with text, we often have to deal with some or all of the following:

• dynamic text with different length on every instance
• multiple devices with different screen resolutions
• limited number of lines

As the amount of places where I need to automatically scale the FontSize is steadily increasing within my apps, I had to come up with a solution — the AutoFitFontSizeEffect.

The shared code

Of course…

We finally arrived in 2020 — time to kick off my blogging year as well. With this post, I will show you some of the Visual Studio Extensions I am using frequently and that are making my life as a developer a bit easier.

Xaml Styler

Download Link: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TeamXavalon.XAMLStyler

Project Site: https://github.com/Xavalon/XamlStyler

In Visual Studio 2019, writing XAML normally ends up in very long lines because it does not automatically break into new lines. In May 2019, I discovered the Xaml Styler extension by watching a video on Channel9.

Xaml Styler, even in its default configuration (which I did never change, tbh)…

I finally finished porting my first app ever from Windows Phone to Android and iOS — “Fishing Knots +” is now published in the Google Play Store and Apple Appstore. This post summarizes what I’ve learned during the process of porting.

What’s the app about?

The app is about fishing knots. It sounds boring for most people, but for me, this app made me becoming a developer. I have a somewhat emotional connection to it. It was back in the time when Windows Phone 7 was new and hot. It was a new shiny OS from Microsoft, but it clearly lacked the loads of…

Every now and then, we need to customize our Xamarin.Forms apps to match a theme or other requirements. The Forms API has already a lot of options, but sometimes they aren’t enough. A common practice is to write custom renderers, but with the Effects API, there is another cool kid in town.

The documentation recommends using Effects when we just want to change properties on the underlying native control. I have begun to love Effects as they make my code more readable. With Effects, I always know that there is a platform-specific implementation attached, while that is not obvious when…