Handling Events in the Xamarin MessagingCenter - article

Url: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/12/01/xamarin-messagingcenter.aspx

Tightly coupled systems are a nightmare to deal with. Having references everywhere causes all sorts of problems with reusability. Think about this in the standpoint of mobile systems where we would like to share code between iOS, Android and Windows .NET systems. Having to pass around a reference to a UIViewController or Activity/Fragment so that you can make some type of change can be a nightmare. iOS doesn't understand an Android Activity/Fragment, and Android doesn't understand a UIViewController.

What's a developer to do? Thankfully, there are a couple of answers to this problem. The first, and most obvious, solution is to use standard .NET/C# events. Remember, nearly every feature in the .NET Framework is a part of Xamarin products. The second possible solution is something that is Xamarin.Forms-specific: the Xamarin MessagingCenter, which I'll explore in this article.

Navigation with Xamarin.Forms

Url: https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/06/01/navigation-with-xamarin-forms.aspx

Xamarin Forms was released a bit more than a year ago. Since then, the product has grown, gone through rounds of features and bug fixes, and feels very much like it's ready for use in applications. And since then, mobile apps are no longer relegated to one screen. Mobile apps should work on multiple screens of functionality. And even then, users must be able to navigate between screens in a standard way. In this column, I'll look at how Xamarin Forms can be used to implement the various approaches to navigating on various devices.
Note: In early-to-mid 2014, this column featured articles on standard navigation in iOS and Android, but this column will show how to implement standard navigation with Xamarin.Forms. Also, graphics are not my specialty -- please excuse the graphics.

Startups and Technology Article 1 - Getting Your Application to Market

https://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/06/23/developing-and-selling-apps.aspx

You are a developer.  You are at the top of your game.  You can make bits do magical things over the web.  Your database can run circles around anyone else's. You've got a great job. 

Unfortunately, that job is at a soulless corporation. That company sells widgets that have changed very little in the last 125 years. There is a ceiling for you as a developer at this company. You have users in marketing and production. Some of them you love, some you loathe. You long for something more. 

You hear about people making lots of money by starting product companies, but you aren't quite sure what you have to do. You watch Silicon Valley on HBO. You hear about this thing called Y Combinator. Then, one day it happens, you hit upon a great idea. It's something that you see all kinds of need for. What should you do now?

Data Binding with Xamarin and iOS (iPhone & iPad)

Url: http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/04/01/a-simple-data-binding-trick.aspx

Applications and businesses live on data. Data is what makes a business a business, generates value for customers, and allows a company to generate income. Displaying data to a user is a common operation, especially in mobile. It might be immensely important for a salesperson to get the last bit of information before visiting a client or to display the location of a restaurant via a local consumer-oriented app. In this article, I'll look at the UITableViewController class that allows you to get at and display that data in an iOS app.

test

I Get XAML, You Get XAML, Everyone Gets XAML with Xamarin.Forms

Many of you in the Microsoft .NET Framework world are familiar with XAML. XAML is an XML-based language for working with objects. It has been used extensively in developing UIs in Silverlight, Windows Presentation Foundation and is used in the Windows Runtime. Unfortunately, XAML support isn't a feature that's built into iOS or Android. With the release of the Xamarin cross-platform toolkit, Xamarin.Forms, XAML can now be used with those platforms, as well as Windows Phone.

http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/03/01/everyone-gets-xaml-with-xamarinforms.aspx

Article - Q&A: Xamarin's Jonathan Pryor on Android 5 Lollipop

Article Url:  http://visualstudiomagazine.com/articles/2015/02/09/xamarin-android-5-lollipop.aspx

Jonathan Pryor, a Xamarin.Android Development Lead, was kind enough to take some time out of a busy weekend to answer a few questions regarding Xamarin.Android and the company's support for the new Android 5 Lollipop update. Here's an interview conducted in late 2014.  At the end of this interview, I've also asked two fellow Android developers, Kevin Darty and Stephen Long, to chime in on their opinions of the new Lollipop features.