David Britch

Validation in Xamarin.Forms Enterprise Apps

August 8th, 2017

We released an eBook this past May on Enterprise Application Patterns using Xamarin.Forms. The eBook focuses on core patterns and architectural guidance for developing Xamarin.Forms enterprise apps that are easier to test, maintain, and evolve. Guidance is provided on how to implement the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern, dependency ...

Developing Enterprise Apps using Xamarin.Forms

May 3rd, 2017

After many years working with developers of enterprise apps, we know that they face several challenges, including: With these in mind, it's important to build apps that are both flexible and that can be easily modified or extended over time. Designing for such flexibility can be difficult, as it requires an architecture that ...

Creating Platform-Specifics in Xamarin.Forms

November 30th, 2016

Recently on the blog, Pierce introduced Platform-Specifics, which allow you to consume functionality that’s only available on a specific platform without having to implementing custom renderers or effects. With the use of a simple Fluent API, you can make platform-specific tweaks from shared code in Xamarin.Forms. At the time of ...

Building Custom Animations in Xamarin.Forms

August 9th, 2016

Xamarin.Forms includes its own animation infrastructure that allows for easy creation of simple animations, while also being versatile enough to create complex animations. Previously, we explored creating and cancelling animations using the ViewExtensions class, and saw it in action in an app. In this blog post, I’ll explore using the...

Creating Animations with Xamarin.Forms

August 3rd, 2016

Animations are a great way to add polish to your user interface and make your app stand out. Xamarin.Forms includes its own animation infrastructure that allows for easy creation of simple animations, while also being versatile enough to create complex animations. The Xamarin.Forms animation classes target different properties of visual ...

App Theming with Xamarin.Forms Control Templates

March 8th, 2016

Controls have different properties, such as BackgroundColor and TextColor, that can define aspects of the control's appearance. These properties can be set using styles, which can be changed at runtime in order to implement basic theming. We have already looked at theming applications with styles. However, styles don't maintain a clean ...

Introduction to XAML

February 23rd, 2016

XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) allows you to define user interfaces in Xamarin.Forms applications using markup rather than code. Using XAML, you can define user interfaces using all of the Xamarin.Forms views, layouts, and pages, as well as custom classes. XAML has several advantages over equivalent code: There is ...

Turn Events into Commands with Behaviors

February 2nd, 2016

Utilizing data binding in mobile apps can greatly simplify development by automatically synchronizing an app’s data to its user interface with minimal set up. Previously, we looked at the basics of data binding, and then explored some more advanced data binding scenarios where values are formatted and converted as they are passed ...

Simplifying Events with Commanding

January 27th, 2016

Utilizing data binding in Xamarin.Forms applications can greatly simplify app development by automatically synchronizing an app's data to its user interface with very little work. Previously, we took a look at setting up your project to begin data binding and then saw it in action in an app. We then explored more advanced data binding ...

Data Binding Tips and Tricks for iOS, Android, and Windows

January 20th, 2016

Utilizing data binding in Xamarin.Forms applications can greatly simplify application development by automatically synchronizing app data to the user interface with very little work. Previously, we took a look at setting up your project to begin data binding and then saw it in action in an app. In this blog post, I’m going to explore ...