James Montemagno

Principal Manager, Tech PM, Developer Community

James Montemagno is a Principal Lead Program Manager for Developer Community at Microsoft. He has been a .NET developer since 2005, working in a wide range of industries including game development, printer software, and web services. Prior to becoming a Principal Program Manager, James was a professional mobile developer and has now been crafting apps since 2011 with Xamarin. In his spare time, he is most likely cycling around Seattle or guzzling gallons of coffee at a local coffee shop. He co-hosts the weekly development podcast Merge Conflict http://mergeconflict.fm.

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Getting Started with C# 7

August 2nd, 2017
The releases of Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac introduced two spectacular new IDEs to develop mobile applications, cloud workloads, and introduced us to a world of powerful new C# features with the release of C# 7. I recently blogged about my favorite new feature, expression bodied members, and even recorded an entire podcast about how awesome C# 7 is. In this blog post, I'll show you how to get started with C# 7 and some features that you can take advantage of right away in your mobile apps.

Mastering the Android Support Libraries

July 11th, 2017
Android Support Libraries are an essential part to every Android application and you'll find them absolutely everywhere. The Support Libraries offer developers the ability to add the latest and greatest features of Android to their application while maintaining backward compatibility with older versions of Android. As new versions of the Android SDK continue to roll out, so do updates to the Support Libraries; keeping them up-to-date and installing the correct versions is an important (and sometimes frustrating) part of Android development. This blog post will help demystify the Support Libraries and help you upgrade to the latest versions.

Podcast: Exploring the Android Support Libraries & Google Play Services

May 5th, 2017
In this episode of the Xamarin Podcast, I'm joined by Jon Dick of the Xamarin components team to discuss the Android Support Libraries and Google Play Services. Don't miss this informative episode covering what these important libraries are, why they're necessary, what's new, and how to use them in your apps today. Be sure to download today's episode from your favorite podcasting app!

Requesting Reviews with iOS 10.3’s SKStoreReviewController

April 20th, 2017
Asking your users to review your app is never easy, and there was never an intuitive way to do it. Developers were left to constantly prompt users to review the app with pop ups or by putting a Leave Review button somewhere hidden in the settings, as I have done for many years (here is a quick blog to show you how to do it). Starting on iOS 10.3 this has all changed with the introduction of the SKStoreReviewController, which controls the process of requesting App Store ratings and reviews from your users with a streamlined, in-app dialog.

Securing Web Requests with TLS 1.2

April 4th, 2017
In my years of development, one thing I've learned for certain is that securing your network requests is an essential part of any mobile application. A few weeks ago one of my own applications stopped working due to a change to a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate on meetup.com's authentication server, which made me realize the important role Transport Layer Security (TLS) plays in securing app and server requests.

Catch Up on Visual Studio 2017 and Visual Studio for Mac with Channel 9

March 23rd, 2017
I was honored to be part of the Visual Studio 2017 keynote, where I got to highlight how easy it is to build beautiful, cross-platform native iOS, Android, and Windows apps in C# with Xamarin and Visual Studio 2017. Visual Studio 2017 brings an exciting range of new features and improvements for developers, along with a brand new preview of Visual Studio for Mac.

Simplified Android Keystore Signature Discovery

March 14th, 2017
The Android Keystore is at the heart of every Android application. It enables us to sign our applications and ship them to the app store securely, but also holds additional signature information needed for Google Play services and other APIs, such as Facebook. This new extension makes it super simple to get access to everything you need to sign your app!

.NET Standard Libraries in Xamarin Studio

March 1st, 2017
Xamarin projects have supported .NET Standard Libraries in both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio since their original release in order to enable developers to share code more easily. Consuming .NET Standard NuGets and Assemblies is completely seamless, and with Xamarin Studio 6.2, developers can create and open .NET Standard projects.

Consumable In-App Purchases

February 15th, 2017
If you are building a game or application with content that needs to be purchased multiple times, you'll need to integrate consumable in-app purchases (IAPs) into your application. In my previous IAP blog post, I covered the basics of setting up your app for IAP transactions, adding the IAP items to Google Play and iTunes Connect, and introduced you to the In-App Billing Plugin for Xamarin that greatly simplifies the process of adding IAP to your application's code. Today, we'll take a look at consumables and how they offer a slight tweak to the development process.

Integrating In-App Purchases in Mobile Apps

February 2nd, 2017
Developers often need to integrate monetization to generate revenue when developing mobile apps. There are several ways to monetize apps, but at some point you may want to introduce In-App Purchases, or IAPs, into your app. IAPs can be used in several ways that could apply to your apps, such as adding features, removing ads, or buying in-game currency. Let's take an in-depth look at IAPs and how to add them to mobile apps.