I’m speaking At DevIntersections. Get $50 off…
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Your First Mobile Application With Xamarin.Forms – a new Pluralsight Course
Pleased and proud to announce my latest Pluralsight Course…
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Learning Xamarin.Forms – Part 5: ListView
In Part 4 of this series we created a new Master/Detail project. In this part, we’re going to zero in on one view on one page… but what a view it is!
This series is based on my Pluralsight Course: Building Your First Mobile Application with Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio 2017
ListView
Because we are using the out of the box Master/Detail project, and because that project uses some advanced techniques, taking it apart won’t be simple, but it will be valuable.
Azure For Developers – Part 3: Deploying from Visual Studio
This is part 3 of an ongoing series on Azure for Developers, based on a set of forthcoming videos from LinkedIn Learning
In Part 2 of this series, we looked at creating an application in the Azure Portal. More common is to create your application in Visual Studio and then to deploy it to Azure. We’ll look at that now.
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Azure For Developers – Part 2: Your First App Service
This is part 2 of an ongoing series on Azure for Developers, based on a set of forthcoming videos from LinkedIn Learning
In Part 1 of this series, we began to look at some of the ways to “chunk” the various parts of Azure, and focused in on PaaS (Platform as a Service). Let’s get started on our first App Service.
Open the Portal and log in as described in Part 1. On the left, click App Services. At the moment, you don’t have any, so click Create App Service. This opens a long menu of App Services. Scroll through and see what is available.
Click on ASP.NET Starter. That brings up a review “blade.” click Create This will bring up the ASP.NET Starter Web App blade, where you can configure your starter app. Fill in a name. To avoid conflicts I typically begin my application names with a couple letters followed by a dash, followed by the name. For example, here I might use jl-firstApp.
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Learning Xamarin.Forms – Part 4: Layout and Views
This series begins with an overview here
This series is based on my Pluralsight Course: Building Your First Mobile Application with Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio 2017
Layout
Xamarin.Forms has a number of “Layout” controls that can contain other controls (views) and help you with positioning those views on the page. There are a number of different layouts available to you, including:
- ContentView
- ScrollView
- Frame
- TemplatedView
- StackLayout
- AbsoluteLayout
- RelativeLayout
- GridLayout
For the first number of blog posts in this series, we’ll be using the StackLayout (one view on top of another or one view next to another) and the GridLayout (similar to an HTML table)
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Azure For Developers – Part 1: Scratching the Surface
This is part 1 of an ongoing series on Azure for Developers, based on a set of forthcoming videos from LinkedIn Learning.
Azure is big…
…really big. There is so much to it, that getting started can be totally daunting.
Let me start by saying that there is a lot of literature, documentation, videos, etc. on Azure; much of it free on the Azure home page
The problem is that there is so much documentation that again, it is hard to know where to start. In addition, Azure is a moving target. It seems that each week brings new features, or changes to the existing interface to Azure (for example, the Portal, discussed below).
Because Azure is so big, it is terribly difficult to drop into the documentation, where you will see sentences like this: “Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to build, package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices.”
Say what? (Don’t get me wrong, the documentation is fantastic, and incredibly well written… it is just that it can be difficult to understand anything until you understand everything. That is why I’m going to take a very narrow, developer-oriented, step by step approach.
Learning Xamarin.Forms – Part 3: Navigation
This series begins with an overview here
In Part 2 we considered MVVM
This series is based on my Pluralsight Course: Building Your First Mobile Application with Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio 2017
Navigation
Just about any serious mobile application will have two or more “pages.” (We’re going to refer to pages throughout this series, though that is less meaningful in mobile apps than it is in, for example, desktop applications).
The starting point for Xamarin.Forms navigation is with the Navigation service. To see how this works, let’s create a new Xamarin.Forms (blank) application named NavigationDemo.
Learning Xamarin.Forms – Part 2: MVVM
I think many would argue that discussing MVVM is premature in part 2 of a discussion on Xamarin.Forms. My counter argument is that it is important to start out with best practices, and MVVM is the pattern of choice for Xamarin.Forms
Note, this blog post is based on my Pluralsight Course
OK, What Is MVVM?
MVVM was created (or more accurately, it evolved from previous patterns) along with the development of WPF and later, Silverlight. Projects that use XAML for the development of a User Interface are particularly good candidates for this pattern.
MVVM is nothing more (and nothing less!) than a way to create a clean separation of concerns among the various classes of your app, and to ensure that your app is testable and that dependencies are minimized or eliminated.
MVVM stands for Model – View – ViewModel. This implies a separation of your code into the domain-relevant data (the Model) and the representation of data (the View) and finally, the logic (sometimes called the business logic) of your program (the ViewModel)
Learning Xamarin.Forms – Part 1 – Overview
About this series
This post begins a series in which I will introduce Xamarin.Forms, put it in context and then teach all you need to know to go from absolute beginner to intermediate/advanced Xamarin.Forms programmer. I assume no prior mobile programming experience, though you will need to know C#.
This series is based on my new Pluralsight Course: Building Your First Mobile Application with Xamarin.Forms and Visual Studio 2017
What Is Xamarin.Forms?
My guess is that if you are reading this you probably know, so I’ll be brief:
- Native Xamarin allows you to create native iOS and Android (and other) apps in C#, writing the User Interface individually for each platform
- Xamarin.Forms allows you to create native iOS and Android (and other) apps in C# with a shared User Interface.
With Xamarin.Forms you write to a common set of “controls” or “views” and these are translated to native controls when the program is created. Xamarin.Forms applications are indistinguishable from native applications because, by the time they hit the phone, they are native apps.
New Course: Source Code Control With Git Using SourceTree
(Click on image to go to course)
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