Jesse Liberty

In the previous posting I started a new project in Xamarin.Forms that I will reproduce in
iOS and Android in coming posts.

Today, we’ll take a look at the second page in the Xamarin.Forms version: ListTasksPage.

This lists the tasks that you entered and persisted in the previous posting.

Continue reading →

Last week we looked at a simple example of customizing a control and creating a custom renderer.  This week we go a bit deeper.  Our goal is to give a BoxView a border, and to adjust that border dynamically.

[ This content is taken from my forthcoming Pluralsight course ]

As noted last week, we start with an Element and a Renderer.  In our case, the element will be a SpecialBoxView.  Unlike last week, however, this custom class will have contents; specifically the properties we want to be able to bind to.

Continue reading →

Xamarin.Forms is a killer framework, and it has a wide variety of very flexible controls.  But sometimes you run into restrictions on the control that you really need to override.  The answer to this dilemma is to create a customized control.

To understand how to create a customized control, you must first understand that every control consists of an element (e.g., a button) and a renderer (the platform-specific code that tells the phone how to draw the element.

The trick to customizing a control is to override one or more methods in the renderer.  To see this at work, we’re going to start very easy with a shaded button.  Future postings will tackle more complex rendering.

[This blog post is based on material from my forthcoming Pluralsight course]

Continue reading →

Working with SQLite as your database in Xamarin.Forms is not difficult but it does involve some specific steps: 

• Add the SQLite-.Net PCL library to all three projects
• Create the ISQLite interface
• Add a singleton to your app class
• Open your database in the appropriate directory and use DependencyService to access it
• Create your table(s)
• Write your CRUD operations

Piece of cake.

In this and the next posting I’ll go over these steps in detail and in context.

Continue reading →

In the previous posting, I set up the ProjectTracker solution, including the xUnit testing folders.   We talk a lot about test-driven design, but the truth is that we (most of us?) start with an overall architecture in mind prior to writing anything.

For ProjectTracker, I know I’m going to have a project model, and I know that it will contain a name and a way to get the total duration of work on the project, as well as “segments” which will hold each “chunk” of work.

I also know that I’ll have multiple projects but that at most one will be active at a time.

Now, the specifics of how to put that into code… well that I’m going to determine test-first:

Continue reading →