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Your first WebGL.NET app

WebGL.NET? WebGL.NET borns as our WebGL low-level bindings for Wave Engine 3.0. Thanks to Mono's effort on taking the CLR into WebAssembly (WASM), WebGL.NET serves as a binding to consume the WebGL API directly from C# (or the .NET language you prefer, actually). WebGL.NET covers the official WebGL 1.0 and 2.0 specifications, offering a more suitable scenario for day-to-day .NET developers. This guide will help you creating a WASM app which draws a triangle with WebGL, all of this programmed in C# and running on top of .NET. Previous knowledge on WebGL will make this even easier; however, we're thinking here on people which's coming new to the OpenGL world. You must have installed a modern .NET Core SDK, and can use Visual...

WebGL.NET? WebGL.NET borns as...

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Mask animation with Xamarin.iOS and AutoLayout

In modern app development, we can't think only of writing good code and full of features applications. We also have to create beautiful user experiences, and there is where animations take part in the game. Most common animations will change elements size, position or visibility to bring them to life.   In one of our recent projects, a design team member had the idea of user interface elements that should be partially cropped depending on a score. Take a look to the image on the left that illustrates the concept.   There's probably more than one way to do it. Our solution was to make use of maskView property, available since iOS 8. As documentation says:   [eltd_blockquote text="The view’s alpha channel determines how much of...

In modern app development, we ...

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Setting up Xamarin.iOS builds in Visual Studio Team Services (formerly Visual Studio Online) through MacinCloud, and a bonus (HockeyApp)

A few weeks ago we needed to setup CI/CD builds in HealthClinic.biz private repo (here is the public one), hosted in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS from now on), for the Patients app made with Xamarin.iOS. Since the suite includes a Cordoba app for iOS as well, such was being built through MacinCloud, so the agent pool was already configured (if not, here can be found how to). Nowadays, VSTS offers a Xamarin.iOS build step where, if the agent pools support such capability, wraps everything needed to generate the final APP/IPA (1st for Simulator, OK for CI; 2nd for device, needed for CD) just selecting a Visual Studio Solution to build. The issue is, what happens with all the other steps...

A few weeks ago we needed to s...

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Input Validation Approach for Windows 10 UAP, Android and iOS

You have probably faced the problem of validating input fields in your app forms. As you may know, each platform provides different tools to validate text, time and other type of entries. What happens if we need a common solution for our favorite target platforms: Windows 10 UAP, Android and iOS? As DRY principle lovers, we always think about reusing as many code artifacts as possible. The ideal solution would be one compatible for all these platforms. When working with Xamarin and thinking of code reusing, the pattern that comes to mind is MVVM: a pattern that has been always related with many .NET technologies. Our experience with .NET Framework technologies linked with MVVM like WPF or Silverlight, which provided some built-in...

You have probably faced the pr...

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Grial UIKit review

A few weeks ago we got access to the Regular version of Grial UIKit for Xamarin.Forms. Grial UIKit comes with more than 30 awesome Xamarin.Forms' XAML screens which showcase this Xamarin Component, as well as, support for customization capabilities of Xamarin default controls, providing and unified Grial Theme that looks and feels great on every platform. Introduction Here, in Plain Concepts, we are always eager to leverage every platform in which we develop our apps for. We try to know as close as we could the strengths and weaknesses of the native UI frameworks of our platform apps, its customization capabilities, etc...

A few weeks ago we got access...

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Colors in iOS: Same Value, Different Tonality

While working on a native Xamarin.iOS app, I noticed a difference between the same color applied through source code to the navigation bar and through Interface Builder to the background of a scroll view. There was a small difference between both colors' tonality, although I had entered the same RGB values on both places. You can appreciate the difference on this small sample app, where pure red (#ff0000) is used on both views: When you enter an RGB value in code, through an UIColor for instance, it's rendered fine. The color you see on the emulator/device is correct, and should match the one on the design (take care not to have a semi-transparent layer on top of it, or something similar). [code...

While working on a native Xama...

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Initial Steps with Xamarin.UITest for Hybrid Apps

Recently we have used Xamarin.UITest to validate the UI of an app developed with Cordova, and Test Cloud to run such on a lot of physical devices. Assuming you have already experience creating a Xamarin.UITest project, the very first thing you will need to play with is running an emulator or a physical device to deploy the app and run the tests. Such is done with this very simple piece of code: [code language="csharp"] public class AppInitializer { public static IApp StartApp(Platform platform, Xamarin.UITest.Configuration.AppDataMode mode = Xamarin.UITest.Configuration.AppDataMode.Auto) { if (platform == Platform.Android) { return ConfigureApp .Android .EnableLocalScreenshots() .ApkFile("../../../Apps/myapp.apk") .StartApp(mode); } return ConfigureApp .iOS .EnableLocalScreenshots() .AppBundle("../../../Apps/myapp.app") .StartApp(mode); } } [/code] Please take note we are going to test the UI of a multiplatform app developed with Cordova for iOS and Android, so we decided to have a single...

Recently we have used Xamarin....

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Continuous delivery for Xamarin.iOS projects with TeamCity, FAKE and HockeyApp

With this new post we are going to learn how to add continuous delivery to a Xamarin.iOS project. Main components are FAKE as build automation system, TeamCity as continuous integration and deployment server and HockeyApp as storage, distribution and notification service of our client deliveries.         The advantages of continuous delivery are huge, provides visibility to projects that make use of it and speed up their development process, apart from saving time turning the delivery management into an easy task. I suppose the reader of this article has some experience configuring projects and build configurations in TeamCity. These are the ingredients and cooking procedure: -A Mac/Mac Mini with OSX and Xamarin.iOS installed. (Check you have mono and curl in your PATH environment variable) -Install TeamCity Agent in OSX. (I suggest you to install it as a login item, to ensure it gets executed...

With this new post we are goi...

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Linker experiences with Xamarin.iOS

We experienced some problems in one of our latest projects with Xamarin.iOS, the kind of problems that are normally accompanied by a big headache. While everything worked like a charm over iOS simulator, something started to crash when running the app over a physical device. It was a simple app consuming data from a web service and being displayed via Master Detail pages with standard views so, what could be wrong? Thanks to output log while debugging over device, we found that there were some errors - with their stack trace information - from System.Data.Services.Client assembly. That component calls some reflection methods and this is why it was failing, just take a look to the next image. If you have a...

We experienced some problems i...

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Leveraging PDF417.mobi Android component to Xamarin.Android

As we can see here Xamarin.Android brings us the possibility to bind a Java library and use it in our Xamarin app.
This feature allow us to use Java libraries in our Xamarin projects, and reuse our self libs or components of thirds parts.
In one of our lasts projects we needed to integrate a specific bar code scanner component in a Xamarin.Android app.
Here we will talk about, how we have created a Xamarin.Android control using http://pdf417.mobi/ component in a Xamarin.Android app.