Flutter Sample Part 2 – Page navigation

Continuing on from the previous post about my first steps with Flutter, it seemed a natural next step to try and add navigation to a second screen which would show some further details about the photo. So first thing to do is create a new screen, in this case called ImageDetailsScreen. In the constructor above …

Flutter first steps

I've started looking at Flutter, the new cross-platform SDK for developing mobile apps from Google. As I've being doing Xamarin for a while, and Flutter is now a competitor backed by Google, I thought it might be a good idea to take a closer look. There are plenty of claims about easy it is to …

SkiaSharp and Custom Fonts in Xamarin Forms

The documentation for using custom fonts (or fonts packaged with your app) in Xamarin Forms details the support for including a custom font in the Application Assets and how to set the FontFamily property of a Label control. Unfortunately if your app is using SkiaSharp and you want to draw text using the SKTypeFace class, …

Debugging Xamarin Forms

Another niggly Xamarin annoyance. For some reason I couldn't figure out, none of my breakpoints were being hit in Visual Studio. Thankfully found the answer here

SplitView without Light Dismiss layer

I had an issue recently in a UWP application that used a SplitView. The requirement for this application was to allow the SplitView to be expanded while still allowing the main content to be interactive and more importantly, for the list in the main content to be scrollable. However, normally when the SplitView pane is …

UWP MediaPlayerElement and separate Audio Output

The new MediaPlayerElement control in the Anniversary update features a handy way to allow synchronising the playback of multiple videos. Previously when I attempted to synchronise two videos with two separate MediaElement controls, I waited until the MediaOpened event was raised by both controls before calling Play() on both, hoping that that would be sufficient …

Seamless Page Navigation in UWP Application 3

Proceeding from the last article on this, it's great to see that with the Anniversary Update there is now a much simpler way to animate elements across pages when navigating from one to another. In the updated Windows Composition examples there's a ConnectedAnimationService which seems like it can be used to animate not only Images …

Migrating a Windows Phone 8.0 app to Xamarin Forms, Part 5 – Using Map and Location Services

(Continuted from the previous post on converting a Windows Phone 8.0 app to Xamarin Forms) On the parking ticket details screen a map control displays a map pin at the location of the parked car. In Xamarin Forms, as was done before with access to the Camera and an SQLite connection, access to the phone …

Migrating a Windows Phone 8.0 app to Xamarin Forms, Part 4 – Using the Camera

(Continuted from the previous post on converting a Windows Phone 8.0 app to Xamarin Forms) In my WP app, the parking ticket details page displays a photo associated with the ticket, taken with the phone's camera. In addition a thumbnail version of this photo is displayed on the main ticket list page. In Xamarin Forms, …

Migrating a Windows Phone 8.0 app to Xamarin Forms, Part 3 – Using SQLite

(Continuted from the previous post on converting a Windows Phone 8.0 app to Xamarin Forms) In my WP app, the app's parking ticket model data was stored in an database table in SQLite. On WP I used Sqlite.Net to allow using LINQ style queries to access and insert data. In the Xamarin Forms app it's …