Xamarin, mobile, cross-platform
At the AI Builders Brisbane July 2025 Meetup , I gave a 2025 edition of my 'How Not to Translate a Videogame' talk from 2019 . The talk explored how recent advances in AI, especially agentic capabilities, improved the scope and quality of the outcomes possible from "hobby-level" effort into automated translation of a relatively obscure Japanese visual novel, ' 12Riven ' - the final game in a…
In 2023, the life of a C# iOS developer is pretty good. We have apple silicon, and dotnet supports it. The legacy Xamarin toolchain is not arm64 friendly and probably never will be, but once you migrate to the new stuff, you'll find yourself in an all-arm64 development nirvana, where builds zip away silently, and the hot, noisy days of intel past are but a faint memory. Everything is as it should…
For as long as I can remember, Xamarin.Android has given developers the ability to choose between using JIT and AOT compilation for their applications. JIT'ed builds are far smaller, but carry the overhead of runtime method compilation. AOT builds are much larger, but generally more performant - often by a substantial margin. An old post by Adam Pedley is still a good reference if you want to know…
Dependency Injection (DI) might be one of the more polarising topics in the Xamarin community. In general, you're either on board with it and use it religiously - or - you're wrong ⁽ʲᵘˢᵗ ᵏᶦᵈᵈᶦⁿᵍ⁾. The price for the privilege of a DI container is some overhead - both at startup, when service registrations are made, and during runtime, as dependencies are resolved. In this post, I'll look a little…
At the Melbourne Xamarin Meetup November 2019 Meetup , I gave a second run of my " (Some of) What's new in iOS13 " talk, which (appropriately) covers new features and frameworks in the latest version of iOS. Since the talk included a number of new demos, this one ended up with the title "(More of) What's new in iOS13" . You can see more about the original talk in my earlier post , which covered…
A few months back, I wrote a post for Progress/Telerik devblogs on building offline machine learning models for ML.NET's quickly and easily using the Model Builder GUI. The piece briefly introduces ML.NET and then follows with a walkthrough of training an interaction prediction engine for New York taxi fares. That post was finally published this month, so you can read all about it over at Telerik…
iOS13 includes a large number of exciting new features, some of which I outlined in a previous post . One addition in the release that has received less attention is the new option for UITableView and UICollectionView data source configuration - the 'diffable data source'. The aim of diffable data sources is to greatly simplify the interactions between a dataset and UITableView / UICollectionView…
"Native or Forms"? is one of those fundamental questions that almost every team looking to start a Xamarin-based project needs to make a call on. The question implies an either/or arrangement, and the reality is that the majority of Xamarin projects do end up being either 'all Native' or 'all Forms'. In the recently released special .NET Core 3 Focus edition of CODE Magazine , I wrote about a…
At the Queensland C# Mobile Developers meetup group 's August 2019 Meetup , I gave a talk entitled "(Some of) What's new in iOS13" , covering - appropriately - some of the new features iOS13 brings us as Xamarin developers. Given there are such a large number of additions in iOS13, I decided to focus on four areas - Dark Mode , PencilKit , ARKit and CoreML . Most of the functionality was covered…
As you might have read, Xamarin recently released the first of its Xcode 11 previews , which provide early access to in-progress Xamarin bindings for the new iOS and macOS SDKs. These are useful if you want to start working with new and updated frameworks like Sign in with Apple , PencilKit , SoundAnalysis and ARKit3 - all of which except for the latter are baked into the first preview. Even if…
When it comes to UI for Xamarin.Forms, there's no denying that using XAML to create them (rather than code) is the widespread community preference. Sample a set of posts from Planet Xamarin or submissions for the recent Visual and CollectionView challenges and you'll find examples of coded UI are far and few between. In a recent talk (see end of post) I presented a somewhat tongue-in-cheek…
At the Queensland C# Mobile Developers meetup group 's May 2019 Meetup , I gave a talk on the recently announced Mono interpreter and mixed-mode execution support for Xamarin.iOS entitled "Practical (and not so practical) Uses for the New Mono Interpreter" . The talk covered a little of the basic theory behind the function of the interpreter in Xamarin.iOS, but focused mainly on demonstrations of…
It's no secret that a big fan of LINQPad . Though I originally started out using it for data manipulation and visualisation in a previous life, over time my LINQPad queries have become more and more sophisticated, with high levels of interactivity and extensive use of LINQPad's layout and helper functions (some examples of more gratuitous LINQPad queries at the end of this post). LINQPad comes…
Over the last month or two, Xamarin has run two challenges involving completing small tasks with upcoming Xamarin.Forms 4 features - the Visual Challenge and the CollectionView Challenge . As a relatively staunch "Xamarin Native" developer that finds himself using progressively more Forms Embedding as time passes, I thought these would be good opportunities to check out the new features and catch…
At the Melbourne Xamarin Meetup April 2019 Meetup , I gave a third (!) rendition of my talk from last year on ARKit - Apple's Augmented Reality (AR) - framework for mobile. You can see more about the original talk on my earlier post . This time the meetup was streamed on Twitch, potentially signalling my transition from chatroom memer to full-time streamer (but probably not). It is also now…