A simple developer's journey

Custom entry with renderers For my Xamarin Forms project I needed to render an 'Entry' control with a bottom border of a specific color. There are several possibilities but I will show you mine. For that, I used renderers. iOS one is particularly not trivial. The wished result look like that: iOS Renderer [assembly: ExportRenderer(typeof(ExtDatePicker), typeof(ExtDatePickerRenderer))] namespace MyCompany.iOS.Renderers { public class ExtDatePickerRenderer : DatePickerRenderer { protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<DatePicker> e) { base.OnElementChanged(e); // Need to connect to Sizechanged event because first render time, Entry has no size (-1). if (e.NewElement != null) e.NewElement.SizeChanged += (obj, args) => { var xamEl = obj as DatePicker; if (xamEl == null) ret

Xamarin.Forms.Map component Xamarin.Forms.Maps is a great component. It gives you the possibility to deal with maps and geolocation problematics in a few lines of code. This "Map" component internally use native map controls for iOS, Android and Windows Phone: You can display and locate "Pins" with custom information on the map. I suggest you to read the reference links above. Display pins with custom information The problem But actually, in my mind, the Map control miss a very important feature: --> Tap  on the map to get the relative location (to put a new pin, to get the relative address...) The workaround Use renderers Actually, to solve this problem, we need to implement custom renderers for iOS and Android. Maybe this feature will be implemented later by Xamarin... So here is my solution (3 code files below): - ExtMap.cs : overloaded map control that will contain our "Tapped" event to get the tapped location

Recently, I had to deal with custom Buttons in my Android application. So I designed custom renderers to render it. Unfortunately, I encountered a strange behavior with the text alignment of my buttons. This happens when the button changes of state : - Originally the button's text is centered - When you click it, the text moves to the left See images below:   Before / after the button click After investigating, I found a solution to my problem. In my Android custom button renderer, I had to overwrite a specific method:  ChildDrawableStateChanged public class ExtButtonRenderer : ViewRenderer<Extbutton, global::android.widget.button> { ... public override void ChildDrawableStateChanged(Android.Views.View child) { base.ChildDrawableStateChanged(child); if (Control != null) Control.Text = Control.Text; } ... } That's all ! Related links: Custom renderers: http://developer.xamarin.com/guides

Recently I had some difficulties to embed custom fonts in my applications. Specially with the iOS application that was crashing with no message (while it was working for the Android version). In fact, it was a font issue. So in this post I will show you some tips to embed quickly custom fonts in both your Android & iOS apps. 1- Select your fonts The first step is to get some cool fonts you want to use. You'll maybe use (free) fonts from various websites like: www.1001freefonts.com www.dafont.com 2- Set font files properties In your solution, include your fonts files: iOS:  Create a subfolder (in the the 'Resources' directory) where to embed the fonts Build Action = BundleResource & "Copy Always" Android : Create a subfolder in the 'Assets' directory where to embed the fonts: Build Action = "AndroidAsset" & "Copy Always" 3- iOS application: edit your plist file With iOS you need to specify the e