A simple developer's journey

New 'Xamarin' menu available If you are a Xamarin developer, you will be happy to know that the "full" Xamarin Platform's documentation is now available on microsoft.com website.  This website looks really clear , so it should be easy to find what you need... Microsoft documentation portal:   https://docs.microsoft.com If you select the "Xamarin" menu, you will be redirected to the following page: This is the entry point to many chapters describing the platform like: - technical / language documentation - UI (with XAML) documentation but you will also find: - deployement tutorials - mobile continuous delivery tutorials - data / database articles - code samples - and so much more ! So let's go coding Xamarin !

Xaml build error For one of my Xamarin project, I just had this build error: This error was related to my XAML code : Unable to cast object of type 'Xamarin.Forms.Xaml.ElementNode' to type 'Xamarin.Forms.Xaml.ValueNode' After searching for a long 'moment', I just didn't understand what happened... My investigation (this process can help you :p) So I decided to remove a large part of my xaml code and then re-add it little by little. Each step I tried to compile to see when error occurs. So In my case, I determined that the piece of code that was going wrong was the following: Ok, it was my mistake but in the code editor, Visual Studio didn't tell me anything. I was trying to bind an event ( I though it was a property ) to a DateTime property... What is not possible. Hope this helps someone to save a few minutes :)

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 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...