Author: Hussain N. Abbasi

Hussain N. Abbasihttp://intelliabb.comHussain Abbasi is the Head of Technology at ChaiOne. He is a content-creator, blogger, speaker, streamer, and software engineer with over a decade of experience developing mobile, web, cloud, and desktop applications. Hussain is a well-known community leader in the mobile development space. He is a co-organizer of Houston Xamarin User Group and the organizer for Houston Flutter User Group in Houston area and authors and contributes to several OSS projects. You can find his shenanigans at hussainabbasi.com. Or his blog at intelliAbb.com. You can find him on twitter @HussainNAbbasi.

Pro Tip: Useful Code Snippets For Your Xamarin.Forms Development

Code snippets are a hidden gem in Visual Studio that most of us do not pay much attention to. Utilizing them correctly can increase productivity when we have a lot to code. In Visual Studio, code snippets are available for multiple programming languages e.g. C#, F#, XML, HTML, CSS, Python, etc. They are extremely useful when we have a bunch of boiler plate code for our properties, constructors, bindable properties, etc.

Code snippets can be a huge topic, but in this post, I will list some of the XAML and C# code snippets useful when developing Xamarin.Forms mobile applications.

In this post,

Snippets
Creating Code Snippets
C# Examples
XAML Examples
Export Templates

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Card View For Xamarin.Forms Using Custom Layouts

In this post, we will learn how to create a card view with child views using custom layouts. Creating a custom card unifies the experience for the user, gives us more control on the design of the app and speeds up the cross-platform UI/UX workflows. It is easy to get a simple, yet flexible, card introduced in your app.

Update: Get this card as part of IntelliAbb Xamarin Controls NuGet package.

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Inject Static Libraries And Plugins In Xamarin (Prism.Forms)

When using a container for dependency injection in your Xamarin.Forms app, you may find yourself trying to use a plugin or library that is static that you want to register with your container. Having statics in our code makes it hard to test and causes coupling. In this post, I will demonstrate using Prism.Forms how to inject a static plugin or library that may or may not expose an abstraction.

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Tutorial: BottomNavigationView and ViewPager in Xamarin.Android

Android introduced BottomNavigationView in API 25.1 and I like it. To be honest, one of the biggest difference between iOS and Android for me was the placement of tabs. I enjoyed ActionBar tabs when they were a thing and loved the fact that I could swipe the tabs as I wished. But, when I used the bottom tabs in Android recently, I fell in love instantly. In today’s world of giant smartphones, one can only reach the bottom of the device during one-handed operations, so I loved the fact that I could use my hardware back button to navigate back and switch between tabs all with a single thumb.

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Instant Duas now available on Android

Get your daily supplications and reminders in on your Android phones. Get Instant Duas on Google Play Store.

Fortress of the Muslim (Hisnul Muslim) in the palm of your hand. Search, Read, Listen, and Share close to 200 duas in a clean and beautiful design.

Using Prism.Forms EventAggregator with Xamarin.Forms

If you are building a Xamarin.Forms app, it should be a no-brainer that you use MVVM pattern for your code base. It should also be a no-brainer that you give Prism.Forms a try. It makes development fast and code easy to maintain with its plethora of built-in services such for navigation, dependency injection, alerts, events, etc.

I recently added a sample to Prism’s samples library on how to use cross-platform EventAggregator using Prism.Forms in a Xamarin.Forms app.

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Get Xamarin Certified Now. For less.

The most deterrent factor for anyone trying to get Xamarin certifiedhas been the upfront cost of enrolling in to Xamarin University. It used to be $1995/developer per year paid annually, which went down to $999 late 2016. This was a whopping 50% discount which garnered interest of many potential certification candidates. But let’s be honest, a grand is still very much out of question for a young developer who might still be in college or an experienced developer who just can’t afford that upfront, specially when some of other technical certification such as Microsoft’s are much cheaper.

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Handling Multiple Taps in Xamarin.Forms on Android

Sometimes in this beautiful world of cross-platform mobile development, we come across a problem that makes no sense at first. But after some StackOverflow surfing and Xamarin/MSDN research, we may find a way to tackle that problem. In some scenarios, there are multiple solutions and we have to decide which approach works best given our situation. In this post, I will demonstrate one of these problems, rather scenarios. The multi-tap monstrosity on Android when using Xamarin.Forms.

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Getting started with Xamarin

“How do I get started with Xamarin?”

I get asked this question a lot lately, thanks to Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin. Less than one month after Microsoft announced the Xamarin acquisition at Build 2016, interest in Xamarin went up 3 times.

Xamarin Evolve 2016 Keynote

This is good for developers who want to play with Xamarin and build their mobile skill set using their .NET competencies, and those who want to switch to cross-platform mobile development from native side. Not to mention, the businesses that were not able to deliver their mobile apps in multiple platforms all at once due to cost and resources. Now they can with lower cost and in a lot of cases, with existing technical resources available, specially if they are a Microsoft shop.

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Using FragmentTabHost with ViewPager

On my last project, I wanted to design one of the screens to look like Google Newsstand’s swiping tabs that were also scrollable and had an image between the ActionBar and the tabs.

Google News Screenshot

I did not find any simple and useful solution to this that I could easily follow and implement in my app. So I created my own. Here’s how it looks like.

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