Creating a Simple Modal Dialog Form for Xamarin.Forms

I’ve finally managed to get some time to look at the Smite Scoreboard application that I’m using as a vehicle to dive into Xamarin.Forms (XF) and it’s been a fraught time (see bottom of post).

Between incompatible nuget packages, mismatched Windows and iOS configurations and finding that XF didn’t actually support what I wanted to do I was pretty close to saying, “you know what, to hell with it – I’ll just use the native Xamarin approach instead”.

However, I recalled a video by John Sonmez titled ‘Why does Programming Suck?’ and rolled my sleeves up and dug in again.

Unable to deploy Xamarin Android app to GenyMotion emulator

We all know that when you are developing mobile apps there is nothing better than running on an actual device. This is especially useful when wanting to access the device sensors such as GPS and the accelerometer. But we also all know that we have to test against a wider variety of devices than we have in our drawer. That’s where emulators come in – and where the trouble starts in some cases, but I won’t go into Hyper-V here!

StructureMap and MVC5 – Resolving the resolution exception for IUserStore

I’m currently working on an MVC5 website which uses StructureMap for Inversion of Control operations. Everything was working fine but then I started to get exceptions when I ran the application and attempted to login (not sure if Update 3 was responsible for surfacing this problem but it certainly worked without any problems previously)

Xamarin for Visual Studio won’t Update?

I’ve been developing with Xamarin for a few years now and most of the time I do so using Visual Studio. Now, as with most technologies, Xamarin is constantly evolving and therefore updates are pushed out fairly frequently – that’s all good, we all like new stuff don’t we?

Well, I’ve always had a problem whereby Visual Studio would prompt me to say that there was an update available and that I should ‘Click Here to Update’ – the only problem being that this doesn’t actually do anything!

Visual Studio 2015 – Package Installation Error [Failed to initialize the PowerShell host]

Well today I decided to start a new Xamarin.Forms project in Visual Studio 2015 but fell at the first hurdle – you would have thought File > New Project would be simpler than this really.