Month: January 2014

Programming Stuff

iOS/Android/VisualStudio/C#/Xamarin – It’s Looking Up

on January 15, 2014

As you may know, I began digging into Xamarin at the end of last year. It showed a lot of promise as a great way to create cross-platform iOS and Android apps leveraging the existing Visual Studio and C# skills that so many developers have.

When I first started working with it, I did have some initial concerns as I talked about in these 2 blog posts.

I have to say though, once I got past those initial hurdles, things are definitely looking up.

So far I’m doing mostly basic stuff but overall things are going well.

My two main issues are

  1. Visual Studio seems to occasionally have difficulty attaching to the iOS build server
  2. The Visual Studio Android UI designer doesn’t work as well with RelativeLayout as Android Studio does

Neither of these are show-stoppers though.

In the case of connecting to the iOS build server, in most cases restarting Visual Studio takes care of the problem.

For the designer, the Visual Studio designer is workable and if I want to, I can use the Android Studio designer to do the layout work and then just copy it over to the Visual Studio project.

So that’s a long way of saying…

Using Xamarin within Visual Studio is getting a thumbs up so far.

Keep watching as I push on it harder to see how it does as the problem complexity increases.

If you’re interested in doing iOS/Android development with Xamarin, Part 1 of my Pluralsight course series on the topic just went live today…

CrossPlatformiOSAndroidVSCSharpPart1_WithLogo

Programming Stuff

Lambda Expressions in Android Studio

on January 2, 2014

I’m often asked by students from my Android courses as to how I’m able to use Lambda expressions like the following in my Android programs.

Lambda Code Folded

The short answer is: I’m not able to use them. 🙂 What I typed was the following.

Lambda Expanded

The Lambda expressions appear in the editor due to a feature of Android Studio called “Code Folding”.

Android Studio does this sort’a thing in a number of scenarios. You can tell the Lambda expression is a result of code-folding by the highlight that appears over the folded portion of code.

You can also easily identify that the Lambda expression is a result of code folding because the editor will display a plus-sign to the left of the statement. You can view the full, original statement by clicking on the plus sign.

Lamba expression substitution is controlled by the following value in the Android Studio Settings dialog.

Code Folding Settings

As this is my first post of 2014, let me take this opportunity to wish everyone … Happy New Year!!