How to use symlinks with MSBuild
Symlinks are very useful. This post shows how to leverage them for conditional
processing using MSBuild item groups.
[Read More]
Fridathon: unstructured learning or hacking you can opt-in to do on any random Friday.
-
-
Dynamic Xamarin Forms From XAML and JSON
Yes, I’m well aware that the official API set for Xamarin.Forms only allows loading the compiled XAML into its “owning” view, using the LoadFromXaml<TView>(this TView view, Type callingType) extension method from the Xamarin.Forms.Xaml.Extensions class. And this is of course the actual real and supported way of doing it (for whatever reason, I’m not part of the Xamarin.Forms team :)). [Read More] -
Bootstrapping Cross Platform MSBuild with XBuild and NuGet
Now that MSBuild is open source and cross-platform, you easily bootstrap it via XBuild and NuGet to build on a Mac/*nix too. [Read More] -
Ultimate Cross Platform NuGet Restore
If you just want the straight solution, download the targets file alongside your .sln and name it Before.[solution file name].targets. Now just build from either IDEs or command lines :). [Read More] -
Open Source Oslo M
For those of you on the cutting edge of Microsoft technologies that don’t ship ;), you probably have fond memories of one particular product that had so much promise: Olso “M”. [Read More] -
Mobile Essentials: Productivity Tools for Mobile Developers
A bunch of mobile development and tooling enthusiasts here at the office wanted to put out some tools, templates and general productivity enhancements for mobile developers, so we decided to set up a custom Visual Studio gallery that you can set up to get these tools in an integrated fashion in the Extensions and Updates dialog (a.k.a. Extension Manager). These will generally be projects we work on the side, on weekends and nights and hackathons. [Read More] -
Installing Xamarin for Visual Studio 2015 Preview
If you currently have a previous version of Xamarin installed, you may not get the 2015 bits automatically when installing the new alpha for VS2015 Preview. Here's how to ensure it's properly installed. [Read More] -
Automating GitHub: Introducing OctoHooks
GitHub is an awesome platform for hosting your source code, and the issue tracker is pretty decent. Some might argue that it’s too simplistic and that larger projects require more features and customization, but I’ll beg to differ, and show you how you can tune it to your heart’s content by leveraging its comprehensive API, and do so even without writing a single line of code ;) [Read More] -
Smarter Project References
Sometimes the simple act of adding a project or assembly reference results in multiple subsequent attempts to fix the build because of the myriad indirect references that those depend on in turn, and which you are forced to add. Some other times, you just wish you were able to remove all those external projects that clutter the solution and slow down VS, but you need the project references for those tough debugging times. Welcome to Smarter Project References! [Read More] -
Project dependency does not build with Xamarin
It’s not at all uncommon to face this error while working with Xamarin iOS projects. The scenario shown in the screenshot is fairly typical: a multi-platform solution with one or more shared portable libraries and one app project for each target platform, in this case iOS, Android and Windows Phone 8.0. In theses cases, when you select iPhone or iPhoneSimulator as the platform, suddendly, Visual Studio seems to “forget” to build the shared library, and just fails with a less than helpful “Metadata [dependency project dll] could not be found”. [Read More]