Over the last few weeks I’ve been busy porting Calcium to Xamarin.Forms. Today I’ve released the first of 6 articles demonstrating some of its key features. In this series you learn how to do things with Xamarin Forms that you’ll not find anywhere else. For example, you see how to create a cross-platform Application Bar component using the Xamarin Forms native rendering API with Menu Item support that works on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone;...

I’m in process of enabling some cloud services for Surfy, the web browser app for Windows Phone. Part of this process has involved leveraging Azure Notification hubs. A notification hub allows you to send notifications to a host of different devices, including Windows Phone, Windows, and even Android and iOS devices. Also, notification hubs are rather flexible. They use a tag system, whereby a client app can send a list of strings along during channel...

With the latest release of Surfy for Windows Phone 8 I’ve been getting more deeply acquainted with the intricacies of Windows Phone Voice Command localizability. In the process I have uncovered some issues that may snag an unsuspecting dev or two. If you are not familiar with Voice Commands then this post is probably not for you. If you’re still interested, there’s a primer on Voice Commands on MSDN. The Windows Phone OS Voice Command...

Reflector is a terrific tool, no doubt. If you’ve ever used its export code feature, however, you’ll notice it has a tough time interpreting calls to property accessors. Code is intermingled with get_Foo() and set_Bah(…). Well, you can quickly replace those method calls with the following set of regular expressions. Starting from Visual Studio 2012, Visual Studio uses the .NET frameworks regular expression API. So, gone are the days of having to learn VS’s old...

Today we at Outcoder are pleased to announce the release of our brand new app: Farlight! Farlight lets you paint onto a moving canvas while creating stunning translucent animated abstract art. We’ve gone cross-platform and we’ve targeted all the major app platforms! Farlight is available for iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, Windows Phone 7 & 8, and for Windows 8 on the Windows Store. We targeted multiple-platforms using the great tools from our friends at...