Marcos Cobeña Morián: ADAL and how to sign in with Microsoft accounts in Xamarin.iOS

One the latest bits we added to HealthClinic.biz suite is Azure’s Active Directory Authentication (ADAL from now on). Basically, you can authenticate users by their Microsoft account, and let them access the app or not. You can do some other things, but our mainly goal was that one. For instance, we added also Touch ID so your… Continue reading ADAL and how to sign in with Microsoft accounts in Xamarin.iOS
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Craig Dunn: Xamarin.Forms Workbooks

As explained in the last post, it’s easy to add Nuget packages to Xamarin Workbooks. My immediate reaction to this news was “I want to use Xamarin.Forms!” Unfortunately it’s not immediately obvious how to get Xamarin.Forms into a Workbook… so here are the steps (for an iOS Workbook):

1. Add the Xamarin.Forms nuget (and reference the platform)

When you add the Xamarin.Forms Nuget, four assemblies will be referenced (including the iOS Platform assembly for Xamarin.Forms). The using statements need to be added too – don’t forget to add the Xamarin.Forms.Platform.iOS namespace:

2. Create a Page and App as usual

In both classes it’s a good idea to create public properties for elements you want to manipulate in the workbook.

This allows those controls to be referenced later in the workbook…

3. Hack the FormsAppDelegate

The biggest hurdle to getting Xamarin.Forms to run is that in a normal iOS app, the AppDelegate must be a subclass of FormsApplicationDelegate to wire up various bits of Xamarin.Forms. Peeking into the open-source, the key thing we need to do is set the RootViewController… the following code does the initialization we need to get a Workbook running:

WARNING: obviously this approach misses some of the other code implemented in FormsApplicationDelegate so some things might not work as expected. This is a bit of a hack 🙂

4. Run It

The public properties on the App and Page classes mean the workbook can manipulate those elements to demonstrate various Xamarin.Forms capabilities.

Try it out with the WorkbookFormsTest workbook:

Check out the more complex ListView1 workbook too:

p.s. the irony of included screenshots of code is not lost on me – but hey, it’s actually a good reason to download and us Xamarin Workbooks to try these samples out 😀

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Craig Dunn: Xamarin Workbooks with Nugets

Xamarin Workbooks are getting better and better (check out the intro to Workbooks if you don’t know what I’m talking about).

Nuget packages can now be added, meaning you can teach or demo almost anything in a Workbook 🙂

In the Workbook app, choose File > Add Package… to open the Nuget package explorer:

Then search for the Nuget and add to the workbook:

Try out this Json.NET Workbook example to see how it works

Coming up next – adding the Xamarin.Forms nuget!

p.s. for a video demo of Nugets in Workbooks, check out this community contribution on brax.tv

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Kerry W. Lothrop: The many flavors of HttpClient

HttpClientHandler When using Xamarin, you can use the standard .NET HttpClient. By default, HttpClient is Mono’s complete reimplementation of the entire HTTP stack. It is sufficient for many use cases but there are other alternatives out there that can be defined by selecting an alternative HttpClientHandler. For my Evolve talk, I put together an overview … Continue reading The many flavors of HttpClient
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Greg Shackles: Using iOS and 1Writer as a Presentation Assistant

I’ve given a lot of talks over the years, with varying amounts of live coding and moving parts. For many of them it wasn’t uncommon for me to have some sort of notes jotted down as an emergency reminder if my memory fails in the moment, and I always have local fallbacks for any network-dependent demos to avoid being completely hindered by bad connections.

When preparing for my talk at this year’s Xamarin Evolve, I found myself in need of more than in previous talks. This talk was, by definition, completely network dependent, as well as totally dependent on a host of third party services I had no control over. Basically this was a nightmare scenario for me as a presenter, and made me question what I was smoking when I pitched the talk. In addition to the prospect of demo fails, I also found myself with far more things on my pre-flight checklist to remember to do before even beginning the presentation. My default way to write notes and lists is to use Markdown, which then lead me to:

I was surprised at the lack of good options I was finding after some initial searching, since it seemed like my needs were extremely basic:

  • support for viewing Markdown
  • support for GitHub-flavored Markdown (namely checkboxes that you can interact with)
  • avoiding the urge to write something myself the week before Evolve
  • ideally with split-screen support on an iPad

If you saw my talk at Evolve you might have noticed my sticker-covered laptop, but next to it you can see my iPad assistant:

Speaking at Evolve

1Writer

After trying a bunch of different options that didn’t quite scratch my itch, including some web-based, my colleague Chris Krycho recommended 1Writer which ended up being perfect for my needs. It also has nice writing and editing support, but I won’t really go into that since I didn’t actually need that for this use case.

1Writer has built-in Dropbox support, which meant that it could connect to my account that was already being used to store my presentation and notes and load it directly from there. In the rest of this post I’ll outline how I set up my flow and used 1Writer to organize my talk’s flow and significantly ease my anxiety over missing something.

Create Copy of Base Notes

As I was writing my notes I would store them in a file named script-base.md in Dropbox. This would serve as the starting point for any run through the talk, be it a practice run or the real thing. 1Writer makes it was to create a duplicate of a document, so each preparation round for a run of the talk would begin by duplicating the base script and giving it an appropriate name:

Creating a duplicate

Checking Off Items

The first section of my script was a list of things that need to be done prior to stepping on stage and delivering the talk. This includes everything from bumping up font sizes, logging into services, turning on Do Not Disturb, etc. Nothing is too simple to leave off the list here, so it’s a great way to have a master list of everything you could forget in the moment. As I completed each step I would check it off in the document:

Checking off items

Since this is working off a fresh copy of the script there’s no need to worry about having to uncheck everything to start over.

Including Steps for Demos

My goal was to be totally driven by memory for my demos and not have to refer to my assistant, but since it was there anyway it would have been silly to not include details of the entire thing in there. Since I was working in Markdown, it meant that I could easily annotate code that I was planning to write from scratch, which could serve as a reminder of what I needed to write in case of temporary memory loss:

Coding checklist items

Unlike the earlier section where I’d check off items as I completed them, that was not a goal of mine for the demo section since that would break the flow of the presentation. In my case these checkboxes could just as easily have been bullets, but I left them as checkboxes since it was occasionally useful during preparation when working on timing.

Split Screen

One of the nice-to-haves I was after was support for running in split-screen mode on my iPad. The main reason for this was that it allowed me to run 1Writer side by side with the built-in iOS timer app, which was awesome for being able to have something I could look to and see where I was at without having to break my flow and look somewhere else.

Split screen with timer

Miscellaneous

1Writer also offered a lot of nice options for theming, fonts, text size, etc, which made it easy to tailor the view to just how I wanted it. I should also note that 1Writer is not a free app. It’s currently just $4.99 in the iTunes app store though, which was an absolute bargain for the value I got out of it. I suspect that I’ll be taking this approach more often for future talks.

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