Jonathan Peppers

glidex.forms - Fast Images for Xamarin.Forms on Android

From my experience making image-heavy Xamarin.Forms apps in the past, Android was a huge pain-point. Android.Graphics.Bitmap is somewhat of a troublemaker, and to make matters worse, Xamarin.Forms API design makes it tough to handle them properly...

Xamarin.Forms Performance on Android

One of the tasks that has always been in the back of my mind on the Xamarin.Android team is to make some improvements to help Xamarin.Forms apps. It turns out that one of our most common Xamarin project is developed with Xamarin.Forms in Visual Studio on Windows. We should improve that scenario!...

Deploying a Minecraft Server on Azure with Docker

This week at Microsoft is "One Week"--an all-week Hackathon where we are allowed to work on open source projects for fun...

Securing Google Play In-App Purchases for Xamarin with Azure Functions

Implementing secure in-app purchases for Google Play is a bit trickier than iOS for several reasons. The Android APIs are a bit more involved, and Android's openness lends itself to more hacking, in general...

Securing In-App Purchases for Xamarin with Azure Functions

If you've ever added in-app purchases to your app and track each purchase with analytics, you will quickly see the reports from iTunes (real revenue) don't match up with purchases recorded from your analytics tracking...

Improving HTTP Performance in Xamarin Applications

Any mobile application that depends greatly on HTTP requests can be a source of frustration. Mobile devices are constantly running slow connections, losing connectivity entirely, or switching from Wi-Fi to cellular...

Mocking Xamarin.Forms

I'm not making fun of Xamarin.Forms, I promise. Discussing my library for unit testing Xamarin.Forms appropriately named Xamarin.Forms.Mocks...

Build Xamarin.Forms from Source

One thing I’ve found not much information out there on is how to build your own copy of Xamarin.Forms and use it in your application. With just a little effort I was able to setup Visual Studio Team Services to build my fork of Xamarin.Forms and deploy a NuGet package to our private feed on MyGet. I think people out there are probably interested in setting this up, especially if you have a project pushing Xamarin.Forms to its limits...

Xamarin.iOS Under the Hood: Calling Objective-C from C#

So how exactly does C# code call into Objective-C? How does this compare to how Objective-C methods are called natively? These are questions I've always pondered but have not always had the time to research...

Automating Unity3D Builds with FAKE

So among the different types of games and apps we build at Hitcents, one particularly troublesome type to deal with is basically any game built with Unity...

Second edition of my book is out!

My book, Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development, is new and updated with Xamarin's latest releases. Includes goodness about the new stuff: Xamarin.Forms, NuGet, shared projects, and more...

Build all the things! with FAKE

At Hitcents currently, we had been using Jenkins, and setup some complicated build steps in their web UI to build our various projects...

If You Can Ship your App in China, You Can Ship it Anywhere

Xamarin 3 and Healed Cuts

After updating to Xamarin 3, I am definitely impressed with the work Xamarin is doing to improve their products...

My Book: Xamarin Cross-platform Application Development

Xamarin Android Builds in Jenkins

Recently at Hitcents we have been working on deploying our Android version of Draw a Stickman: EPIC to app stores across China. China’s Android app market is a strange place, and it has somewhere around 30 app stores...

MonoGame on Gone Mobile

I had a great time talking about writing cross platform games at Hitcents with the guys on Gone Mobile. If you are interested in MonoGame or game development with C# in general, it's a great listen...

Xamarin's Tiny Cuts

I want to start out this post by saying I am a great lover of Xamarin and their tools. Without Xamarin, I would might not have become a mobile developer and most of the success the company I work for (Hitcents) has had with mobile apps would not be possible...

Best Mac Apps for Windows Devs

At work, I have more and more been transitioning to using a Mac. MonoTouch has fueled this, and I hate to say it, but I am starting to like Mac hardware...