Category Archives: Android

Azure and Xamarin Forms book published!

I am officially a published book author! “Azure and Xamarin Forms” is now available on Amazon as an Apress publication for both the kindle and printed versions or PDF at the Apress site.

When someone asks you if you know a good book to recommend on getting with Xamarin Forms or getting started with Azure for Devs or using them both together, I would be most appreciative on considering a recommendation. To my knowledge it is the only book available like it combining these two technologies in one place. I have received some great feedback so far and am very excited about this book helping devs. Special tanks to my technical reviewer:

Sunny Mukherjee :   https://www.linkedin.com/in/sunnymukherjee/

Here are the links:

Amazon -

https://www.amazon.com/Azure-Xamarin-Forms-Platform-Development-ebook/dp/B07DS9RH87

Or directly thru Apress for the EPub and PDF versions

https://www.apress.com/us/book/9781484235607#otherversion=9781484235614

Happy coding!

 

Russ Fustino MVP Summit Channel 9 Interview on appdev!

At the recent MVP Summit in Redmond, Russ Fustino, Microsoft MVP developer Windows Platform, chats with Seth Juarez  of Microsoft’s Channel 9 about Microsoft App Studio, Windows 10 and cross platform development, as well as the OutSystems Platform and the MVP summit in general. Enjoy!

 

 

https://channel9.msdn.com/events/Seth-on-the-Road/MVP-Summit-2015/MVP-Summit-2015-Russ-Fustino

Note: I am looking for career opportunities, so if you know of any that I might be interested in, please contact me at russ@fustinobrothers.com

Rock’in with Russ Fustino, Florida Tour Announced!

Where in the world is Russ Fustino? Here are the dates, locations and topics for this week in Florida! More dates to be published next week. This week includes Bradenton, Miami and Boca Raton! Hope to see you there!

Date: June 2 @ 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Location: Station 2 Innovation Center
912 7th Ave E, Bradenton, FL 34208  (map)

Topic: Rock’in Cross Platform Mobile Dev with Russ!

Register here: http://www.meetup.com/Entrepreneurs-Startups/events/222241246/

 

Date: June 3 @ 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm

Location: University of Miami

5030 Brunson Dr #314, Coral Gables, FL 33124

Room 314 Dooley Memorial Building.  In the same building as the Cosford Cinema.

Topic:  Rock’in with Russ on Today’s Software Development Technologies

Register here:   (limited number of public seats available) https://www.eventbrite.com/e/rockin-with-russ-on-todays-software-development-technologies-tickets-17218250250

 

Date: June 4 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

Location: Coders Café Special meeting at Cendyn Spaces!

Cendyn SPACES Cazbah
980 North Federal Highway #110
Boca Raton, FL 33432

Topic:  Rock’in with Russ! How We Built the Jethro Tull App Using Xamarin Forms and Raygun

Register here:   http://www.fladotnet.com/Reg.aspx?EventID=769

Tour sponsored by Raygun.IO!

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MAD Tampa recap, How We Built The Jethro Tull App

Special thanks go out to a great group! The Mobile Application Developer Tampa group was a packed house and the crowd was very engaged with a ton of questions. Please find the links with all of the answers!

 

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The second session I did was on “Improving Your App Quality”  and the recap for that session including PowerPoint and sample code will be posted soon on the http://raygun.io  site. As promised, here are all of the resource links for the Tull session:

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• Xamarin Forms Gallery (Navigation)

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/controls/pages/

•What is a Xamarin plugin?

http://motzcod.es/post/104507063997/what-exactly-is-a-plugin-for-xamarin

•How to create a plugin?

http://blog.xamarin.com/creating-reusable-plugins-for-xamarin.forms/

•302 Error on Tour dates feed – Bugzilla
https://bugzilla.xamarin.com/show_bug.cgi?id=27265

•Mr. Gestures on NuGet

http://mrgestures.com/

•Background images that don’t stretch

http://java.dzone.com/articles/using-full-size-none-stretched

•Circle Images

https://www.nuget.org/packages/Xam.Plugins.Forms.ImageCircle

•XAML View for Custom Cells

https://gist.github.com/jamesmontemagno/a70ffa4a3d16972a3369

•HP 10 Plus 10.1-Inch 16 GB Tablet (Silver) – $239

http://www.amazon.com/HP-Plus-10-1-Inch-Tablet-Silver/dp/B00LPC3W1Q/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1431503402&sr=8-1&keywords=HP+10+Plus+10.1-Inch+16+GB+Tablet+%28Silver%29

PS. You need 10 inch screen shots for submitting apps, and there are no emulators of that size that I could find.

•Excel 2003 Add-in: XML Tools Add-in

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=3108

•Good link for splash screen on android:

http://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/19362/xamarin-forms-splashscreen-in-android

• For the Build/iOS Bundle Signing set “Identity: Developer (Automatic)” and “Provisioning Profile: Automatic”. Was getting error – can’t find in keychain

http://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/25768/iphone-code-signing-key-other-developer-name-xxxxx-not-found-in-keychain

•App Submission Resources Android

https://developers.google.com/android-publisher/

http://www.appbrain.com/stats/android-market-app-categories

https://play.google.com/about/developer-content-policy.html

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/113474

• App Submission Resources IOS

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

https://developer.apple.com/app-store/

• IOS Screen shots

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/LanguagesUtilities/Conceptual/iTunesConnect_Guide/Appendices/Properties.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40011225-CH26-SW2

•Publishing IOS:

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/ios/deployment,_testing,_and_metrics/app_distribution_overview/publishing_to_the_app_store/

•Common Bug on IOS Publishing

https://forums.xamarin.com/discussion/40388/disallowed-paths-itunesmetadata-plist-found-at-when-submitting-to-app-store/p1

•Publishing Android

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/android/deployment,_testing,_and_metrics/publishing_an_application/

•Android in app billing:

http://components.xamarin.com/view/xamarin.inappbilling  (Which has a sample app)

•Dependency service:

http://developer.xamarin.com/guides/cross-platform/xamarin-forms/dependency-service/

•Getting Started  Xamarin.InAppPurchase:

https://components.xamarin.com/gettingstarted/xamarin.inapppurchase

Rockin with Russ Fustino!

Join the Mobile Application Developer Meetup Group in Tampa, Florida!

http://www.meetup.com/TampaBay-MobileAppDevelopers

Meeting Dates Set for 2015!

MAD Tampa will generally meet every second Wednesday

Time: 5:30-8:00PM

Location: AgileThought Office (Tampa)

2502 N Rocky Point Dr. Ste 900
Tampa, FL 33607  (map)
Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Two Sessions by Russ Fustino, MVP and Raygun Community Evangelist

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How we built the Jethro Tull Endorsed app using Xamarin Forms

Is Xamarin Forms the real deal? Join MVP Russ Fustino as he shares insights into the trials, tribulations and joy of building the Endorsed Jethro Tull App. Hot off the metal topics covered include: background images in the app (that are not distorted), using custom renderers, using embedded resources, XAML markup for Tablet and Phone, instrumentation, custom view cell, image sizes, third party controls including Mr. Gestures,  Circle Image Control ,  Xam.Plugins.Settings as well as portrait and landscape orientations. Also, he will cover some gotcha’s on the submission process to Amazon Store, Google Play and The App store including: setting up a test team, app size limitations on Android, iTunes and Apple logos, competitive mobile platform stores for iOS apps, in app purchases and third party endorsement proof.

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Improving Your App Quality

Join MVP Russ Fustino as he shares a great error reporting tool that is fast and reliable, no matter what the load. See how he used Raygun this during the development cycle to help debug errors and some weird bugs for the Endorsed Jethro Tull app. It is also great for the production environment and gives you real time data and affected user information. Be proactive and fix errors before your users hound you down. See an overview of Raygun and the many supported platforms as well as integrations.

Download your free trial today! www.raygun.io and follow @raygunio

Bio:

Russ Fustino is a Raygun Community Evangelist and a highly experienced software evangelist. As well he has developed and published Windows Store, Windows Phone 8.1 Universal, Xamarin iOS, Android and WP 8 apps. He is a former Developer Evangelist for Xamarin, ComponentOne and Microsoft and is CEO of Fustino Brothers, Inc (FBI). FBI Tull apps are endorsed by Jethro Tull. Russ has a passion for software development and tools through conveying technology via live seminars, webcasts, blogs, photos and internet video productions. Russ is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Client Development and an INETA Lifetime Achievement Award winner for helping educate, entertain and enlighten over 1 million programmers. Russ co-heads up an INETA group: Mobile Application Developers Tampa (MADTampa – www.madtampa.com ). Check out Russ’ blog at www.russtoolshed.net/blog and follow @RussFustino

Russ Fustino, Raygun Community Evangelist

Another chapter begins for me in this great developer community we have in our software industry! I am happy to announce I have started at www.raygun.io as the Raygun Community Evangelist! Raygun has the hottest error tracking and affected user software in our industry. Raygun continues to see significant growth month over month in downloads and installations…  Raygun supports more app platforms and more integration notification systems than anyone.  See lists below.

Are you tired figuring out null reference exceptions? Is it from C# , IL (Intermediate Language) or the machine code by the JIT compiler? This can be tricky indeed,..what exactly is null? Enter Raygun. For example, I had a WebException: Error: NameResolutionFailure in my Jethro Tull app during development, and the Raygun reporting pointed me directly to the http client request call that had failed. I forgot to put in a try / catch statement around that call and it was fixed pretty quick.

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Also, Raygun’s backend infrastructure is second to none and is blazing fast, which is a huge benefit to developers during testing and development. It is great to have results to analyze in a matter of seconds on a consistent basis. Even better, is to get the results for production apps before your customers do and be proactive!

Message grouping an awesome feature of Raygun. What is message grouping? Let’s say you have a globalized web app and you have an error message from a browser in Germany and the same error in English. Even though textually different, they are grouped as effectively the same error! It makes your job easier. Start your free trial now at www.raygun.io .

The product continues to be enhanced with more enhancements planned. Check out  most recent Announcement on: Affected User Tracking – The Easy Way To Find Out Who, What, Why and When!

I am looking for speaking engagements, so let me know if you know of any user groups or events, who might  be interested in seeing this great set of tools. It’s all about taking your application quality to a higher level! Please contact me at rfustino@raygun.io .

Stay tuned to @RussFustino and @raygunio for more tweets about Raygun. Please like our Facebook page too !

Check out John-Daniel Trask interview on a recent episode of .NET Rocks Tune in for special offer, as a thanks just for listening! John-Daniel Trask is the Co-founder & CEO of Mindscape, creators of the popular Raygun error tracking software. John-Daniel is also a Microsoft ASP.NET MVP. I look forward to working with his energetic team and everyone at Raygun,They are a genuine and talented group!

We are expanding the US office based in the San Francisco Bay area and are hiring a sales, marketing and evangelism team over the next few months. The evangelism position is not geo specific. See details at: www.raygun.io/careers

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Get notified today! Use Raygun!

Platform Support:

Languages:

.NET
iOS, Ruby on Rails
Python
Node.js
JavaScript
PHP
WordPress
Java
Android
Cold Fusion
Unity
Nancy
Drupal

Third Party languages:

Raygun4Go
Django-raygun-dot-io
goraygun (Go language)
RaygunCake
RaygunAS (Adobe Air)

Plugins:

Asana
BitBucket
BugHerd
Campfire
Flowdock
FogBigz
GitHub
HipChat
JIRA
Kato.im
Lighthouse
PivotalTracker
Slack
Sprintly
Trello
Visual Studio Online
YouTrack

Integrations

API
Web Hooks

Deployments

API
Octopus Deploy
Bash
Powershell
Capistrano
Rake
Grunt

Russ Fustino, Full Time CEO of Fustino Brothers

  • I am back to being CEO of Fustino Brothers, full time. Email russ@fustinobrothers.com and please follow @FustinoBrothers and @RussFustino
  • I am taking a little break  from my contract with Xamarin and Developer Evangelism
  • On a little painful news, it is starting to look like I need laser surgery on my back. During recovery period I plan on doing a lot of coding, as traveling will not be possible, and publish the Jethro Tull iOS and Android Apps using Xamarin. I will know more in a couple of weeks.
  • I am heading up to the Jethro Tull shows in Providence, RI tonight and Lynn, MA on Saturday .  I will be  showing Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull the FBI Jethro Tull app  for Windows Phone and Windows Store right after sound check in Lynn. How exciting is this!
  • The App Studio team will be at the Lynn, MA show to capture the moment.
  • Then its off  to the MVP Summit for my favorite conference of the year! I am so looking forward to seeing everyone! I think I am in trouble however, as my room mate is the one and only Jonas Stawski. Yikes! Smile

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  • I will be documenting my way thru this experience of Using App Studio to start an app and using Xamarin to finish it. I am working on a new set of videos for WintellectNOW. More details to come as to topics and content.
  • I am working with the App Studio Windows   team to make the generated C# projects Xamarin friendly, facilitating cross platform capabilities.  The team is very close right now , and keeps getting closer in every release.
  • I hope to be back with Xamarin after the new year in some capacity.
  • I received my Xamarin Mobile App Certification in October and my 2014 Renewal for Microsoft MVP 2014 in Microsoft Platform Development!
  • Wish me luck!

Xamarin Ceritified Mobile Developer Badge-small res

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Great SD Times Article on Xamarin and Azure

I had the great pleasure of chatting with Microsoft RD Patrick Hynds and I contributed a few quotes to his latest article in SD Times Magazine on Azure.  We talked  about how Xamarin fits nicely into this scenario. Xamarin has an Azure Mobile Services Component in the Xamarin Component Store.

Enjoy a good read at:
http://sdtimes.com/follow-azure-road-cloud/

Xamarin is specifically mentioned on page 9:
http://sdtimes.com/follow-azure-road-cloud/9/

Also, announcing Monthly payments for Indie!

Xamarin Student

Xamarin Forms session by Russ Fustino, Xamarin Developer Evangelist

Xamarin at Successful Tampa Code Camp! Recap

I had the great pleasure presenting Xamarin Forms at the recent Tampa Code Camp. This event was resurrected from a one year hiatus and a welcome site to the Tampa Developer Community. Many are looking forward to a bigger and better code camp as part of a very engaged developer community here in Tampa next year.

Personally, this was a huge moment in the next chapter of my career as well. I delivered my first Xamarin Session, concluding with three weeks of intense training and setup. It was a culture shock, of sorts, for me to present on a Mac and I joked about it that it was more of a challenge for me to learn a Mac than learn Xamarin! The Mac is a better presenting machine in that there are fewer moving parts to demonstrate iOS development. I still use my Windows machine to develop on. Anyway, it all turned out good as about 60 in my session learned about the Xamarin Platform and Xamarin Forms.  For most of the audience, it was their first exposure to Xamarin.

Here are is PowerPoint for the session: http://1drv.ms/1AbKxPp

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First photo of Russ as a Xamarin Developer Evangelist in Action! (Thanks Scott Dorman!)

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It was a packed house! Greg Leonardo was working on my AV here.   It is funny, I once did that for him a few years back at one of his sessions. Full circle, huh?

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First Demo, Xamarin Forms Hello World in iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. This got a big warm round of applause!

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Russ with Greg Leonardo, Head organizer of Tampa Code Camp.

Fox News has a great piece on the code camp: http://www.myfoxtampabay.com/story/26016891/code-camp-brings-developers-together

Download Xamarin today at www.xamarin.com

Follow my new Twitter @RussFustino

and follow @XamarinHQ

Russ Fustino, Xamarin Developer Evangelist!

Hello all! I am happy to announce I am the new Developer Evangelist for Xamarin! I am so excited about this next chapter in my career. I am looking forward to learning and teaching one of the hottest set of software products on this planet, which will help the lives of many fellow geeks! It is a very rewarding position indeed and I am on cloud 9. Everyone I have met at Xamarin is awesome and I look forward getting to know the entire team.

For those that unfamiliar on what Xamarin does… we produce software for programmers which facilitates creating the same mobile app, natively, on multiple platforms such as Windows Phone,  Android and iOS. It is a ‘must have’ tool in the industry with some incredible recent announcements on the new version Xamarin 3.

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I will be traveling up to the Boston Xamarin office on occasion and I look forward to seeing all the “Shed Heads” back home. So, New England crew, get those lobsters ready!

And of course, I will be hitting up all the conferences for speaking engagements in and around Florida and all over the country. Drop me an email if you are interested in having me speak at your user group or conference. My new email at Xamarin is russell.fustino@xamarin.com .

I also setup a new twitter @RussFustino with my actual name (about time huh?). Please follow! I will have more details on my Xamarin blog once it gets set up. Stay tuned and follow me on twitter. Thanks!