All in Xamarin

ListView Interactivity with Xamarin Forms

ListView Interactivity with Xamarin Forms

Eduardo Rosas Osorno
Xamarin

ListView interactions are an important part of the user experience on any application. As often as it is necessary for our applications to list items inside of a list, it is necessary for the user to interact with them.

In my previous post, I built a Notes application that allowed users to create new notes, assign a title and some content, and save these notes inside an SQLite database. Once saved in the database, there was a Page that read all these items and listed them inside a ListView, but there is no real interaction with the list.

In this post I will focus on 3 interactions you can add to your ListViews:

  1. Pull to refresh (reading from the table)
  2. Context actions (deleting an element)
  3. Taps (showing a details page)
Local Databases in Xamarin Forms with SQLite

Local Databases in Xamarin Forms with SQLite

Eduardo Rosas Osorno
Xamarin

I don't need to argue that databases are of great importance in almost any kind of application, so in this post, I will cover the usage of local SQLite databases inside a Xamarin Forms app.

Specifically, we will be creating a simple notes app, with a couple of views: one where the user will see the list of notes and another one for creating/editing a note. While I will briefly explain the code that I use to define the interface, I will focus on the SQLite functionality itself, not really talking about the event handlers and the definition of elements inside the XAML file. If you are not familiar with XAML maybe check one of my previous posts first.

I do want to specify that I created this project using a .NET Standard library as a code sharing strategy and that I will cover Android, iOS and UWP implementation. If you are using Visual Studio for Mac, UWP won't be an option, and maybe your code sharing strategy will be PCL instead of .NET Standard, but the implementation is identical, except for the folder where you need to reference the SQLite packages.

How to design efficiently on Xamarin Forms - Implicit Styles

How to design efficiently on Xamarin Forms - Implicit Styles

Eduardo Rosas Osorno
Xamarin

Using XAML Styles is probably one of the best things you can do when developing XAML applications, especially as they grow and you have more and more pages that you need to maintain, and they need to keep the same looks. This is true of course for Xamarin Forms applications as well, even when this UIs are going to be shared across Android, iOS and sometimes even Windows.

This post is about implementing implicit styles, those that are automatically applied to the entirety of the definitions from one type.

Xamarin Forms - Selecting an Image from the Gallery

Xamarin Forms - Selecting an Image from the Gallery

Eduardo Rosas Osorno
Xamarin

Selecting an image from the gallery, or taking a picture with the device's camera is something that is very often used in mobile applications, and of course, your Xamarin Forms apps are often going to require this functionality, so this post will guide you through the steps necessary to implement this on a Xamarin Forms application for both Android and iOS.

Custom Vision API - Identifying Melanoma with Xamarin

Custom Vision API - Identifying Melanoma with Xamarin

Eduardo Rosas Osorno
Xamarin, Artificial Intelligence

Microsoft has a very interesting set of tools under the Cognitive Services brand, all in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, one that has particularly caught my eye is the Custom Vision API. This tool allows you to "easily customize your own state-of-the-art computer vision models that fit perfectly with your unique data case. Just bring a few examples of labeled images and let Custom Vision do the hard work".

This sounds like a promising, easy to implement service, and it really is, but either way, this post will guide you through the steps necessary to get your own Xamarin app connected to your own Custom Vision API.