Microsoft is constantly optimising our productivity. Last year they announced mobile center. It is a bundle of services to help mobile developers with CI. Microsoft has been working hard to integrate the functionalities we already used (app distribution, crash reports, analytics,…). Last week I finally switched to the new platform because now you can integrate between visual studio online and mobile center even when using custom builds.

For an upcoming blog post I wanted to use a custom font for the title of my Xamarin Forms NavigationPage. Whether or not it is against the design guidelines is another discussion.

After a complete reinstall of my mac and Xamarin Studio, I was quite surprised to see my Android simulator die on startup. No messages where displayed in the XS “Error” pad or “Deploying to device” pad. Just “Execution failed”.

Normally I’m developing on a mac with Xamarin Studio. Debugging an Android project on the Android emulator running on your mac is easy, because it just works. But now and the I need to do some work from my windows machine. My windows is running as a VM with Parallels Desktop.

Xamarin Forms is getting better with each iteration, there’s no doubt about that. We have more controls at our disposal than Win32 devs started with. If it doesn’t fit our needs you can use effects. Changing a BoxView into a circle seems to be possible, but felt a bit wrong. With Xamarin Forms we can still use native implementations with custom renderers.