As a mobile developer 90% of the time I work on a mac. Visual Studio for Mac is an awesome tool to create Xamarin mobile apps. More than not mobile apps are using services. You can use .NET Core to create APIs but deploying them isn’t so easy on a mac. Sure you can use the Azure CLI, but if you are working with mixed teams Powershell seems to be king to deploy towards Azure.
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”.