Publish Xamarin Forms iOS App using HockeyApp
After integrating HockeyApp into our Xamarin Forms Application, it’s time to publish a first beta to our testers using HockeyApp. Here is a step by step guide what to do.
Checkout Source code from Visual Studio online GIT source control
With Visual Studio Team Services you could host your GIT repository online in Microsofts Cloud. This makes it easy to share code between Visual Studio and Xamarin Studio. As you cannot use your username within Xamarin Studios GIT client because you cannot use the @-sign from your email address, here is short information about how to set up alternate credentials because it seems that Microsoft has changed the way of creating these credentials as many blog posts are outdated.
Setup POST REST Webservice with ASP.net and VB.net
Post Add new REST Service into existing ASP.net web application shows how to setup a REST Service to GET data from the Webservice. Typically you also want to write some data back to the server, e.g. when you create a new record you should send a POST request. Here is a description how to do this with visual basic.net.
Xamarin Tips
While developing Xamarin Forms application and watching trainings from Xamarin University, some tips and best practices are mentioned so I write them down here as a reminder for myself (and maybe as a starting point for you).
Using HockeyApp with Xamarin Forms
HockeyApp is quite popular, mainly for collection crash reports, but also helpful for distribution, user feedback etc. To add it into your Xamarin Forms Application, I found video Integrating HockeyApp to Xamarin Forms by Houssem Dellai very helpful. Also How to integrate HockeyApp with Xamarin on HockeyApp Support is helpful but it’s not especially about Xamarin Forms. It’s for Xamarin iOS and Android so it’s also important for Xamarin Forms, but e.g. the feedback option might need some further information. So here is a short summary how to implement into Xamarin Forms and also add the Feedback option.
Add new REST Service into existing ASP.net web application
If you want to create a new webservice, you might use the new de-facto standard REST instead of previous solutions from Microsoft like SVC or ASMX. So here are some helpful information if you want to add your first REST Webservice into an existing ASP.net application.
How to use Let’s encrypt with IIS
Let’s encrypt is a service to get SSL Certificates for websites for free. It’s supported by organisations / companies like Mozilla, Akamai, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cisco and many more. Many hosting providers already implemented a simple method to request and automatically renew these SSL certificates for free. For the less important of my websites I used StartSSL for a long time without any problems. But since this month, Firefox does not trust SSL certificates from StartSSL anymore, see Distrusting New WoSign and StartCom Certificates on Mozilla Blog. Continue reading…
Android Emulator stays black on Xamarin Forms Apps
Suddenly Android Emulator does not work on my Xamarin Forms Project anymore. Don’t know why, but Xamarin only says “Starting Android_Accelerate_x86”, Android Emulator pops up but stays black and nothing happens….