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I spent a few too many hours fiddling with Xamarin Form’s collection view and multi-selection binding. That was somewhat frustrating so I’m writing a little about it in the hopes that you don’t have to deal with the same. If you have a view like this: and a View Model like this: You’d expect the binding to work, right? No problems. Well, no. It doesn’t. The CollectionView will only bind SelectedItems to collections of object. I don’t know why the Xamarin team decided to go that route, but it is a quirk that has wasted too many hours. While the view example above is correct, the View Model should look like this: ...

6 months ago I posted about Automatic release notes on Azure DevOps. Since then, I was able to make the process a little more centric to Pull Requests and avoid the occasional incorrect work item showing up in the release notes. The primary difference is that we will use the new Cross Platform Generate Release Notes task instead of the original Powershell based task. This updated version offers a little more control via handlebars extensions that can help us filter out the undesired work items. Here is how the task looks like: ...

This is not something common, I guess. Imagine with me, will you? You have an app dedicated for reporting. The sole reason you built this app is to allow non-developers, but data savvy people, to create operational reports for LOB applications. How do you ensure that your users will not use this solution to modify data on the fly? Imagine how fun would it be to explain why your reporting solution allow them to modify data to your boss. With me so far? ...

In January last year, I wrote about building and deploying Xamarin iOS apps using Azure DevOps. I wanted to write about the Android process but never mustered the energy to do it. Nevertheless, today is the day I will. Not a ton has changed since then. Perhaps, the most relevant change is that last time I showed how to deploy directly to the store and this time I want to show how to deploy as an Enterprise app. Also, the build will use the somewhat new yml build pipeline instead of the visual build. ...

In case you can’t or don’t want to use the Microsoft hosted agents (why?), setting up your own build servers is not too hard. Of course, I hope you don’t have to deal with a proxy server. In the unlikely scenario that you have a proxy server, I honestly hope you don’t have one with a self-signed certificate. Now, if you have to deal with all of this, I feel you. I put some notes together on how to get this setup done and have builds and releases running on your own agents flawlessly. ...