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Creating a cross-platform chat app using Xamarin Forms and SignalR

In less than 5 minutes. First step is to create your Xamarin Forms projects – start with a blank shell app – and add an additional blank ASP.NET Core project to the solution – we will use it to host our SignalR backend. Once the projects are setup, we begin by implementing the ChatHub which…

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How to publicly expose your local SignalR service for consumption by mobile clients using ngrok

When dealing with mobile clients, it’s not always easy to get them on the same network as your development machine and even when you do, localhost will have a different meaning so you need to use IPs and change bindings and disable SSL or trust self-signed certificates, in short it’s a pain. Say hello to…

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Extending your Xamarin Forms AdMob renderer to display Microsoft Ads on UWP

So far we’ve been displaying ads only on Android and iOS through AdMob and our AdMob renderer. Google dropped support for Windows Phone altogether and never bothered with UWP so AdMob is not a choice in this particular situation. Fortunately, Microsoft is also in the advertising business and  they’ve now nicely integrated everything in the…

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UWP – Using an Acrylic Brush in your Xamarin Forms MasterDetail menu

Right, so you are one of those guys targeting UWP with their Xamarin Forms app… aand you want to use the new Acrylic brush to make you application stand out. Say no more. We won’t be using any 3rd party library/package to do this and we’ll be working in the platform specific project; so open…

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Xamarin ListView performance & replacing it with Syncfusion SfListView

While Xamarin keeps adding features and improves the performance of Xamarin Forms with each and every update, what they offer in terms of cross-platform user controls is not always enough. In my case, I’ve got an RSS reader app which aggregates news articles from different sources and displays them in a ListView like this: While…