The first time I wrote a Xamarin.Forms.Maps program, I couldn't figure out why my map wasn't appearing. And then I put a call to Xamarin.FormsMaps.Init() into the AppDelegate (iOS) and MainActivity (Android):

Shared:

[code lang="csharp"]
public class App
{
public static Page GetMainPage ()
{
return new ContentPage …

I think BASIC's greatest strength may be that it was something that many people -- not just those with a particular background -- could learn. There was no gatekeeper, either literally or figuratively: you didn't have to push punchcards under a bank-teller window nor did you have to learn recursion before learning …

Who can remember the scaling behavior of UIView.ContentMode? Not me!

So I wrote this quick little F# program to review them:

[code lang="fsharp"]
namespace Simple

open System
open MonoTouch.UIKit
open MonoTouch.Foundation
open System.Drawing

type ContentView ( color : UIColor ) as self =
inherit UIView ()
do
self.BackgroundColor \< - color …

Not at all surprisingly, it turns out that F# events need not be the crufty structures I showed in my previous post.

First, Xamarin's David Siegel suggested "Let the Event type be inferred, don't define a delegate type, and send simple typed values rather than EventArgs:"

open System

type Control …

tl;dr: F# has a long learning curve (it takes a long time to master) but productivity happens quickly.

I recently wrote my first real application in F#. Although I've been using F# for many of my scripting needs for about a year and use F# to explore iOS APIs …

Xamarin loves F#!

Of course you can use F# to program iOS and Android applications using Xamarin and Visual Studio!

[code lang="fsharp"]
namespace Simple

open System
open MonoTouch.UIKit
open MonoTouch.Foundation
open System.Drawing

type ContentView ( color : UIColor ) as self =
inherit UIView ()
do
self.BackgroundColor \< - color

type SimpleController …

Helpful: http://ivomynttinen.com/blog/the-ios-7-design-cheat-sheet/

There have been great barcode-reading libraries available for Xamarin for some time, but iOS 7 has built-in barcode-recognition support.

There's only one tricky bit: you have to tell the AVCaptureMetadataOutput what types of barcodes you're interested in after you've added it to the AVCaptureSession. (I suppose what happens behind the …

http://www.apple.com/ios/feature-availability/#maps-3d-buildings-in-navigation

The new M7 coprocessor in the iPhone 5S makes pedometer apps trivial:

[code lang="csharp"]
if(CMStepCounter.IsStepCountingAvailable)
{
var counter = new CMStepCounter();
//Last 8 hours
counter.QueryStepCount(NSDate.FromTimeIntervalSinceNow(-8 * 60 * 60), NSDate.Now, NSOperationQueue.CurrentQueue, StepQueryHandler);
}

void StepQueryHandler(int nssteps, NSError error)
{
Console.WriteLine(nssteps);
}
[/code]