About

I have been writing code since the early 80’s. Things have moved on for sure and continue to evolve. Probably the biggest change since then, and there have been many, has been the transition to mobile devices in the form of smart phones and tablets. You already know this of course, we all do, it’s all around us and as software developers we ignore this at our peril.

Back in 2008 I did embrace one technology and that was WPF. Since then I have pretty much been working in the investment bank sector developing WPF UI solutions for various investment banks. This has proved a great testing ground for this technology and I have learnt a lot along the way.

It generally takes enterprise a good few years to ‘catch up’ with things. Many are still running Windows XP. But, they are catching up and without doubt the biggest technology enterprises will be addressing in the future is Mobile technologies. One of the biggest stumbling blocks is the need to write software for each and every platform. What enterprise or anyone wants is to write once and deploy to all platforms. This is where Xamarin comes in. What is really exciting however is Xamarin’s new offering Xamarin Forms. As a WPF developer I can now harness my existing skillset to write cross-platform mobile applications.

I will be sharing with you my adventures in Xamarin Forms in this blog as I learn, discover and hopefully write some interesting applications. I will also be applying all the things I have learnt as a software developer over the years and share with you some best practices which I will try to use with Xamarin Forms. I hope you enjoy following me on my journey.

I currently run my own software development company, Silkweb Commerce Ltd, specialising in Mobile, Desktop and web application software development. If you are interested mobile application software solutions for you or your company then please contact me at jonathan.yates@hotmail.com.

8 thoughts on “About”

  1. Hello Jonathan,

    I found your blog in internet. I have to say, your blog is really good for explaining Xamarin.Forms. Here I want to ask, can you provide some blog about how to repeat local notification for Android, iOS and WinPhone using Xamarin.Forms.

    As you know, notifications play an important role for some Apps. It is also a good topic. Furthermore, no example can be found from Xamarin.Forms official github-repository.

    Is it possible to repeat local notifications?

    Thanks very much in advance.

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  2. Hey Jonathan,

    thanks for taking us with you on your journey through Xamarin.Forms.
    Like you, i’ve been writing software since the 80’s, the last 10 years mainly as an ASP.NET developer. Xamarin excited me from the beginning, but like you, since the birth of Xamarin.Forms i feel that this is the way to go. So i took the time to learn Xamarin.Forms from the ground. And i had mainly two sources of information.

    1. The amazingly good Preview-Chapters of Charles Petzold’s book
    2. Your not less amazing blog

    While Charles Petzold does a really good job in explaining the basics and concepts of XF and XAML, it was your Blog that took me to a really high level. It was your Mountain Weather App’s MVVM and IOC architecture based code, that helped me get one “click in the brain” after the other. Building two Apps based on your architecture helped me really understand and appreciate the advantages of MVVM and IOC.

    So, while i’m not finished learning (will i ever be?) i wanted to thank your for sharing your experience with us and let you know that it really helps somebody and that it is highly appreciated.

    I you ever come to Munich, ping me, and a hot bavarian meal and a cold beer (or as many as you can handle) are yours 🙂

    Cheers from Munich
    and keep the posts rolling,
    Joe

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  4. Hi Jonathan, first thanks for a series of great articles they have been a wonderful source of knowledge, i have one question, im a littles lost on what would be the best way of resolving platform specific implementations of certain interfaces, do i need to create a separate bootstrapper for that, who would that look like ?, maybe expose the container somehow ?? thanks in advance!!

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  5. Hi Jose,

    what you ask for is an important point where IOC really shines and can make Xamatrin Forms’ DependenyService nearly obsolete.

    What i did is to derive a platform specific bootstrapper class from the PCL bootstrapper and move the bootstrapping code into the platform projects. The platform bootstrapper can so register platform-specific implementations and then call the base implementation which registers all the services that live in the PCL. This is really powerful and helped me to easily register platform-specific and crossplatform services with AutoFAC.

    The only situation i stll need to use DependencyService is globalization code, namely the MarkupExtension to translate XAML strings, because XAML controls the loading of MarkupExtensions and doesn’t give us control over the instantiation.

    Hope this helps,
    Joe

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