Paneque's Technology Blog

When you are a developer for more than one platform, you might find that what is considered basic or pre-built in one, it’s incomplete or completely missing in another one. This entry is about fixing some issues with the virtual keyboard on iOS; especially when it hides your text fields or keeps the input focus. Xamarin Studio/Mono and XCode were used for this example. Hiding the keyboard Tapping inside the TextField will show the keyboard, but it won't be possible to get rid of it by tapping outside or pressing “RETURN” on it. This is something pre-built in Silverlight for Windows Phone. Tapping outside of the textbox or hitting the “back” key will hide the keyboard. But well, there is no back key on the iPhone. So let’s start by creating and extension method that we will use in the rest of the solution. The method will return the view that is the first responder or the “active” one. public static class Extensions { public static UIView FirstRespon...

Popular wisdom says "things happen for a reason". However experience has proved me that when it comes to programmers, that is not always true. Things can just happen for no reason at all. That's why we require feedback, here is one and I assure you is in good spirit. So let's me write about something I found when building an app for iOS using Xamarin/Mono. The invisible property. Ranging from windows forms (desktop or Windows Mobile) to WPF, Silverlight/XAML on the web or windows phone. ASP.NET Web Forms or Razor, MVC or classic. One thing I can say for sure: any visual element  has a way to check for its visual status. Call it "Visible" in windows forms, "Visibility" in Silverlight/WPF. There is always an intuitive, simple and trivial way to know if something - that might be visible - it is visible at a particular moment or not. You can't imagine my surprise when I realized that the UIViewController in iOS does not provide such mecha...

DISCLAIMER: This is not about iPhone vs WP7 devices; its about development tools. If you think you can enter into a device fight here, or you like to listen to Justin Bieber, you should leave the page now. I like programming, and that's it. Well...no. I LOVE programming. No matter the platform, OS, framework or  language; I find that programming is a rewarding experience. Of course as with anything in life, you want that experience to be as smooth as possible. And that's why I am so picky with development tools... They are supposed to make my work easier. And this entry is about that, comparing the development tools used to create apps for iOS (iPhone) and Windows Phone. Recently I had the opportunity to develop the same mobile app for two platforms: Windows Phone and iOS. While I have developed for these platforms before, I rarely have coded the same app (and a complex one) for the two of them. And this is a good chance to perform a comparison, beca...