What is great about Xamarin.Forms? XAML of course! Especially if you are familiar with it from WPF / Silverlight times. However, the experience with XAML in Xamarin.Forms is totally different. Unfortunately, you will not have such a great intellisense, by default you will have to discover typos in XAML at runtime, no visual editor (yet) and without preview. I have been using VS 2017 on Windows and VS For Mac on macOS, in both cases problems listed above exists.

Problem

Show hh:mm:ss picker on iOS using Xamarin.Forms.

Problem

Legacy backend API endpoint returns JSON with units in an uncommon manner.
Instead of returning the measurement system “imperial” or “metric” it returns “kgs” or “lbs”.

Following Local Databases Xamarin guide in order to add SQLite database to a Xamarin Forms project I spent quite some time on adding the “SQLite.Net PCL” nuget package. It failed with the next message:

Communicating with backend in JSON can be challenging.
In case of C# model which by convention should be in CamelCase notation and backend which is using snake_notation we can easily solve the problem with Json.NET.

For example, we have the next model:

public class Model  
{  
  public string FooBar { get; set; }  
}

and we want it to be serialised to: { “foo_bar”: “” }
We could use an attribute:

\[JsonProperty(PropertyName = "foo\_bar")\]  
public string FooBar { get; set; }

“With Apple’s release of Xcode 7 came an important change for all iOS and Mac developers–free provisioning.”

So all you need is an apple id and to configure your IDE.
There are a lot of guides available out there, so this post is not going to be another one:
- Xamarin Developer Guide
- http://stackoverflow.com/a/32249026/1970317

One thing that can be confusing is that first, you need to create a Xcode project with the same “Bundle Identifier” and then download the free provisioning profile. Just pay attention to the uniqueness of your bundle identifier otherwise, it won’t work.