Notes from the workbench.

Oct 26, 2026

I moved my blog from WordPress to Astro and GitHub Pages. Here is how I migrated the posts and comments, kept the old URLs, and used Copilot along the way.

May 25, 2026

If your Microsoft.Extensions.AI.OllamaChatClient call to qwen3.5 never returns, this post is for you. The culprit is Qwen3.5's built-in thinking mode and the fix is switching to a

Aug 14, 2025

I bumped into an issue and I had to look around a bit to find the solution. Hopefully, with this post I can help others (who, just like me, don't read Release Note thoroughly enoug

May 2, 2024

Yesterday marked a bitter sweet moment in the world of mobile development: Xamarin, a tool that has been instrumental in the evolution of cross-platform mobile applications, was of

Dec 8, 2023

In a previous blogpost, I showed you how to leverage the Whisper model on Azure OpenAI Services to transcribe an audio file to text. We can easily take this a step further: instead

Dec 1, 2023

TLDR; I've written a book about applying the MVVM pattern in .NET MAUI called "The MVVM Pattern in .NET MAUI: The definitive guide to essential patterns, best practices, and techni

Oct 3, 2023

Whisper model in Azure OpenAI Service Recently Microsoft announced that Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Speech now offer the OpenAI Whisper model in preview (link) "Whisper" is a

Dec 13, 2022

In almost all of my mobile apps, I use Font Awesome to display icons. It's a huge library and it's super easy to use in .NET MAUI and Xamarin.Forms. You can even use the 'Duotone'

Feb 11, 2022

Update December 2023 This blogpost was originally posted in February 2022. Since then, .NET MAUI and my insights have evolved a bit. On the other hand, lots of the things discussed

Dec 21, 2021

Oh ooh! Video file not streaming on Android... While developing a Xamarin.Forms app, we encountered an issue where an mp4 file wouldn't play on Android, on iOS everything worked pe

Sep 19, 2021

Since a few week I've been playing around with preview builds of .NET MAUI. Installing MAUI Preview 8 A couple of days ago Microsoft released the latest preview version of MAUI: pr

Sep 9, 2021

The MAUI way: a single Project With Xamarin.Forms, we typically had this kind of project structure: A shared project, containing all of our shared code and different 'head' project

Aug 19, 2021

For a LOB application I'm building, one very important request is the fact that users should be able to input/edit data as fast as possible. Allowing users to use the tab key to na

Feb 6, 2021

The first times I used Blazor WASM, I found it annoying that I wasn't able to make changes to the HTML while debugging and immediately see the result in the browser. As a developer

Feb 3, 2021

While debugging my UWP apps, I recently started getting this System.ExecutionEngineExeptionrandomly (roughly 50% of the time) when navigating to a new page. Today I finally found a

Dec 3, 2020

App Center is a great way to distribute (alpha/beta) releases of your Windows or UWP app to (internal) testers. Especially when you make the distribution to App Center a part of yo

Nov 30, 2020

The term UWP is used for a lot of things: UI (WinUI), the Windows AppModel, Windows Runtime API, Store Apps,... As I'm planning to keep this a short blogpost, I'm not going to disc

Feb 15, 2020

I couldn't find any samples to read a Belgian Electronic Identity Card in a UWP application. With the DeviceInformation and SmartCardReader classes it is very easy to access the de

Jan 29, 2020

While setting up Azure Notification Hubs with ARM templates, I encountered a nasty pitfall. I'm sharing it here hoping that it might help out other developers and for a future refe

Dec 3, 2019

Is it possible to show a CommandBar in UWP that... ...is always expanded and fixed so the label of your AppBarButtons are always visible ...has no ellipsis button to open or collap

Nov 22, 2019

Doing UWP development, when you've been doing WPF/WinForms development for years, can cause some confusion sometimes. A colleague of mine got stuck when trying to launch the defaul

Aug 29, 2019

Some time ago, Microsoft announced WPF and WinForms support for Visual Studio AppCenter. I almost immediately tried it out in order to share my experiences on my blog. But, unfortu

Jul 27, 2019

In this post I would like to share how I've implemented user input data validation in Xamarin Forms. Over the years I've tried a few approaches, some with success, others without.

Apr 22, 2019

Little over a year ago, I blogged about how to do image classification using WinML in UWP. Since then we got some updates of Windows and Visual Studio which result in some changes.

Mar 12, 2019

Getting the Geo Location by using Xamarin.Essentials doesn't work when the app is in the background. Let's see how we can 'fix' this (on iOS)! Xamarin.Essentials Xamarin.Essentials

Jan 1, 2019

♥Februari is the month of love and friendship. That's why the Xamarin community is sharing some Xamarin Love every day of this month: Xamarin Month of love and friendship! ♥ A lot

Dec 12, 2018

Error: /usr/bin/jarsigner failed with return code: 1 This issue bugged me for an entire day. The real sad thing about it is, is that I faced this same issue some months ago... So a

Dec 7, 2018

A loooong time ago (at least, this is what it feels like...), I created this custom Xamarin Forms control HyperlinkLabel (Blog post, GitHub repo) that can show one or multiple hype

Jun 4, 2018

In my previous blogpost I created a small PoC to show you how to work with the Azure Custom Vision Service and WinML. In this blogpost we are going to take the same model that I ha

May 15, 2018

Please take a look at my recent blogpost Image classification with WinML and UWP (update) to see what has been changed when using the latest and greatest tooling and apis. During t

Apr 5, 2018

UWP Console apps In my last two blogposts, I've already shown some really cool features coming in the Windows Redstone 4 update. Also new in the RS4 update is the ability to create

Feb 25, 2018

In my previous blogpost, I showed you how we can opt-in for multi instance support in the Windows RS4 update. In last week's 'Windows Community Standup', Kevin and Andrew talked ab

Feb 6, 2018

Redstone 4 Later this year Microsoft will be shipping the Windows 10 Redstone 4 (RS4) update. New features of this upcoming update are starting to surface in the latest Windows Ins

Dec 21, 2017

In this blog post I would like to show you how to use Acrylic, Reveal highlight and Connected Animations using the Fluent Design System that comes with the Fall Creators Update of

Dec 2, 2017

A couple of months ago, two befriended MVPs put me up for nomination. And, finally, yesterday the highly awaited email arrived: I'm so honored to being part of this absolutely grea

Nov 5, 2017

I needed a simple control that could show a hyperlink inline with other text and I'd like the link to be defined in markdown. In short, something like this: HyperlinkLabel In Xamar

Oct 11, 2017

Last week I gave a talk about Realm at the Xamarin Expert Day in Cologne, Germany. Some people asked me if I could put the code of the demos, that I used in this talk, on a public

Sep 2, 2017

Hello .NET Standard 2.0 A week or so ago, Visual Studio Preview 15.4 released and I was pretty excited about this! Why? Well, Visual Studio 2017 version 15.4 Preview brings first c

Aug 13, 2017

Since the Anniversary update, we got this new RemoteSystem class in UWP, which is part of Project Rome. With this api we can discover and interact with other computers. One of my f

Aug 3, 2017

Realm offers a nice technique to share Realms with other users using the PermissionOffer and the PermissionOfferResponse objects. The idea is that you can provide a token that an o

Jul 6, 2017

Sometimes you stumble upon these gems that you didn't know they existed. Like I did today... The 'problem' with the Picker You might have noticed that when you are binding to the S

May 20, 2017

Localizing your app isn't the most fun thing to do. In the last couple of years I've seen and tried various ways of implementing multi language support. In this blogpost I would li

Apr 20, 2017

Xamarin Forms supports binding to indexed properties. But do you know how to trigger a PropertyChanged event on such a property so that the binding engine gets the updated value? B

Apr 16, 2017

Lately I've been playing around with Realm. Realm is a very cool platform that allows us to easily build mobile apps that use things like local data storage, two-way data synchroni

Feb 10, 2017

When I was building a Xamarin PoC at the client, I was disappointed to notice that there wasn't any way of simulating the user's location on the Remoted iOS Simulator for Windows.

Jan 29, 2017

Preface (you can skip this if you are not interested in the underlying idea, no hard feelings!) A while ago my brother -who sells windows (no, not the OS) and doors- asked me if I

Nov 19, 2016

The problem When we use Runs in a TextBlock in XAML, we can get these annoying whitespaces between the Runs in our application. For example, this XAML... ... produces this in our A

Nov 17, 2016

Intro On one of our UWP projects we ran into an issue where OneWay binding using x:Bind (compiled bindings) didn't work. Only the initial value was shown. In the end, when I found

Oct 25, 2016

'Google Images Style' GridView For one of the upcoming updates of the app I'm currently working on, the designers used a grid that looks a lot like the GridView that Google uses on

Sep 26, 2016

Catch 'em all Last week a colleague asked: what's the best way to catch different types of exceptions that need to be handled in the same way? He saw a couple of options himself, f

Sep 20, 2016

Visual Studio 2015 randomly crashing -> FIX! A colleague of mine was having issues with Visual Studio 2015. Every now and then his instance of Visual Studio would just crash. He th

Sep 19, 2016

Some months ago, I blogged about how to display PDF files in your UWP app: Displaying PDF files in a UWP app When I look at the stats of my blog, I notice that that particular blog

Sep 3, 2016

I was trying out some stuff on my Xbox One (well technically not mine, but that doesn't matter). More particularly I was testing out UWP for Xbox One. One of the first things I wan

Jul 5, 2016

Intro The company I work for, Ordina Belgium, got many requests for ‘consultants with Xamarin experience’ from our customers lately. As leader of the Mobile Competence Center at Or

Jun 28, 2016

It has been a while since my last blogpost (due to various reasons: preparing wedding and talk at Techorama, meetings with the architect for the construction of our house,...)! But

Mar 8, 2016

8th March 2016 I gave a talk for Mobel ("Belgian Mobile Developer User Group") about Data sharing and Cross-App Communication in UWP. As it was only a short talk (in total there we

Feb 6, 2016

In this short blogpost I want to show you how I've used the Windows.Data.Pdf.PdfDocument class in order to render a PDF file inside my UWP app. In order to open a PDF from a UWP ap

Jan 17, 2016

Designers tend to come up 'crazy' (not standard!) ideas about the looks and the behavior of UI elements. Especially when you are building a UWP app and those designers have no expe

Dec 30, 2015

One last blogpost to end 2015 with... Intro For this small project I'm working on in my spare time, I wanted to use a Pivot control but without the gestures; i.e. swipe/pan/flick t

Nov 15, 2015

(published on 11/30/2015, although Wordpress states '11/15/2015') Intro The first time I heard about Compiled Bindings (x:Bind) was at Build 2015. Finally we got compile-time valid

Nov 14, 2015

Intro My team and I are currently working on a UWP project which is a complete rewrite of a WinRT app that we have been building.Recently we started development on the 'Search' fun

Nov 7, 2015

Deferred Loading is a great way to optimize your XAML views. It allows us to lazy load controls that aren't visible by default, or that are only visible under certain conditions. I

Nov 5, 2015

Since a couple of years, one of my new years resolutions has been: "Starting a blog". For some reason or another, for all these years, on the 31 December I needed to conclude that