Creating a sprite editor

This post is part of the MAUI UI July community series of blog posts and videos, hosted by Matt Goldman. Be sure to check out the other posts in this series!

C#, maui, games, MauiUiJuly, MauiGraphics,


Time for change

Hello my name is Shaun, I am a white middle-aged male and I have benefited from privilege to get where I am in the tech industry today. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t come from money and my parents had to work hard to put food on the table. But I have still benefited from the details in my introduction; I am white and a male.

Women, Time for change, discrimination, industry,


Choose your own adventure

Wow! This was probably my most difficult talk! Embedding the content into a .NET MAUI application/game and allowing you to influence the content was a challenge. Thank you so much for participating!

C#, .NET, maui, games,


Playing audio in .NET MAUI applications

This post covers how we can add the ability to play audio files in our .NET MAUI applications. In order to achieve this we will be making use of the Plugin.Maui.Audio package that my good friend Gerald and I have recently put together.

C#, .NET, maui, audio,


Progress is not merely a measure of outcomes

A number of recent experiences have driven me to this post. I must add that at least one of these experiences are based on my own expectations as I am attempting to achieve something completely new to me - writing a book.

software development, progress,


Building a mobile game in Xamarin Forms - Lottie

Lottie is one of the best discoveries that I have made in this past year. It has been around much longer, but it took a friend and a side project to help me discover it.

C#, xamarin, xamarin.forms, animations, lottie,


Mistakes of a senior engineer

Hi, my name is Shaun and despite having 15+ years in software development I want to hold my hand up and show that I still make mistakes and silly mistakes at that! I am writing this in the hope that it helps you realise that when we make a mistake we shouldn’t beat ourselves up about it, we are only human.

software development, mistakes,


Building a mobile game in Xamarin Forms - BindableLayout

In this post we will finally get to building some UI and applying the parts we have learnt in the previous posts. This will involve potentially undoing some bits but hopefully this will help to show how we can achieve yet more parts through MVVM and the approaches we have been focussing on.

C#, xamarin, xamarin.forms, bindablelayout,


Building a mobile game in Xamarin Forms - Styling and Resources

First off we need to choose a color scheme for our app! This can be a real challenge especially for the less creative types. I am certainly in that category, along with being red-green color blind I have been known to make some questionable decisions around matching colors together :).

C#, xamarin, xamarin.forms,


Animations in Xamarin.Forms

During our time building a mobile game with Xamarin.Forms we discovered just how powerful the Animation class in Xamarin.Forms really is!

C#, dotnet, xamarin, xamarin.forms,


Maui custom handlers without hash ifs everywhere

I don’t know about you but I really do not like having #if definitions dotted around all over my codebase and I try my best to avoid it where I can. Currently a mechanism to configure new custom handlers within MAUI can require you to make use of the #if statement as seen below:

C#, dotnet, maui,


My experience with contributing to Open Source

I have recently entered the world of contributing to Open Source. It was such a great experience that I feel I need to share it with you. To be clear, I have run my own Open Source project for a number of years but this has been to support my own needs with the option of allowing others to use it. It was only in 2021 that I have contributed to others.

contribution, development, mobile, open source, xamarin,


NuGet packages inside dotnet interactive

Following on from a previous post on using dotnet interactive inside vs code we can dig a little deeper in to some more useful functionality. We all need to consume NuGet packages right? I know I certainly do.

C#, dotnet, dotnet-interactive, nuget, visual studio code,


Using dotnet interactive inside VS Code

I try to be a strict note taker throughout my day-to-day work life. Whether those are minute from a meeting or recording the results of an investigation. I have been using markdown for this purpose as it is lightweight and I can easily follow the syntax to achieve an outcome that I desire.

dotnet, dotnet-interactive, visual studio code,