I created this how-to guide to help developers currently learning or working on an existing project with Windows 10. My hope is that by the end of this tutorial, you will benefit from these configurations that help expedite the learning and developmental process.

One year ago, while I was having lunch at the University of St. Thomas campus in downtown, I ran into a friend who worked with the Minnesota High Tech Association (MHTA). He told me about an MHTA program initiative called SciTechsperience which matched STEM interns with internships at small to medium sized companies. I was eager to start an internship, but I knew I didn’t want to work at a large company, so this opportunity sounded perfect for me.

Xamarin.Forms Width and Height is -1!?

Occasionally in a Xamarin.Forms project you need access to an object’s Width and/or Height and you are being returned a value of -1. This can be super frustrating! It however makes perfect sense, because in all of these scenarios the view hasn’t gone through a layout cycle preventing it from knowing the size of the object you wish to put on the screen relative to the parent container, etc.

One could say that I was thrust into the role of web development. Coming from a background of carpentry and wood-working, I had no prior experience in the IT field, and no notion of what to expect. My exposure to web-development came as an intern at Mobile Composer through the software development program at MCTC (Minneapolis Community & Technical College). Through my experiences with Mobile Composer, working on new code every day, watching tutorials on Pluralsight, and sifting through the forums on stackoverflow I quickly discovered that the field of web-development is constantly evolving. Because technology is ever-changing and improving, web-development requires a continual learning process.

I’d always heard that initial stage of getting into the programming field was a difficult first step. I was struggling with the prospect of having to work over the summer in a dead-end job that had nothing to do with my career of choice. Just as I was beginning to despair over what to do with myself, my instructor posted a link to the SciTechsperience program from the Minnesota High Tech Association. I immediately recognized the opportunity of an internship where I would be challenged, and which would allow me to grow as a junior developer. I read through the job postings and came across the listing by Mobile Composer. The work plan for the summer, and the technologies I’d be exposed to were very appealing to me. I quickly sent in my application. In less than 12 hours I had an interview set.

Over the last few weeks we’ve noticed that a lot happens in your UWP project when you flip the switch from Debug build to Release build mode. At the heart of it, has been this little check box on the UWP project build properties: “Compile with .NET Native tool chain”.