NEWS
Motz on .Net Rocks
The only thing better than hearing James Montemagno get excited about Xamarin is when he gets together with Carl Franklin and Richard Campbell on .NET Rocks. Together they discuss all the shiny new Xamarin things.
Netduino and Xamarin - Guest Lecture at Xamarin University
Join Bryan Costanich for a Xamarin University Guest Lecture as he walks through hacking a coffee maker into a connected appliance using Netduino and Xamarin.
DESIGN
Essential Image Optimization
This is an eBook by Addy Osmani, technically it talks a lot about what is required for optimizing images for web-based applications, however, there is a wealth of information in here to better understand image formats and compression techniques
BUSINESS & MARKETING
Developer Secrets to Unprecedented Mobile App Engagement
Creating applications that delight and engage users should always be our goals. In this post, Josiah Humphrey from Appster shares four strategies that make an app engaging,
Improving Your Mobile App With Competitive Analysis
The App space is crazy competitive. One thing you can do is "Know your enemy" - by conducting a competitive analysis to see where your competitors are at, what is working for them, what isn’t and what you can do better.
DEVOPS
Hiding API keys from Git
It's a really good idea to not leave your secret keys in your code in Github. Otherwise bad things can happen. Jim Talks about a potential way to deal with this.
TOOLS
Clean and Zip .NET projects
Sometimes you just want to zip up a project and email it... but boy are those things big. This is a little mac finder extension that will basically remove those bin and obj directories for you. If you are after something similar for Windows there is TreeTrim
IOS
Face-based Augmented Reality with F# and the iPhone X
Larry O'Brien takes cool to a new level. Not only does he delve into Augmented Reality on the iPhone X - he does it in F#. It feels like he might be showing off at this point ;-)
WINDOWS UNIVERSAL
Microsoft Design Resources
Here are some links to design resources and inspiration that you might find useful for adhering to the UWP design guidelines.
XAMARIN FORMS
Sara Ford can has MVVM!
Sara Ford has an 8 part blog series where she delves into getting started with MVVM and Xamarin.Forms.
Drawing with SkiaSharp in Xamarin.Forms
SkiaSharp is a cross-platform, open source drawing library that allows you to share your graphics code across platforms. This article provides a gentle introduction to SkiaSharp with Xamarin.Forms and some links to help get you started.
The Long Press Effect
The Effects API is an awesome part of the Xamarin.Forms framework. In this post, Adam Dunn presents a nice little Effect to add a long click gesture to any Xamarin.Forms element. Beats writing a renderer each time :)
Keyboard Overlap
In his Xamarin Forms 101 series Devlin shows how to use the KeyboardOverlap plugin to stop those pesky software keyboards from obstructing your entry fields!
VisualStateManager In Xamarin.Forms
Those of you coming from other XAML platforms may have worked with the VisualStateManager before. Basically, it allows you to specify states for a control, the appearance of a control when it is in a certain state, and when a control changes states. Well, it's on it's way to Xamarin.Forms world! Adam Pedley over at XamarinHelp introduces us to it.
Showing PDF files in Xamarin.Forms
Gerald Versluis shares some code to display PDFs within your Xamarin Forms application.
AI
Identifying my daughters toys using AI
Jim Bennet, in a true display of developer laziness (the good type), is busy training AI models to remember all his daughters toys' names - so he doesn't have to :)
SECURITY
Multi-Factor Authentication in Azure AD B2C
Matthew Soucoup continues his epic authentication marathon with a seventh article. This time talking about adding multi-factor authentication.