KYM PHILLPOTTS
Welcome to another Weekly Xamarin Newsletter. You'll find lots of great links in this weeks edition to dig into. Also, we would like to introduce a new member to the team - Luce Carter. Luce is a passionate Xamarin developer and a big supporter of the Xamarin community. We are pleased as punch to have her on the team.
But, I'll let Luce introduce herself...
LUCE CARTER
We have a new co-curator on the team!
Hi everyone!
I thought I would write a bit about myself so you can learn who the extra face is behind this awesome newsletter!
I'm Luce Carter, a fellow Xamarin lover based in Manchester, England working as a Software Developer. I have been playing with Xamarin either professionally or in my spare time since around late 2015. In 2017 I founded the Manchester Xamarin User Group which runs quarterly and has been really great fun so far!
As well as a love for all things Xamarin, Mobile and .NET, I also have a strong love of community and giving back. Either through teaching coding courses, writing blog posts or offering my services free of charge to anyone to proof read/edit as I am a bit of a self-confessed pedant when it comes to online content.
When Kym approached me about joining the team I was absolutely honoured and immediately said yes! Geoffrey and Kym do fantastic work and I plan to continue this alongside them, sharing with you links to articles, guides, podcasts and videos that I found interesting that I think you would too. This is the first newsletter I have contributed to and it has already been great so I hope you can enjoy reading it as much as I did working on it!
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GETTING STARTED
Choosing betwen Native, Xamarin Traditional and Xamarin.Forms
Choosing to start with Xamarin or Xamarin.Forms is often one of the first decision points for a new project. There is much to consider. That decision point has been reduced significantly by things like Xamarin.Forms Page Embedding. In this article, Łukasz talks through some considerations.
CODE
Ultimate Guide to Deep Source Stepping Into [almost] Anything [in Visual Studio]
Sometimes our code doesn't work (no seriously, it happens). We debug and step through, all looks well, at some point it enters into some method we don't control -maybe part of the core framework- and BOOM an exception. Or maybe the data just comes out the other end all ugly and wrong. In this post you'll find out exactly how to step right in to this 'foreign source code', breakpoints.
Ultimate Guide to Deep Source Stepping Into [almost] Anything [in Visual Studio] by Jason DeBoever
DESIGN
User Experience Design Resources
A great list of resources for User Experience Design. Much gold in here!
Mobile Design Patterns
We all need design inspiration from time to time. Mobbin is yet another site which you can look into for mobile design inspiration!
Color Contrast Crash Course for Interface Design
There are an estimated 285 million people in the world who are visually impaired. This number includes anyone from legally blind, to those with less than 20/20 vision. Design your apps for inclusivity.
Color Contrast Crash Course for Interface Design by Matt D. Smith
Building Type Mode for Stories on iOS and Android
Handling text nicely in apps is hard. Instagram recently launched Type Mode, a new way to post creative, dynamic text styles and backgrounds to Stories. This blog post is an discussion of things learnt.
TOOLS
Lunacy, Sketch for Windows
Sketch is an awesome tool for designing UIs... but it's mac only... boo!!!
What if I told you there was a WIndows option? Mind Blown!
Lesser-known Debugging Tactics for Visual Studio
The Visual Studio debugger is an enchanting creature that can save you loads of time while finding and fixing issues in your application. Learn how to get the most out of it with some lesser known Debugger tips.
A Brief History of .NET Standard
Xamarin (and before that, Mono) allowed .NET code to run on multiple platforms for years. These days, there’s a new push in cross-platform with .NET Core and .NET Standard. This post looks at the history of code sharing in .NET and where cross-platform .NET is going with Core and Standard.
A Brief History of .NET Standard by Laurent Bugnion
Visual Studio for Mac tips & tricks
It's always good to be proficient with your tools. If you are just moving to Visual Studio for Mac then here are some tips to get you started. Also, make sure you check out some handy keyboard shortcuts for Visual Studio Mac at the Docs site as well.
Visual Studio for Mac tips & tricks by Evgeny Zborovsky
Automatic Provisioning with Visual Studio 2017
iOS device provisioning is largely regarded by all iOS developers, Xamarin or otherwise, as being one of the biggest barriers to getting started with iOS. Let's face it, it's a minefield. There is good news, however, Automatic Provisioning has made its way into Visual Studio. In this Xamarin blog post Amy gives you the low down.
Automatic Provisioning with Visual Studio 2017 by Amy Burns
ANDROID
Xamarin Android encryption
Security in apps is important. This looks like an interesting article on using Asymmetric encryption in Android without hardcoding values.
Xamarin Android: asymmetric encryption without any user input or hardcoded values
IOS
Drag yourself into iOS 11 with the new Drag and Drop API's
iOS 11 introduced drag and drop, a feature that allows users to easily move or copy data within or between apps.
XAMARIN FORMS
Using Xamarin.Forms Inside Visual Studio Mac Extensions
Wow, Visual Studio Mac Extensions written in Xamarin.Forms and using XAML?... no way! Oh yes! Let Matthew Robbins the author of mFractor show you how.
Using Xamarin.Forms Inside Visual Studio Mac Extensions by Matthew Robbins
Rich Media Experiences with the Xamarin.Forms
If you need to have videos and rich media cross platform in your Xamarin.Forms application you can save yourself a bunch of time and effort by looking at Adam Fishers Video Player component.
Delivering Rich Media Experiences with the Xamarin.Forms Video Player by Adam Fisher
Comparing Xamarin and NativeScript
Are you curious about NativeScript’s ability to create cross-platform applications? Which one do you think is better? Xamarin Forms or NativeScript? This post looks into NativeScript and see if there are some similarities between NativeScript and Xamarin Forms.
https://devlinduldulao.pro/comparing-xamarin-and-nativescript/ by Devlin Duldulao
REACTIVEUI
ICYMI epic twitter thread on the future of System.Reactive on .NET
Come join the discussion at https://reactiveui.net/slack in the #rxnet channel. We are free of the mothership and can now work towards feature parity with other implementatons such as RxJava. What does the future look like? What should be on the roadmap? Can you help? Will you? So many old [and new] faces have turned up over the last couple days since the announcement and we are all excited af - Geoffrey Huntley
System.Reactive community is now part of ReactiveUI slack
To celebrate the end of two-years of product direction uncertainty we have opened up the ReactiveUI Slack instance. Anyone can now join - Geoffrey Huntley
CAREER
Impostor Syndrome
Impostor Syndrome is one of the largest and most damaging challenges we face in our professional lives. Whilst Impostor Syndrome is not classified as a mental illness or disorder, it is often recognised as a reaction to certain situations – those situations are often amplified in our line of work.
PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Merge Conflict 93: Follow the Audit Trail
Frank and James talk about releasing "real" software and "real" production libraries. What does it take to release libraries out into the wild including a full audit trail of APIs, code, docs, and tons of tiny little things that are easy to skip?
Building mobile apps using Xamarin and F# - Complete with Tic Tac Toe
Xamarin is well known as a platform for building cross-platform mobile apps using C#, but did you know it also supports F#? In this session we'll look at the F# support in Visual Studio for mobile apps, starting with building a 'Hello World' app using Xamarin.Forms, then expanding on this to a simple game, showing how to bridge the world between functional programming and the OO world of UIs.
RELEASES
MvvmCross 6.0
Yes, you read it correctly! MvvmCross 6 has finally arrived and it is available on NuGet! MvvmCross 6 comes with quite a lot of improvements, but this also means some things will break. We have prepared a migration guide that will help you do the transition real quick! You can find it here.
MFractor v3.5 out now!
mFractor is a crazy powerful extension for people developing Xamarin applications on Visual Studio for Mac. The team over at mFractor continue to push out amazing new features. This release has tonnes of exciting features; we've worked hard to improve our XAML IntelliSense engine, added some new, very handy C# code actions and fixed a tonne of bugs.
Pro Tip: To celebrate the release of v3.5, you can get 25% off MFractor Professional until May 1st, 2018. Check out the post for details.