Issue 153

GETTING STARTED

Community Books on Xamarin Development

Xamarin development is constantly growing and evolving to meet the needs of developers. To help you find the right resources for your development education, the Xamarin Blog has curated a list of community books written about Xamarin.

Community Books on Xamarin Development by Jayme Singleton

DESIGN

Treating your work like something out of a crime drama

A term not often heard in relation to software development, ‘crimeboarding’ is a process used at Code Computerlove to map out a piece of work from a detailed, technical perspective. The concept’s based on the technique we’re all familiar with thanks to numerous crime dramas/movies: detectives laying out all their evidence, thoughts and links to do with a specific crime on a giant board. This method transfers surprisingly well to development.

5 Tips for designing a great mobile app

Designing such an app is not an easy task, it demands a lot of focus and dedication from the stakeholders and designers alike. This post covers five important tips that you should always keep in mind while designing an app.

5 Tips for designing a great mobile app by Lollypop Design Studio

Designing a Crypto Wallet App

How a concept app for a Crypto Wallet (everyone's favourite topic) was designed from the ground up. A great read if you want to see an approach for designing for usability.

Designing a Crypto Wallet App (Concept) by Vivek Karthikeyan

BUSINESS & MARKETING

Building an App Business

A fascinating read about researching and creating an App business.

How I lean startup’d my way to $240k+ on the saturated App Store – Rob Caraway by robcaraway

TOOLS

Measure your code sharing metrics

We always like to talk about how much code sharing we get with Xamarin apps, but have you ever measured it? Measurer-4000 is a tool designed to get your Xamarin application's metrics and calculate its performance in sharing code and UI between platforms.

jmmortega/Measurer4000 by José Manuel Montero

All the best things about Visual Studio Code that nobody ever bothered to tell you

VSCode is a great tool. Here are some of the awesome things it can do that you might not be aware of.

VS Code can do that?!

XAMARIN FORMS

Code Snippets for Xamarin.Forms Development

Code snippets are a hidden gem in Visual Studio that most of us do not pay much attention to. Utilizing them correctly can increase productivity when we have a lot to code. In Visual Studio, code snippets are available for multiple programming languages e.g. C#, F#, XML, HTML, CSS, Python, etc. They are extremely useful when we have a bunch of boiler plate code for our properties, constructors, bindable properties, etc.

Hussain Abbasi shares his favourite snippets

Pro Tip: Useful Code Snippets For Your Xamarin.Forms Development by Hussain Abbasi

Creating a custom button with ripple effect in Xamarin Forms

How to create a custom Xamarin Forms button and keep all the cool platform awesomeness you'd expect like ripple effects.

Creating a custom button with ripple effect in Xamarin Forms by Matt Hoffman

Implement Drawer and Split UI with the Xamarin.Forms MasterDetailPage

Drawer navigation and master-detail UI are two powerful patterns that guide users through content in applications with significant amounts of data or many pages. Xamarin.Forms provides the MasterDetailPage to help you implement both presentation styles.

Implement Drawer and Split UI with the Xamarin.Forms MasterDetailPage by Mark Taparauskas

Xamarin Quick Hit: Dimming a button to indicate it is disabled

A quick hit topic from Jesse Liberty on how to achieve a dimming effect on a XAML button using data binding in Xamarin.Forms.

Xamarin Quick Hit: Dimming a button to indicate it is disabled by Jesse Liberty

Masked Entry in Xamarin.Forms

A mask on an entry field is a way to format the input into something more human readable. For example, a phone number may look like +61 400 555 555, or (555) 555-555. There are many ways to implement a mask. For maximum configurability, you would use Regex, however for most simple cases, we can implement something much easier.

Masked Entry in Xamarin.Forms by Adam Pedley

.NET

Migrating from PCLStorage to .NET Standard 2.0

If you’re a Xamarin Forms developer, you’ve likely used PCLStorage (or other Dependency Service) to interact with the target platform’s file system in the portable class library’s code. However, since November 2017, Xamarin.Forms now uses a .NET Standard 2.

Migrating from PCLStorage to .NET Standard 2.0 by Lance

Xamarin in Action - A Blog Series Summary

Our very own Luce recently wrote a series of blog posts reviewing/summarising Xamarin in Action by Jim Bennett which covers Xamarin Native cross-platform development, which has previously come up in this newsletter. This post acts as a sort of 'table of contents' summarising each chapter with links to the posts she wrote.

AZURE

The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure

Whatever tools and skills you use to create or edit your applications in your on-premises environment, you can use with Azure—from existing IDEs and editors to open-source programming languages and frameworks. Check out this guide which has a summary of all those great services.

The Developer’s Guide to Microsoft Azure - SECOND EDITION

Sending Push Notifications from a Azure Function

Azure Notification Hubs is a massively scalable mobile push notification engine for quickly sending millions of notifications to iOS, Android, Windows or Kindle devices, working with APNs (Apple Push Notification service), GCM (Google Cloud Messaging), WNS (Windows Push Notification Service), MPNS (Microsoft Push Notification Service) and more.

Gerald walks through sending messages through the Azure Notification Hub from Azure Functions.

Sending Push Notifications from a Azure Function by Gerald

AI

Using TensorFlow and Azure to Add Image Classification to Your Android Apps

TensorFlow is a well established, open source machine learning and deep learning framework that can be used to create and run a wide range of different models, usually using powerful machines in the cloud. In addition, TensorFlow also supports running models on mobile devices through the TensorFlow. In this guest blog at the Xamarin site, Jim Bennet shows you how to get started.

Using TensorFlow and Azure to Add Image Classification to Your Android Apps by Jim Bennett

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

New Xamarin University Lightning Lectures!

Every Month Xamarin University publishes out Lightning Lectures - Short talks on common challenges. Most recent additions are:

Glenn Stephens - Creating Custom Controls with Xamarin.Forms
Rene Ruppert - Customizing the Android Toolbar

Check 'em out!

Lightning Lectures

.NET Rocks! - Building UI on the Web using Ooui with Frank Krueger

Carl and Richard talk to Frank Krueger about his work on Ooui (pronounced whee), an open source project for implementing a Xamarin-forms like UI experience to the browser. The result is pretty amazing, including a web-based XAML editor that all runs in the browser... super fast! Frank talks about his experiences building code that runs with WebAssembly and the challenges of thinking through new UI experiences.

.NET Rocks! vNext

Adaptive Xamarin.Forms UI

With Xamarin.Form’s natural ability to target devices of all sizes, building adaptive UIs is more important than ever. Learn how to build adaptive UIs that scale across iPhones, Android tablets and Windows PCs while reusing as much code as possible. Check out this Xamarin University Guest Lecture.

Adaptive Xamarin.Forms UI - Greg Lutz - Xamarin University Guest Lecture by Greg Lutz

Monitor Your App's Health with App Center Analytics & Crash

This week James is joined by App Center Crash PM Sara Ford to chat on the importance of monitoring your applications. We discuss analytics with App Center and automatic crash reporting with the simple and cross-platform SDK.

Monitor Your App's Health with App Center Analytics & Crash by James Montemagno

Merge Conflict 94: Everyone Loves Architecture

MVVM, Functional Reactive Programming, Redux, Reactive, or just straight up code behind! There are so many options out there and has been a huge debate. We sit down and discuss some architecture including Frank's latest experiment: Immutable UI.