NEWS
Xamarin University Updates
Xamarin University has been hard at work building new content and features over the past month. New classes, new Lightning Lectures, new badges to collect and a brand spanking new App!!!.
Check out whats new and get learning!
xamarin.com
DESIGN
How to develop an eye for Design
You develop your design eye by thinking as if you were the designer of a product. Open an app you use often and resist the urge to start scrolling through content. Instead, actively focus on the screen in front of you. Don’t just use apps, study them!
How to develop an eye for Design by Kathleen Warner
uxdesign.cc
UX Design for Gym Fitness App
UI and UX design is vital for the app performance. Every year people’s expectations about mobile applications grow. They want a mobile app to be fast and easy to use due to delightful interaction and navigation system. Moreover, UI design should be appealing and original so that an app could catch users’ interest, make them stay and discover the functionality.
Check out this case study and also the links at the end for some great ideas about UX design for apps.
Case Study: Manuva. UX Design for Gym Fitness App. by Tubik Studio
uxplanet.org
Bright Colors in UI Design
The skill of applying colors effectively is a must-have for everyone who works with visual design. Color theory knowledge has become even more prominent with growing popularity of flat and material design directions. Learn how and when to use bold, bright colors in your UI.
Bright Colors in UI Design: Benefits and Drawbacks by Tubik Studio
uxplanet.org
PERFORMANCE
Offline is a status, not an error!
An interesting blog post from the Instagram crew who talk about how they deal with the status of offline. Specifically how they decoupling network availability and app usability. A goal for just about all mobile apps.
Improving performance with background data prefetching by Instagram Engineering
instagram-engineering.com
TOOLS
Clean your problems away!
Don't you hate when you switch branches and your Xamarin project stop working? Or even when it starts to give you some weird errors, weird behavior "for no reason"?
Well, fear no more! There's a simple solution for that (actually 2)!
Clean your problems away! by Giusepe Casagrande
giusepe.com
ANDROID
Mastering Android Themes
Learning Android themes and styles is tough. This 4 part blog series covers all you need to know. At the end of this series, you should be able to write an app with more than 1 theme and dynamic theme as well. Along the way, you will learn various ways to style an Android app with the reasoning of what is best.
Mastering Android Themes by Gaurav
medium.com
Easy tricks to boost the native Android integration of your cross-platform apps
Most mobile developers write their Mobile Apps on a Mac, which makes it super easy to quickly test them in the iOS Simulator. Naturally, this results in prettier iOS than Android apps, as we see discover flaws on iOS more often. Using an Android Emulator mostly, is not an option, as the Android world is diverse and fragmented.
Here are some easy tricks to boost the look and feel of our App’s integration into the Android ecosystem and their OEMs peculiarities.
Easy tricks to boost the native Android integration of your cross-platform apps by Robin-Manuel Thiel
pumpingco.de
IOS
Asymmetric encryption with Xamarin iOS
As a follow up on the Android Asymmetric encryption without keys which we featured last week, this week Marco Siccardi teaches us how to avoid having harcoded Asymmetric keys in iOS.
How to perform asymmetric encryption without user input/hardcoded values with Xamarin iOS by Marco Siccardi
msicc.net
Remove Extra Separator Lines in ListView (Xamarin Forms - iOS)
When using ListViews in Xamarin Forms sometimes we have the use case that we have a list with just a few elements, and we want to show each element with a separator line but on iOS it is set to all rows even the one without elements. Let Charlin Agramonte show you how to fix that!
Quick Trick: Remove Extra Separator Lines in ListView (Xamarin Forms - iOS) by Charlin Agramonte
xamgirl.com
WINDOWS UNIVERSAL
Using the built-in UWP data protection for data encryption
How to encrypt and decrypt data in an Universal Windows Platform app with the built-in DataProtection API.
https://msicc.net/using-the-built-in-uwp-data-protection-for-data-encryption/ by Marco Siccardi
msicc.net
XAMARIN FORMS
How to Build a Xamarin.Forms Custom Modal Popup
This blog post is about calling native custom modals and passing data back to the shared code while respecting the MVVM design pattern.
How to Build a Xamarin.Forms Custom Modal Popup by Doumer
doumer.me
Add Tizen Projects to Your Xamarin.Forms Applications
You can now develop applications for Tizen, and use Xamarin.Forms as the UI framework. This new way of developing applications is a great opportunity, not only for existing Tizen developers but for all Xamarin developers.
Add Tizen Projects to Your Xamarin.Forms Applications by Jay Cho
xamarin.com
Taking a Screenshot in Xamarin.Forms
There may be a few occasions when you want to take a screenshot of your app, such as for sending to support. Xamarin.Forms doesn’t have this functionality; hence we will have to create a custom renderer for iOS and Android to capture the screen. In this blog post, Adam Pedley shows us how.
Taking a Screenshot in Xamarin.Forms by Adam Pedley
xamarinhelp.com
Grouped Radio Buttons in Xamarin.Forms
Joe Maeyer shows how to create a Grouped Radio Button item within a ListView.
iwritecodesometimes.net
.NET
Blazor, Razor, WebAssembly, and Mono
Blazor is an exciting new web framework from the ASP.NET team that uses Razor, WebAssembly, and Mono to enable the use of .NET on the client. There’s been a lot of excitement about the possibilities this presents, but there’s also been just as much confusion about how these various parts fit together. In this post Dave Glick attempt to clarify things and show you exactly what each of these technologies do and how they work together to enable .NET in your browser.
Blazor, Razor, WebAssembly, and Mono by Dave Glick
daveaglick.com
Using ConfigureAwait to improve your application
Async and Await make your asynchronous code so much easier to write. Do you know about ConfigureAwait? It can make your code even a little bit more efficient.
Using ConfigureAwait to improve your application by John Thiriet
johnthiriet.com
AZURE
What is Computer Vision API Version 2.0?
The cloud-based Computer Vision API provides developers with access to advanced algorithms for processing images and returning information. By uploading an image or specifying an image URL, Microsoft Computer Vision algorithms can analyze visual content in different ways based on inputs and user choices.
microsoft.com
MEETUPS
Xamarin Developer Events in May
Xamarin and .NET user groups are hosting recap events around the world all month long to ensure every developer gets the most they can out of Microsoft Build. Continue your Xamarin development education and get the latest news on exciting releases, tooling, and updates shared during Build at an event in the list below, by checking out our Xamarin Events page, or by looking for an event near you on our Community page.
xamarin.com
CAREER
What it means to “Disagree and Commit”?
An interesting discussion about the Amazon principle of "Disagree and Commit". What does it mean, and how to you go about it.
What it means to “Disagree and Commit” and how I do it. by Natalie Russell
amazonianblog.com
PODCASTS & VIDEOS
Merge Conflict 95: Just Link It All Away
Apps too big... let Frank and James set you straight:
Using too many libraries and your app size is too big? Don't worry the linker is here to save the day! That is right the Mono linker and .NET Native are here to shrink that app and library size and can be highly customized. We take a look at why you would want to use the linker, how to preserve code from getting linked, and how to optimize your libraries and apps.
Merge Conflict 95: Just Link It All Away
mergeconflict.fm
App Builders Switzerland 2018
Whilst not technically Xamarin related, there are lots of good videos in here for all things mobile development!
App Builders Switzerland 2018 by
youtube.com
Lifting App State with Geoffrey Huntley
This week, James is joined by friend of the show and Microsoft MVP Geoffrey Huntley to discuss lifting app state with Reactive Extensions (RX). Geoffrey gives a full overview of RX and Reactive UI and how it can help developers compose their application logic easier.
Lifting App State with Geoffrey Huntley by James Montemagno
msdn.com
Using Lottie for Beautiful Animations
This week, James is joined yet again by friend of the show Matt Soucoup, who shows us how to add amazing animations to your Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms app using the cross-platform animation library Lottie.
Using Lottie for Beautiful Animations with Matt Soucoup by James Montemagno
msdn.com
AND FINALLY...
You, I, and ReactiveUI
Kent Boogaart has released his book "You, I, and Reactive UI".
Learn ways of writing UI code that is powerful, elegant, maintainable, and neatly encapsulates the management of state.
Understand how ReactiveUI's abstractions help you write user interface logic once, then run it on a wide array of platforms that have nothing in common apart from a .NET runtime.
See how ReactiveUI makes it so much simpler for you to construct modern experiences that depend on a multitude of asynchronous events.
Discover how ReactiveUI can facilitate the testing of all your code, even asynchronous and time-sensitive scenarios, regardless of how long they would ordinarily take to execute in real-time.
An important and timely book - Order your copy now
kent-boogaart.com