Issue 157

APP OF THE WEEK

Calca in the Microsoft Store

Let's hear it for the Microsoft Store!!! (crowd goes wild).

Frank Krueger has released his "crazy symbolic math calculator/markdown editor designed specifically for mad scientists" to the Microsoft Store.

Calca in the Microsoft Store by Frank Krueger

DESIGN

7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design

Tips for "cheating" at designing.

7 Practical Tips for Cheating at Design by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger

Little UI Details

A collection of little tips from @steveschoger to improve your visual design skills with the little details that make a big difference

Little UI Details

Must-have animations for Chatbots

Chat apps and bots are here to stay... Here is an exploration of the UX elements required for a successful Chat based app.

Must-have animations for Chatbots by Shan Shen

Exploring Wireframes: Is Simple Better?

"Low fidelity wireframes and high fidelity wireframes are the unsung heroes of excellent software." This article addresses the question of Why you should Wireframe... and how accurate do those wireframes need to be.

Exploring Wireframes: Is Simple Better? by MentorMate

UX Book recommendations

Glenn Stephens has created a list of his favourite UX Books

UX Book recommendations

BUSINESS & MARKETING

Ratings and Reviews.

There is a common misconception, that App Store Optimization is all about keywords and graphics. In reality, it is a bunch of actions that lead to your app optimization: keywords, description, screenshots, ratings and reviews, etc.

Ratings and Reviews. Part 1: by Ilia K.

Developers Union

There is a quiet revolution going on over here: "We believe that people who create great software should be able to make a living doing it. So we created The Developers Union to advocate for sustainability in the App Store. "

Developers Union - Home by The Developers Union

LEADERSHIP

Under the Hood of Developer Marketing

Developer Marketing – what is it, why is it important, how to develop it successfully? James Parton interviewed Jeff Sandquist, General Manager on the Cloud and Enterprise Team at Microsoft.

Under the Hood of Developer Marketing: Microsoft's Jeff Sandquist by James Parton

OPEN SOURCE

Add Video Calling in Xamarin apps using Agora.io ?

The Agora.io Xamarin SDK is an open source project that enables developers to build cross platforms apps in C#. After requests from many developers, we have officially adopted the Xamarin binding and open sourced it to help others easily bring real time communications to their mobile apps.

Add Video Calling in Xamarin apps using Agora.io ? by Sid Sharma

DEVOPS

Continuous Integration & Delivery for Xamarin & .NET Libraries with VSTS

If anyone knows how to manage multiple libraries and packages it's James Montemagno. In this article, James talks CI and CD for his Libraries (and how you can do it too).

Continuous Integration & Delivery for Xamarin & .NET Libraries with VSTS by James Montemagno

DevOps at Netflix

This article walks through the journey Netflix has taken in regards to DevOps. Fascinating read.

Full Cycle Developers at Netflix — Operate What You Build by Netflix Technology Blog

Securing and Versioning Xamarin Apps

A guest post on the Xamarin Blog from Dan Siegel which looks at how so secure and version your app using Mobile.BuildTools.

TOOLS

NuGet Support in Visual Studio for Mac 7.5

What does it take to build the tools we use. Matt Ward talks through nuget changes in VSMac 7.5. Also, check out his article on bringing .NET Core to VS Mac.

NuGet Support in Visual Studio for Mac 7.5 and .NET Core Support in Visual Studio for Mac 7.5

Build LOB and Cognitive Apps with Our New Xamarin Components

Telerik have released a really interesting component:

We are proud to announce the Xamarin version of Conversational UI – a modern UI for chat interfaces. The component itself is called RadChat and can be tied to all the major conversational UI APIs or services available today, including Microsoft Bot, Google’s API.AI and Amazon Lex, and can also be integrated in peer-to-peer scenarios.

Build LOB and Cognitive Apps with Our New Xamarin Components [New Release] by Rossitza Fakalieva

ANDROID

Everything new in the Google Play Console

The Google Play console continues to evolve. Here are the changes that came out of I/O 2018 conference.

I/O 2018: Everything new in the Google Play Console by Tian Lim

IOS

MSAL and the iOS Simulator

The MSAL.NET library, or the Microsoft.Identity.Client helps your app acquire tokens from Azure AD B2C - in fact, it's indispensable when performing any of the policies - as it handles shelling out to the system web views, communicating to B2C, and caching the tokens so the user doesn't have to log every time the app launches.

But there's something wrong with the iOS Simulator - because the token caching does not seem to persist between app launches and you're forced to login again and again and again.

But we don't have to live like this ... we can persist logins across app launches!

MSAL and the iOS Simulator by Matthew Soucoup

XAMARIN FORMS

Adding Kerning to Labels in Xamarin Forms

Kerning is the process of adjusting the spacing between characters. In this article, XamBoy shows you how to achieve it with a Xamarin Forms labels.

Adding Kerning to Labels in Xamarin Forms by Rendy

Network Resilience For Your App With Polly

Everyone needs good error handling and network resilience. In this post, Gerald Versluis shows how to use a great library called Polly. With this library we can define policies (you can see where the name came from) on how to deal with failed network requests.

Network Resilience For Your App With Polly by Gerald

Icons with Font Awesome 5 in Xamarin Forms

Using Font Icons is a great way of showing icons that scale nicely on any device. Damien Doumer shows you how to get started using Font Awesome 5.

Icons with Font Awesome 5 in Xamarin Forms by Doumer

Xamarin.Forms, Akavache and I: storing, retrieving and deleting data

Marco Siccardi follows up on an earlier post on Akavache by covering typical methods for storing, retrieving and deleting data from the cache instance.

Xamarin.Forms, Akavache and I: storing, retrieving and deleting data by Marco Siccardi

3D Content Using Wave Engine

Javier Suárez has a blog post on how to integrate 3D Content into a Xamarin.Forms application using Wave Engine. If you need to bring in 3D models into your Forms application this might be a nice approach. Note: Page is in Spanish

[Xamarin.Forms] Aplicaciones con contenido 3D utilizando Wave Engine by Javier Suárez Ruiz

AZURE

Building a Number Plate Identification Service in 5 Minutes with Microsoft’s Custom Vision Service

Nick Randolph "woke up this morning pondering how hard it would be to use Microsoft’s Custom Vision service to build a service which could be used to extract out number plates from an image.". The title of his article is a bit of a spoiler. :)

Building a Number Plate Identification Service in 5 Minutes with Microsoft’s Custom Vision Service by Nick

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

Merge Conflict: Merge Conflict 98: Machine Learning for Space Exploration with Paige Bailey

We sit down with the world famous Paige Bailey to discuss the state of machine learning and its impact on space exploration as well as on the coral reef. We of course get into artificial intelligence and how it is impacting every industry out there and we let Paige fill in all the pieces. James talks about his passion for the dwarf planet Pluto and how it should be everyone's favorite planet out there. Frank gets into his hidden passion for python and a lot more.

Paige also discusses her favorite libraries and projects that everyone should know about and support.

RELEASES

Behaviours Library 1.4

David Britch has been spending some time adding new functionality to his Behaviours Library

Behaviours Library 1.4 by David Britch

AND FINALLY...

Refactoring...

When you go to refactor someone's code...

Rich Rogers on Twitter by Ben Simo

Xamarin in Action is now on the bookshelves!

Jim Bennett's book is available IRL. For all you paper-based Luddites out there you can now curl up with this great book. If you need any convincing take a look at Luce Carter's review of the book

Xamarin in Action is now on the bookshelves! by Jim Bennett