Issue 183

KYM PHILLPOTTS

Welcome back again for another issue of Weekly Xamarin, and a happy Thanksgiving for everyone who celebrates it! For the rest of us, we can at least reap the rewards of tech bargains during Black Friday deals. ;-)

Everyone have a great weekend, and enjoy the amazing work from the Xamarin Community.

LUCE CARTER

It's not often we have two of us write something in the newsletter but this week Jason Smith, the great mind behind Xamarin.Forms announced he is leaving Microsoft/Xamarin for a new adventure. On behalf of our whole community, thank you Jason for your hard work and commitment. I know Forms has come under some criticism lately but it is still an amazing project and everything you and the team has achieved has changed the mobile landscape. It is still my personal favourite for creating apps and I don't think I would love Xamarin as much as I do without it. Good luck from all of us and can't wait to see what your next adventure brings!

GETTING STARTED

Xamarin.Forms Fundamentals: MVVM

Jesse Liberty goes back to basics and discusses MVVM.

Xamarin.Forms Fundamentals: MVVM by Jesse Liberty

DEVOPS

Thanks, HockeyApp. Visual Studio App Center Will Take It From Here

One year ago, we announced Visual Studio App Center as the future of HockeyApp. During this journey we listened to you and have continued to improve App Center in every way. We started out with the next generation of your favorite HockeyApp services: distribution, crash reporting and analytics, and added new services exclusive to App Center: Build, Test and Push Notifications. But we didn’t stop there. We continued to build new features that make you even more productive.

Today, after months of work and refinement, we are announcing that HockeyApp will complete its transition fully to App Center in one year on November 16, 2019. We know you are busy building amazing apps, so we have focused on making this transition experience smooth and seamless for you.

Thanks, HockeyApp. Visual Studio App Center Will Take It From Here by App Center Team

TOOLS

Edit Lottie animations

Sebastian Jensen shows a tool which makes it possible to edit the animations without After Effects, at least the colors.

Note: Post is in German

Lottie-Animationen bearbeiten by Sebastian Jensen

Awesome-monodevelop

A curated list of awesome Visual Studio for macOS and MonoDevelop addins, tools and resources.

jsuarezruiz/awesome-monodevelop by Javier Suárez Ruiz

ANDROID

Android Build Performance and Reliability

The Xamarin.Android team has been working hard on improving these two issues. In Visual Studio 2017 version 15.9 and Visual Studio for Mac 7.7, we made a number of changes to improve these issues.

Android Build Performance and Reliability by Jon Douglas

Android Emulators On Hyper-V Are Pretty Awesome

I have been a mobile developer for 7 years now and since the day I started one of my largest complaints has been the Android emulator. From the very start we had just ARM emulators that were a complete joke to work with as they moved at a snail's pace.

Android Emulators On Hyper-V Are Pretty Awesome by James Montemagno

XAMARIN FORMS

Developing Samsung TV Apps with .NET - Getting Started

.NET Everywhere!! Even on your TV! In this article, you’ll learn how to set up your development environment, create your first app, and see it running on the TV emulator.

Developing Samsung TV Apps with .NET - Getting Started by Jason Roberts

XAML Compiled Bindings (Xamarin.Forms performance reminder)

Data binding is an excellent feature of the MVVM pattern and allows you to decouple views and view models. Because Xamarin.Forms are MVVM-first, using data binding is a clear choice. However, as data binding uses reflection by default, it can have a negative impact on performance.

Luckily, Xamarin.Forms support Compiled Bindings, which are akin to UWP’s x:Bind and let the compiler process all bindings during compile-time and then use strongly-typed references at runtime thus improving performance immensely.

XAML Compiled Bindings (Xamarin.Forms performance reminder) by Martin Zikmund

AZURE

Controlling an IoT device from your phone

Jim Bennett gets down with some IoT hardware to see how easy it would be to get his phone to control some hardware via Azure, with the eventual goal of doing some kind of holiday hack such as using it to control Christmas lights.

Controlling an IoT device from your phone by Jim Bennett

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

A History of .NET

In this episode, Robert is joined by Richard Campbell, co-host of .NET Rocks. They spend their time together reviewing the history of .NET, the subject of a book Richard is working on. They start with why .NET was created and end with .NET Core and they cover lots of milestones in between.

A History of .NET by Robert Green

Leveraging Xamarin in an agency environment - Mick Byrne

Hot on the heels of his talk at MonkeyFest 2018 Mick Byrne did a presentation at the Melbourne Xamarin Meetup. Mick presented on how the talented developers at "We Make Apps" structure their solutions for maximum code sharing, native performance and no-compromise UIs. For those of you who are looking at architecture and solution structures for Xamarin Apps this is one not to miss.

Also, if you are involved with a Xamarin Meetup or User Group and record your sessions, please let us know and we can promote your videos!

Leveraging Xamarin in an agency environment - Mick Byrne by Melbourne Xamarin Meetup

124: All In On .NET Standard 2.1

We are all in on .NET Standard for sharing code between our projects and libraries for the community and things are about to get better with .NET Standard 2.1! We break down the latest news in the world of .NET Core 3.0 and .NET Standard 2.1!

124: All In On .NET Standard 2.1 by soundbite.fm