Issue 227

KYM PHILLPOTTS

Bit of a quiet week on the links-front, but still lots of great articles to catch up on and keep you busy over the weekend.

Also, did you see the Surface hardware announcements? Definitely it looks like we are all going to have to learn how to develop multi-screen applications in the future.

Have a magical weekend everyone!

❤️ Kym

CODE

Correcting Common Async/Await Mistakes in .NET

Gone are the days of users tolerating blocking User Interfaces. Your users deserve better. But you know, there are so many ways to hurt yourself with Async and Await. But Brandon Minnick is here to help you tame the beast.

Correcting Common Async/Await Mistakes in .NET by Brandon Minnick

BUSINESS & MARKETING

How To Get Your App Featured on the App Store

Getting featured on the App Store isn’t just good for bragging rights but also for downloads. Appfigures have been keeping track of all apps and games that were featured on the App Store for the last 10 years and have noticed a few patterns.

How To Get Your App Featured on the App Store

TESTING

Xamarin.UITest: Is a ListView is Refreshing?

Automated UI testing has become critical for publishing 5-star apps and many Xamarin.Forms apps display data in a ListView. But how can our UI tests determine if our ListView is refreshing? Brandon teaches you how to find out!

Xamarin.UITest: Is a ListView is Refreshing? by Brandon Minnick

TOOLS

Taming your properties with Fody

Using the MVVM pattern is a great way to organise your Xamarin.Forms app – certainly not the latest or only way, but usually a good choice. It will help you to separate concerns, help with testability and general good organisation of your code base. The biggest criticism of MVVM is normally how much boilerplate code you need to write around things like PropertyChanged. Fody can help you out by generating a bunch of that code for you.

Taming your properties with Fody by NigelFerrissey

XAMARIN FORMS

Introduction to Xamarin.Forms Shell

The new Xamarin.Forms Shell is meant to boost mobile developer productivity. App content organization and navigation is nicely abstracted away by the Shell, thus allowing developers more time to focus on app content. This article explores the basics of Xamarin.Forms Shell and how to get started.

Introduction to Xamarin.Forms Shell by Matt Soucoup

DarkMode and LightMode with MergedDictionaries

Everyone is all about the Dark and Light modes these days. In this post, Daniel covers how you can use MergedDictionaries to create implicit styles to theme your application appropriately.

DarkMode and LightMode with MergedDictionaries by dhindrik

Creating a clean Style Library

In this post, Daniel discusses tools for working with styles and how to structure and organise styles effectively within your Xamarin.Forms applications.

Creating a clean Style Library for Xamarin.Forms v1.0 by Daniel A. Monetelli

Gradient overlay

When you are designing applications that have text over an image, the text can be lost in the background. A nice technique to handle this is to put a fading gradient behind the text. And that's exactly what this article by Matt covers.

SkiaSharp gradient overlay with inset control by Matt Crombie

Using Effects on Xamarin.Forms

Custom Renderers are useful when we want to customize native controls of a given type all around our app. But when we want to customize only some specific properties of a given native view, we could make use of Effects.

Using Effects on Xamarin.Forms by Juan Maria Lao

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

Xamarin: .NET Community Standup - Oct. 3, 2019

In case you missed the Xamarin .NET Community Standup this week, it's full of great resources from the community and this standup focuses on the CarouselView. Definitely worth a watch!

Xamarin: .NET Community Standup - Oct. 3, 2019 - CarouselView to the Max by .NET Foundation

Xamarin.Forms – UI Testing & Customer Engagement

Sweeky Satpathy is a guest on Jesse Liberties, Yet Another Podcast. Sweeky is a Program Manager in the Customer Engagement Team, which is part of DevDiv product engineering team responsible for all of Microsoft’s developer focused products and services and represents the voice of the developer to the rest of Microsoft.

Xamarin.Forms – UI Testing & Customer Engagement by Jesse Liberty

Xamarin.Forms 101: Getting to Know your XAML Workspace

This week on Xamarin.Forms 101 Maddy takes a look at building XAML user interface and how to leverage all of the tools built into Visual Studio 2019 for Windows. This includes the toolbox, property panel, and built in previewer.

Xamarin.Forms 101: Getting to Know your XAML Workspace - Visual Studio 2019 for Windows

Merge Conflict: 169: A Love Letter To Immutable Data

Frank is headed off to the Open F# conference where he will be giving a talk entitled "Why I wish I wrote my app in F#" and he gives us a sneak peek at what everyone is in store for.