NEWS
Announcing .NET Framework 4.6.2
Lots of new stuff in .NET 4.6.2: Improved NullReference handling, support for longer max paths, and loads more.
microsoft.com
Xamarin.Forms 2.3.1 (Stable) now available
From v2.3.1 and upwards Xamarin Forms will require at least a Cycle 7 release of Xamarin. When upgrading take care not to simply "update all" as that will update the Xamarin.Android.Support packages to an incompatible version.
xamarin.com
CODE
Why you shouldn’t write your own open source license
At their core, open source licenses are legal contracts between code contributors and code consumers. In exchange for me waiving my right to sue you if something goes wrong, you grant me the right to use and modify your code. The difference between open source licenses, and other intellectual property grants, like say, an author’s license to a book publisher, however, is that open source licenses are heavily standardised, with about a dozen mainstream licenses and three primary licenses representing the vast majority of open source projects. This contract standardisation creates important non-legal externalities.
balter.com
Visualizing garbage collection algorithms
Most developers take automatic garbage collection for granted. It’s just another amazing feature provided by our language run-times to make our jobs easier, but if you try to peek inside a modern garbage collector, it’s tough to see how they work. In oldie but goodie from 2004, Ken Fox demonstrates several algorithms using visual animations.
atomicobject.com
DESIGN
Making a case for letter case
John Saito on the pros and cons of letter case over capitalisation for your labels and buttons. There's some good points being made in the comments too.
medium.com
PNG optimisation
Exporting an identical image from different design tools results in different file sizes. Why? What can be done to optimise them to reduce download time and disk space?
bjango.com
BUSINESS & MARKETING
"I sense that people who get upset about generic release notes for app updates have no idea how software development works in big companies."
This Twitter thread gives some good insight into why you might see the dreaded "Bug fixes" line in larger apps when they update. Great discussion here and it makes a lot of sense.
twitter.com
ANDROID
Introducing new app categories - From Art to Autos to Dating
Google has introduced new app categories and renamed a few existing ones to make them more comprehensive and relevant to what users are looking for.
blogspot.com.au
Styling Colors & Drawables w/ Theme Attributes
Alex Lockwood takes a deep dive into the new, Theme-aware Resources#getColor(int, Theme) method.
StateListAnimator
StateListAnimator was introduced in API 21 along with Material Design and is a simple way to transition smoothly between visual states. In this series, Mark Allison takes a look at how to use StateListAnimator to its full potential.
stylingandroid.com
IOS
Using Speech Recognition in iOS 10
Apple is finally making it easy to leverage their great dictation feature in any app. In this excellent walkthrough by Greg Shackles, he shows how easy it is to plug dictation into an app.
gregshackles.com
XAMARIN FORMS
.NET Standard with Xamarin Forms gotchas
After a week of converting a production application to .NET Standard, Adam Peldy has come across most of the gotcha's that you are going to come against with using .NET Standard in a Xamarin Forms environment.
xamarinhelp.com
.NET
Managed replacement of System.Reflection[.Emit]
Managed.Reflection is a fully managed replacement of System.Reflection and System.Reflection.Emit. Unlike System.Reflection, it is not tied to the runtime it is running on. The libary targets .NET Standard 1.3, which means it runs on Xamarin, .NET Core 1.0 and .NET Framework 4.6 and up.
github.com