Issue 106

NEWS

Changes to the Xamarin developer certification process

Xamarin has introduced a huge change to the recertification track. Instead of a list of mandated classes, they're transitioning to an elective model whereby you retain your certification status by studying topics from a subset of the curriculum.

Lock-free GC Handles

In Mono 4.4.0, the performance of GC handles improved by changing to a lock-free implementation. In this post, Jon Purdy takes a look at the original implementation and its limitations, and how the new implementation solved these problems.

Beta Preview 1: Cycle 8 now available

Xamarin has released the first beta preview of the next major feature release, called Cycle 8.

Introducing the .NET Framework monthly rollup

Beginning October 2016, you will be able to install a new update release from Windows Update called the .NET Framework Monthly Rollup. The rollup will update the .NET Framework with the latest security and quality improvements.

SemVer 2.0.0 with NuGet 3.5.0-rc1

Long awaited SemVer 2.0.0 has support has arrived in NuGet 3.5.0-rc1 for both online and local package sources. SemVer 2.0.0 adds multiple release labels which can be sorted numerically, and metadata, an extra string that provides a comment or build information without changing the version identity and sort behaviour.

Change the base branch of a Pull Request

'bout f****ing time.

APP OF THE WEEK

Mimo, an app that teaches you how to Code on your iPhone!

Dennis Daume (@flagbug/ReactiveUI) has released one heck of an application that teaches people how to code in their spare time, on their phone. Built with ReactiveUI on Xamarin, the application is currently trending extremely well on ProductHunt.

CODE

Testing with Continuous for iOS

Ben Bishop took a break from name-dropping Frank Krueger and explored how to do test driven development mobile application development on an iPad using Continuous.

Calling C/C++ libraries from Xamarin

Most examples found online talk about how to access JNI or ObjectiveC features; here Kerry explores how to p/invoke C++ from .NET. Remember, at its core, all Xamarin really is a bunch of p/invoke headers and compiler/toolchain offered under commercial support.

Neat idea; add caller attributes into SQL queries

Want to save weeks of human time, when debugging SQL queries? Include the filename and line-number of the caller into the first line as a comment. For more information, check out this Tweet by Nick Craver.

ANDROID

Quasi-instantaneous Xamarin Android Designer rendering

Jérémie Laval (Xamarin) has given the Xamarin Designer for Android a massive speed boost. It's almost quasi-instantaneous - 37ms from change to final render. It's still experimental and thus hasn't been released (yet!) but it is a massive step in the right direction.

MAC

Xamarin Mac in Visual Studio

It's now possible to officially compile Xamarin.Mac libaries on Windows which means that ReactiveUI and MvvmCross can now compile for every platform (Xamarin Mac, iOS, Android, UWP, WinRT, WPF, WinForms, WP81, WPA) known to man on a single machine and package up the results in a single step.

This feature is a huge win for framework authors/maintainers and the open-source ecosystem. Martijn (MvvmCross) is in town/down under ATM, over beers we discussed implementing the RxUI CI pipeline into Mvx once this feature graduates from alpha to the stable channel. Our current way of doing releases is to compile on OSX, sync on Dropbox, then compile on Windows and then package. Super painful, both projects have suffered regressions at times as a red/green merge, package and deploy workflow before now wasn't possible.

General availability for macOS extensions in Xamarin.Mac

XAMARIN FORMS

Declarative & implicit animations library for Xamarin Forms

Why another library? Well, Xamarin Forms only provides a basic animation API, while especially powerful with its async/await structure and extensibility it operates by setting up its own timing and modifying native view properties as it goes which means the platform's hardware acceleration around animations can't be leveraged. It has a sluggish feel that doesn't "pop" the way a native app would.

REACTIVEUI

ReactiveUI 6.5.1 released

A significant milestone for the ReactiveUI project as it marks the end of a transition process from being maintained by a single developer to being maintained by a team of developers from all around the globe.

This release resolves a NuGet metadata defect which was preventing the installation of ReactiveUI into portable class libraries that targeted Profile259.

For new projects, we recommend joining us in Slack and using the v7 nightlies which are available from MyGet as we are in the final stages of preparing for the release of v7.0.0.

FRESHMVVM

Announcing FreshMvvm 2.1 and 2.2

In previous versions of FreshMvvm construction errors of pages were in a few levels of inner exceptions, so if your xaml had a little error you had to dig into the inner exceptions. Now exceptions will be bubbled up so you don't need to look into inner exceptions

.NET

FSHARP

Xamarin Forms Data bindings with F#

Kimserey Lam demonstrates how you can use data bindings to remove any dependencies between Views and ViewModel when building Xamarin Forms application in F#.

Issue 106 19th August 2016

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