Issue 109

NEWS

No, Apple, killing your headphone jack is not 'courage'

"It comes down to one word," Schiller said. "Courage. The courage to move on and do something better for all of us." Cough. No, courage is marching across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma in 1965. Courage is facing down a tank in Tiananmen Square or a machine gun nest on the beaches of Normandy. Courage, by definition, involves doing something that makes you afraid. This is arrogance.

Introducing The Xamarin Show on Channel 9

James Montemagno has announced a brand new weekly development show on Channel 9 aptly named, The Xamarin Show - a dedicated weekly show about native cross-platform mobile development for iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows with Xamarin.

CODE

Safe Systems Programming in C# and .NET

Joe Duffy shares some of his key experiences from building an entire operating system in a C# dialect, with a focus on areas like garbage collection, low-level code quality, and dealing with errors and concurrency robustly.

DESIGN

The five rules of app localization In China

“If you want to get your app featured on one or more of the multiple Chinese app stores, be prepared to negotiate”. Getting featured in China on the Android market is mostly about guanxi, the Chinese term for connections and networking. For an exclusive launch, you can negotiate rankings, getting featured and even revenue-sharing.

ANDROID

Xamarin.Android 7.0 now with more Nougat

Xamarin.Android with support for Android 7.0 for both Xamarin Studio and Visual Studio is now available in the Beta channel, alongside with support for Xamarin.iOS 10.

Android N behavior changes

Along with new features and capabilities, Android 7.0 includes a variety of system and API behavior changes. If you have previously published an app for Android, be aware that your app might be affected by these changes in the platform

Preparing for native library linking changes in Android N

At the top of the list of updates that may impact your application is the change to Android apps linking to platform libraries. This change disallows apps from dynamically linking against non-NDK libraries and may cause your app to crash. Even if your app is not specifically linking against a private library, you may be using a library that is, such as SQLite (which uses the platform libsqlite.so) or other libraries that are linking against libcutils.so, libcrypto.so, or libssl.so. It’s important to start testing now to see if your application needs to be updated in accordance with these changes.

IOS

Let the iOS 10-ing begin!

Apple has released the golden master seed of Xcode 8 and Xamarin has released an update to the Beta channel which you can use to submit applications that take advantage of the new features in iOS 10 to the Apple AppStore. This release also brings full support for building tvOS 10 and watchOS 3 applications.

Submit Your Apps to the App Store

Go go go! The GM releases for all the platforms are out and the store is open for submissions. Good luck on getting featured with all the shiny new versions of your apps that make iOS 10 look great! 🎉

A Sizeable Cleanup

David Smith has been thinking about the cleanup and has some fascinating stats how many apps could potentially be affected by it. As you may have guessed, there are a lot of apps in the firing line. He also notes that the 50 character app name restriction isn't going to affect anywhere near as many developers.

MAC

Xamarin.Forms is coming to Mac

If you want to follow along with progress on the Xamarin.Forms Mac frontend, check out the macOS branch on GitHub.

XAMARIN FORMS

Support native view declaration in Xaml · Issue #266

<ContentPage.Content>
    <ios:UILabel Text="I'm Native" />
    <android:TextView  Text="I'm Native too" />
</ContentPage.Content>

Native Bindings · Issue #278

var btn = new UIKit.Button();
btn.SetValue(Grid.RowProperty, 2); 

var grid = new Xamarin.Forms.Grid ();
grid.Children.Add(btn.ToView());

Using Xamarin.Auth on UWP with Xamarin Forms

Damian Mehers has figured out how to leverage the WebAuthenticationBroker to implement end-to-end authentication with Xamarin.Forms and Xamarin.Auth on UWP. The source code is available on GitHub.

.NET

Initial C#/CLR stack allocation work has landed!

Short-lived things will soon be allocated on the stack, instead of on the heap aka Escape Analysis.

NUGET OF THE WEEK

Announcing Serilog.Sinks.Xamarin

Serilog has, for quite a time now been my favourite logging library for .NET because unlike other logging libraries, Serilog is built with structured event data in mind which is incredibly powerful. Despite using Serilog exclusively server-side with event-based logging for a couple of years now, I’ve only just started exploring applying this theory to the domain of mobile phone applications.

WHO'S HIRING/LOOKING

Mimo are looking for an iOS Developer to join their team

Mimo (Wien, Austria) is a platform for gamified and interactive lesson bites on Computer Science that give commutes, waits and other moments of idle time a meaning. If you’re known for building apps better and faster than anybody else, this job is for you!

AND FINALLY...

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