NEWS
Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Update 3 (KB3165756)
Microsoft has released a cumulative update that provides fixes to Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Update 3. These fixes address high-impact bugs that were either found by the product team or reported by the community.
microsoft.com
CODE
The Silver Bullet Syndrome by Hadi Hariri
Strap yourself in for one of the best presentations I've seen in a while. We love our silver bullets, don’t we? Constantly chasing the dream that the next big thing will solve all our past problems. It doesn’t matter if it’s a language, framework, platform or library, we’re out there chasing it. Why? Well because it’s going to solve our needs, it’s going to solve the business needs. Well, supposedly it will. How much is it going to cost? Not that much, especially if we’re not the ones paying the bills.
youtube.com
TESTING
Xamarin.UITest Page Object project templates for Visual Studio
Dan from Xamarin has released a Visual Studio template for UI test which provides an excellent architecture for structuring your user-interface tests - the page object model. This design enables you to create your own pages quickly, encapsulate queries, and create fluid "user stories" that move from page to page.
danatxamarin.com
DEVOPS
onovotny/SignService: Authenticode signing service and client
Oren Novotny has open-sourced the project which is used to sign System.Reactive. Now you too can integrate Authenticode signing your CI process.
IOS
XAMARIN FORMS
Xamarin.Forms 2.3.3.152-pre2 now available
Forms now allows native UI elements in Xaml, i.e.: <ios:UISlider>
nuget.org
Xamarin University Infrastructure Library
A set of useful classes for Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms development which is used in a variety of labs at Xamarin University. The library includes examples of behaviours, MVVM, custom controls, binding value converters, type extensions, XAML markup extensions and helpful collections for data binding.
github.com
.NET
MyCoolMethod or MyCoolMethodAsync aka "Hungarian all the things"
Huuuggeee discussion as to whether the Async prefix is really needed on asynchronous methods and when it should/should not be used by heavyweights from the community and Microsoft.
Sprache v2.1 available; supports NetStandard
Stop using RegEx to parse multi-line text or user input, use Sprache instead. My favourite library for building parsers.
nuget.org
Announcing Superpower
Nicholas Blumhardt (Autofac, Serilog, Seq, Sprache) has announced a new parser library. The fundamental difference between how Sprache is organized, and how Superpower works, is that Superpower supports tokenization.
nblumhardt.com
NUGET OF THE WEEK
Reactive, BluetoothLE plugin for Xamarin iOS and Android
Yes! Allan Ritchie has been the light (you will too, in time) and has released a plugin for Xamarin iOS and Xamarin Android which surfaces BluetoothLE functionality in a reactive manner. Values over time, this is exactly what Rx shines at.
github.com
WHO'S HIRING/LOOKING
Senior Technology Evangelist (Sydney, Australia)
The Developer Experience and Evangelism (DX) team at Microsoft is hiring. Good luck.
microsoft.com