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In this webinar, James Montemagno (Xamarin) and Sam Basu (Progress) demonstrate how to build beautiful native cross-platform apps from a single C# codebase. You get complete native API access on each platform and modern productive tools to build your dream Xamarin apps.
With Telerik® UI for Xamarin by Progress, you get complex Charts, amazing ListViews and handy SideDrawers - out of the box. Want productivity and hard-hitting performant controls? Telerik has got you covered.
NEWS
Most Valuable Professional - Geoffrey Huntley (again!)
I am excited to announce that I was one of the ten people who was recently recognised as an MVP by Xamarin for our outstanding contributions to the community.
Planet Xamarin: Follow your favorite community bloggers
I just love it when a back of the napkin project is 🚢🚢🚢🚢'd in < 48 hours. Thank-you for your help. Got an idea for an improvement? Come join us in #planetxamarin on XamarinChat.
Xamarin Partner Summit 2017 – Short Recap
No Xamarin Evolve in 2017? Finger's crossed for 2018 as this the 2013 conference changed my direction in life as a software developer. Best conference I've ever attended.
What's next for .NET?
Richard Lander, Phillip Carter, Phil Haack and Miguel de Icaza took some time out this week to share with us the future of dotnet. A lot happened in the last year in our ecosystem - acquisition of xamarin, runtime open sourcing, open/public by default development/design culture, dotnet core, dotnet native and fsharp.
TESTING
Mocking Xamarin.Forms
Ever wanted to assert markup extensions, custom views, navigation or animations? Here's how. Though, be careful with this as you should be unit testing internals via the public API. Also, testing at this level (implementation) has questionable benefits and can be a sign of bad architecture/design of application or low value/brittle unit tests.
ANDROID
Improving startup time in the NYTimes Android app
As device manufacturers continue to offer faster and more fluid experiences, users expect their native apps to be faster still. The New York Times development team recently shared their insights on how they improved application startup/load time performance in their Java application. Lot's of insights here; the same concepts can be applied directly to mobile development with Xamarin.
XAMARIN FORMS
Attached Properties – What are they good for?
Attached Properties do basic communication between elements, and they also can help add commands to any event or even get many different properties of Effects to be updatable at runtime! Attached Properties are worth learning!
Performance, Power Controls and the Layout System
Michael Ridland takes a look at the internals of Xamarin.Forms and shows you how you can improve the performance of your Xamarin.Forms application by correctly using the Layout system.
REACTIVEUI
For starters, Paul Betts is not my Dad
A provocative testimonial for learning ReactiveUI and the Reactive Extensions by the author of SQLitePCL.raw; Eric Sink.
The effort to learn Rx and ReactiveUI is worth the trouble. My claim is based on this notion that ReactiveUI shines as complexity increases, but also on my belief that most people underestimate the complexity of their app. If you disagreed with me above when I said that "most of your code is reacting to something that changed", you might be underestimating the complexity of your app. It is in fact very common to start implementing under the assumption that something will not change and then later realise that you need notifications or events. Or an observable.
.NET
.NET Standard - Under the Hood
In this video, Immo Landwerth takes a look at how they different pieces of .NET Standard allow you to reference assemblies across various .NET platforms.
.NET Standard - .NET Core and Timelines
In this video, Immo Landwerth provides a quick summary on how .NET Standard and .NET Core relate and what this means in terms of timelines.
MEETUPS
New meetup: Perth Mobile .NET (Xamarin) Developers
The software developers of Perth, Australia now have their very own meetup thanks to Mohamed Zaatar!
NUGET OF THE WEEK
Genesis.RetryWithBackoff
Genesis.RetryWithBackoff adds a RetryWithBackoff extension method to observables that makes it simple to retry a failing observable with a variable delay between retries.
AND FINALLY...
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