NEWS

ReactiveUI Community Meetups
Yesterday was ReactiveUI's first virtual community meetup. I will be doing this every month on Skype for Business as a way of passing on knowledge of how to build reactive mobile applications and to showcase what the community is doing with the framework. Thirty people were in attendance, including Jon Galloway(!) - the recording is now available from GitHub.
Happy 15th Birthday .NET!
On February 13th, 2002, the first version of .NET was released as part of Visual Studio.NET. It seems just like yesterday when Microsoft was building its "Next Generation Windows Services" and unleashed a new level of productivity with Visual Studio.NET.
CODE
The art of destroying software
One of the most important “ilities” in software is the ability to delete it and start over. In this talk, Greg Young looks at this “ility”, why it is important, and how you can optimize for it. Imagine never being afraid of your code ever again!
DESIGN
Bring stunning animations to your apps with lottie
Animations are always a delight to have in our apps, but they can also be very difficult to create. Taking an animation that a designer has created and turning it into platform-specific code is both tedious and prone to error. Lottie is a mobile animations library created by Airbnb for iOS and Android that parses Adobe After Effects animations (exported as JSON) and renders them using native animation APIs.
OPEN SOURCE
XAMARIN FORMS
Accommodating the on-screen keyboard in Xamarin Forms
Most, if not all apps, will require an entry field for user input. When you are on a mobile device, selecting an entry field will cause the onscreen keyboard to appear and depending upon the platform and app settings it can cause different things to happen to your layout.
REALM
Realtime databases with Realm
Realm recently announced a couple of elegant things for Xamarin users, including the 1.0 release of the Realm Mobile Database, and support for Xamarin on the Realm Mobile Platform. With these new features, you can quickly create a collaborative app that syncs in realtime.
MVVMCROSS
Calligraphy with MvvmCross
If you need to implement custom fonts on Android, you should be using Calligraphy. Unfortunately, the MvvmCross layout inflation implementation isn't compatible with Calligraphy. Sven-Michael Stübe has created a NuGet library and has provided instructions on how to overcome this restriction.
.NET
.NET Renaissance
What will ALT.NET look like in 2017? Will .NET developers follow Microsoft's innovative lead and start getting excited about the latest developments in software engineering as their colleagues in other ecosystems?
Multi-targeting the world: a single project to rule them all
Starting with Visual Studio 2017, you can now use a single project to build platform-specific libraries for all project types. Oren explores why you might want to do this, how to do it and workarounds for some point-in-time issues with the tooling.
Visual Studio 2017, .NET Standard and Xamarin
Visual Studio 2017 will change the way we work with .NET Standard. If you have .NET Standard projects now, you will have seen the project.json file. Project.json is now dead and buried, and everything has moved back into the csproj file. This also means no more .xproj file.
NUGET OF THE WEEK
AND FINALLY...
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