Issue 121

NEWS

MFractor v2.9 released

If you're not using MFractor then you are stealing time from your family and/or money from your client. Seriously; why are you not using it? :)

Issue #12190 - Please provide MIT-licensed NuGet packages for MIT-licensed source code

Microsoft listened, it's happening!

Google has accepted the Mono Project for the Summer of Code 2017

Miguel de Icaza is looking forward to mentoring some students this year!

GETTING STARTED

Machine setup for Xamarin

If you are just getting started with Xamarin then this blog post has everything a newbie needs to know.

CODE

The Technical Debt Prevention Clinic

Here's Richard Banks cracking talk from Ignite 2017 on technical debt. Speaker ratings wise, it was the highest rated software development talk and finished in 3rd place, after Troy Hunt and an IT Pro talk:

Your bad code is not technical debt. It's just bad code.

Your bugs aren't technical debt. They're just bad code that doesn't work.

id Software Programming Principles

id Software co-founder John Romero tells the early story of the game company in this GDC 2016 talk and lists the programming principles that guided them towards the rapid development of many games including Doom and Quake with a very small team.

OPEN SOURCE

Dealing with disrespect: How to handle your critics

This video provides an easy to digest guide for how to handle your audience and critics, no matter what they throw at you. If you are wrestling with content, feedback, and communications that are rude, disparaging, and mean-spirited, this video can help.

PERFORMANCE

Improving HTTP performance

Any mobile application that depends greatly on HTTP requests can be a source of frustration. Mobile devices are constantly running slow connections, losing connectivity entirely, or switching from Wi-Fi to cellular. As an app developer, you really don't want to mess with any of this. You want your app to just work, and your users to not even notice any of this stuff going on while using your app. Luckily, there are a few easy tricks that can be applied to Xamarin apps that will get you most of the way there without a lot of trouble.

TOOLS

Generating Bitmaps from SVGs

One of the more tedious and thankless tasks in mobile development is the management of bitmaps. Each platform has its own naming convention and its own set of supported scales. If you want your bitmaps to appear crisp on a wide array of devices, you’ll soon be managing a dozen or so copies of each bitmap. This can quickly lead to frustration and mistakes that are difficult to catch (and it may well be your customers who find the problem).

MAC

Building Your First macOS App

When developers think of building Xamarin apps for Apple devices, they often think of iPhone and iPad, but you can also build apps for macOS. While not exactly the same as its iOS counterpart, there are many transferable skills for iOS developers looking to build apps for macOS.

REACTIVEUI

Your Mouse is a Database

Erik Meijer is perhaps best known for his work on the Haskell language and his contributions to LINQ and the Reactive Extensions. Here in this paper from 2012 he explores how web and mobile applications are increasingly composed of asynchronous and realtime streaming services and push notifications.

Help Wanted: Let's build same samples!

Here's the video from the impromptu virtual meetup last week on the topic of building samples for ReactiveUI.

ReactiveUI v7.2 released

Kent Boogaart released v7.2 of ReactiveUI while I was out and about! So much awesomeness. Another victory for CI/CD and documenting knowledge/processes.

.NET

Design Exploration: Shapes and Extensions

Mads Torgersen (MSFT) has opened a discussion on GitHub to discuss merging these language design proposals:

Extension everything, which allows types to be extended with most kinds of members in the manner of extension methods, and
Type Classes, which provide abstraction over sets of operations that can be added to a type separate from the type itself.

NUGET OF THE WEEK

Bindable Tab badges for iOS and Android for Xamarin Forms

The plugin creates a custom renderer (iOS & Android) and a custom attached property for adding tab bar badges which can be bound in Xamarin Forms shared code.

AND FINALLY...

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