GEOFFREY HUNTLEY
Greetings folks, it's been a while since I wrote a personal comment in this section. Truth to be told for the last eight months I've been expanding my skill-set to include progressive web apps (PWAs) using the Polymer framework. They are totally amazing because there is no installation friction from a user point of view. Asking users to visit the app store before they can use your application causes an unbelievable amount of user frustration.
Work at $client has wrapped up, and now I'm back in Xamarin land building enterprise applications that are deployed via an MDM.
Would I recommend developing a PWA over a native mobile application using Xamarin? The answer is it depends. My recommendation is to learn the PRPL pattern right now as it's a foundational pattern/won't' change, to observe the adoption of WebComponents as a standard and start expanding your skill-set to include PWA once Apple stops holding back their advancement. Apple has a vested interest in stopping the progression of PWA because they generate so much damn revenue from their AppStore.
Xamarin is still the best damn option for developing a cross-platform native application, especially in the enterprise or if your users will be spending more than 30 mins a day using your application or you need any form an offline capability. I say Xamarin is still the best option because they have the best damn education services available (documentation, samples and Xamarin University) which React simply just does not have. Your average dark matter developer will not be able to make the leap to ReactNative. The ecosystem is moving too fast for them.
This week has been interesting personally because we shipped a new version of ReactiveUI and launched the new website. This is the first of many huge announcements to come in the upcoming weeks. Keep an eye on this space.
If you are using Xamarin w/Andrioid you should update immediately to the hotfix which was just released because there was unfortunately some regressions.
Weekly Xamarin
XAMARIN FORMS
REACTIVEUI
ReactiveUI has a new website
This is a massive load off my shoulders, I took a couple days off client work to wrap up loose ends and get this shipped. Please have a look at the concepts page. Samples coming soon (tm) then documentation. Next virtual meetup is next week - some big announcements are coming.
reactiveui.net
Learning Observable By Building Observable
Frequently via social media, or in person at events, I’m asked questions about “hot” vs “cold” observables, or whether or not an observable is “multicast” or “unicast”. People seem to be really mystified by what they feel to be the dark inner-workings of Rx.Observable.
Creating a WPF Twitter client with ReactiveUI
Even though it's WPF, the concepts are exactly the same for other platforms. You should definitely read this tutorial - about to send PR into new website w/this recommendation :)
oz-code.com