Issue 129

GEOFFREY HUNTLEY

This week was massive, big announcements in the ecosystem by Microsoft and I shipped something huge. For the last couple of years, "in my second (unpaid) job", I've been chipping away at an open-source project (ReactiveUI) which is trusted by GitHub, Slack, Amazon & Elastic Search. This journey started two years ago after the project founder departed to become the lead engineer that built the Slack desktop client and most of the tech that powers the Electron ecosystem.

Unfortunately, around that point, the innovation stopped, and the community dwindled. Last year Paul Betts officially handed over the keys - "don't break my shit". Ever since then we have been chipping away at the product and rebuilding the community.

A couple days ago ReactiveUI joined the .NET Foundation, which is a huge milestone for the project. There's some super neat stuff this will make possible and can't wait to share it with you.

The team is about to switch gears and start focusing on developer experience - specifically documentation and samples. We have put together a backlog for a sample application and are searching for people, on personal time, to help build it as part of the .NET Summer hackfest. If this type of stuff is of interest to you, please reply to this email.

NEWS

Welcome ReactiveUI to the .NET Foundation

🎉 finally 🎉

We are building something amazing; reactive programming changes you as a developer and makes you better. Knowledge of reactive programming is universal across programming languages.

Case in point - AngularJS was released, people adopted it, and then Version v2.0 (cough 4.0) came out. All that accumulated knowledge - disposed of. Such a waste.

Internally the we debate whether ReactiveUI is or is not a framework, as at its core the project is essentially a bunch of extension methods for the Reactive Extensions.

If you are sick of investing personal development energy in transitory frameworks whereby you must learn "how do I do $x with $framework specific way" knowing deep down in side that this knowledge has no value in the future; then please come and join us over at https://reactiveui.net/slack

The journey to the .NET Foundation

Geoffrey Huntley and Kent Boogaart has not only not broken my shit, they've ran with it and made it a Great Project (tm) - Paul Betts

Hello WebAssembly (.NET running in your browser without plugins!)

Xamarin has been experimenting with a couple of approaches to bring Mono to the web using WebAssembly - a technology that can efficiently and safely execute code in web browsers without being limited to Javascript.

This technology is significant (for me) as it is the first stepping stone to moving Xamarin Workbooks or LINQPad into the browser. Ever seen those nifty programming tutorials that the Javascript community has and felt a little jelly?

Check out http://rxviz.com for an example of what the Javascript community has, but we don't. I use this website on the daily to teach people Reactive Extensions. Knowledge of reactive programming is universal (as in applies to all languages) but writing this knowledge in a language people may not be familiar with is a hinderance to education.

Upgrading Mono's HttpWebRequest

After almost 12 years of faithful service; Mono is upgrading the guts of HttpWebRequest, the engine that powers the basic HTTP client stack.

Released: MFractor 3.2 for Visual Studio Mac!

Matt & Tom have added new image importing wizard to make bringing images into your app dead simple, fixed 🐛's and improved product quality.

Mono and Xamarin versions numbers have been added for .NET Standard 2.0

The unified #dotnet ecosystem grows!

CODE

Command conventions in Caliburn.Micro

Thought provoking blog post by the creator of Caliburn.Micro:

In my opinion (and it’s just that, my opinion) most commands don’t add any value to the main goals for using MVVM (maintainability, readability and testability).

He's in town (Sydney, Australia) this week to present at NDC on MVVM.

TOOLS

Easily clean bin/obj folders

Automate the deletion of clutter that builds up in bin/obj folder! Save gigs of data.

REACTIVEUI

What is ReactiveUI?

Being Reactive

It took me over 4 slow years to realize that the Reactive Extensions (RX) is a good idea. It’s never too late to start learning something new. Here’s a few reasons why I personally dived into RX. The influencers have double downed on the library, Google has moved to a RX mindset with their new Architecture Components and other languages/frameworks have implementations - Thus the knowledge is universal.

Still using EventHandlers?

Let us show you a better way. You can do this today in your app without ReactiveUI!

Merging IObservable<Egg>

Great explanation of how the Merge operator works:

In Reactive vocabulary, a hen is like an IObservable<Egg>. She lays eggs periodically – we don't know how often, or how many total eggs, or for how long. The machine subscribes to that observable, and reacts to it by performing a number of steps that put a pancake on a plate in the end. U

.NET

Getting Started with .NET Standard 2.0 Part 1 with Immo Landwerth

Getting Started with .NET Standard 2.0 Part 2 with Immo Landwerth

NUGET OF THE WEEK

Embeddinator-4000 for Android & iOS now available on NuGet

Xamarin released the first preview release of Embeddinator-4000 on NuGet. This is the 🍌's (omg!) project that allows you to migrate your existing brownfield Java/Object-C application towards Xamarin - without having to rewrite your application from scratch.

WHO'S HIRING/LOOKING

Xamarin is hiring in India

Looking for an amazing iOS and/or Android dev in India to join #Microsoft's Global Black Belts. Ping me/apply here: https://t.co/GkUtRPt5vt https://twitter.com/colbylwilliams/status/895746221205323776

Olo is hiring

Pros: you get to work with Greg Shackles
Cons: you work with Greg Shackles (j/k!)

Issue 129 11th August 2017