Issue 134

GEOFFREY HUNTLEY

And we're back...

It's been a while since the last Xamarin Weekly newsletter. So much has happened in the Xamarin Community, new Visual Studio releases, new Xamarin Forms releases and a bunch of fantastic community contributions. For this release, I've enlisted the help of Kym Phillpotts (@kphillpotts) to get the links out.

So sit back and enjoy the links...

NEWS

Xamarin Podcast

In this episode of the Xamarin Podcast, James Montemagno and Pierce Boggan cover the latest news for mobile developers from Microsoft Connect(); 2017, including updates to Xamarin.Forms, the Live Player, Visual Studio 2017, and Visual Studio for Mac.

Get Your Azure Mobile Badge from Xamarin University!

Take the Azure classes at Xamarin University and earn yourself a nifty badge whilst you learn all about Azure. Don't have a Xamarin University account? No problem, you can sign up for free and take the classes.

APP OF THE WEEK

Hunt - Open Source Xamarin.Forms App

Rob DeRosa has created a great looking virtual scavenger hunt app in Xamarin.Forms. As with all of Rob's projects, it is beautifully styled and full of best practices. It has integration with Cognitive Services and an Azure DocumentDB backend - Including a super simple deployment mechanism.

CODE

ImageCropView for Xamarin.Forms

Daniel Luberda has made an ImageCropView for Xamarin.Forms which uses FFImageLoading & ReactiveX under the hood. It even supports transformations

Creating Platform Plugins

Matthew Leibowitz has some nice docs and examples to help you develop cross-platform libraries and plugins. This should help you package up those abstractions and allow you to share them with the rest of the world (like a good community member does!)

Retry and Circuit Breaker Patterns

In case you've missed it, David Britch has a series of posts where he talks about creating more robust Xamarin.Forms applications through using the Polly framework to intelligently handle faults. This is his latest addition.

Connect(); 2017: SmartHotel360

One of the great applications demoed at Connect(); was SmartHotel360. A lot of people were asking when the source code was going to be released. So good news, it's out on Github - https://github.com/Microsoft/SmartHotel360

ANDROID

Andriod Oreo 8.0 and Visual Studio Tools for Xamarin

Tom Opgenorth dives into what’s new in Android 8 Oreo and shows how to add the latest features – like Picture-in-picture, notification channels, downloadable fonts, and more – to your apps, 100% in .NET and Visual Studio.

Approaching a Xamarin.Android Bindings Case

Xamarin.Android bindings can be painful. Jon Douglas has a nice page which some suggested approaches for getting to the bottom of issues you might have.

Replacing Services With Jobs in Android Oreo 8.0

Android 8.0 has introduced new background execution limits that dramatically change how services work. You'll want to check out Top Opgenorths post at the Xamarin blog to find out more

IOS

Getting Started with Augmented Reality in iOS 11

If you want to be one of the cool kids doing Augmented Reality (AR) development on iOS 11 you could do worse than have a look at Greg Shackles article over at Visual Studio Magazine

iOS Auto Provisioning Awesomeness with Oleg

There is nothing more terrifying than setting up iOS provisioning. But fear not, there is a new simplified workflow for automatic iOS device provisioning with fastlane

Xamarin Live Player - now with iOS Coded UI Support

The Xamarin Live Player continuing to progress with stability and features and now includes the ability to preview your iOS Coded UIs. Nice

XAMARIN FORMS

Time zone conversion in Xamarin Forms XAML using NodaTime

When developing mobile applications for multiple platforms it can be important to understand how to implement time zones conversion in elegant manner.

Flippin' Flipity Flip - it's a Flippable View

Nice little Flippable View written entirely in Xamarin Forms by Udara Alwis

Xamarin.Forms 2.5 and Local Context on Android

Xamarin.Forms.Forms.Context is dead... what to do? Let David Britch help you out.

Native Forms Released

Want to pull a Xamarin.Forms page directly into your Xamarin.iOS, Xamarin.Android or UWP project? The Forms team has you covered in the new shiny Xamarin.Forms 2.5

Dynamic Bindable StackLayout

Alex Dunn has released yet another data bound Xamarin.Forms layout onto NuGet. This one is a bindable StackLayout.

DynamicWrapLayout

Alex Dunn has created a neat little nuget package that can bind to a collection of data in Xamarin.Forms to a dynamic grid that can scale to different sized devices and orientation changes.

MVVMCROSS

MvvmCross 5.6 Released

Announcing a new MvvmCross version - 5.6. Includes improved support for TvOS, MacOS improvements, UWP suspension fixes, Android fragment changes and Xamarin.Forms bug fixes.

.NET

Share UI Code in any iOS and Android App with .NET Embedding

Announced at this year’s Connect(); was the ability to embed .NET libraries into existing iOS (Objective-C/Swift) and Android (Java) applications with .NET Embedding. James Montemagno takes a deeper look at sharing your native user interfaces and business logic in an iOS app written in Objective-C and an Android app written in Java using .NET Embedding.

SECURITY

Adding Authentication and Authorization with Azure AD B2C

Matthew Soucoup continues his great series of blog posts on Azure AD B2C

Issue 134 18th December 2017