Issue 212

KYM PHILLPOTTS

Hiya everyone,

Hope you have had an amazing week. I've just got back from Seattle (which surprisingly had great weather) where I had a fun time at the Microsoft Campus, meeting people and geeking out. Now I'm back in Australia suffering a bit of jet-lag and not at all enjoying the Australian winter, but at least we have good coffee here ;-)

Have a relaxing weekend and enjoy all the amazing Xamarin community posts this week.

❤ Kym

NEWS

Xamarin Developer Summit Schedule Breakdown

In just under a month some of the biggest names in the Xamarin community will be presenting alongside a prominent members of the Microsoft Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms teams at the Xamarin Developer Summit. Nick Randolph has but together a great breakdown of sessions. If you have the opportunity you should really try and get to this event, it looks amazing.

Xamarin Developer Summit Schedule Breakdown by Nick

CODE

Use StyleCop to improve your code quality

When you develop a project you probably work within a team. Each developer has his own programming habits. To avoid having a code that looks different in each class we need to find a way to harmonize it. Stylecop is one way to achieve this.

Use StyleCop to improve your code quality by Damien Aicheh

DEVOPS

Digging into App Center Data

This is a continuation of Mike James' posts on using AppCenter as a Backend As A Service (BaaS). In this post, he shows how to build a no-code backend to power a mobile app built with Xamarin.Forms 4.0.

Digging into App Center Data by Mike J

ANDROID

CameraX coming soon

One of the coolest things about Android is that the devices and the cameras attached to them come in all shapes and sizes. Managing all these different camera types at the moment is a struggle.

Coming soon is the CameraX API, which aims to solve many problems with an elegant API that behaves in the same way across almost every Android device. Basically, it serves as a simplifying abstraction layer on top of the existing Camera2 API.

CameraX by Andrew Marshall

Automatic Android SDK Management

Android SDK's can be painful. As a mobile developer building apps for Android, there are many tools used under the hood to build, deploy, and debug your Android applications. We know this can be an intimidating process. So to ensure that you will have the best experience while focusing on developing your apps, we want to make sure you’re using the latest tooling. The new and improved Automatic Android SDK Management tool is here to help!

Automatic Android SDK Management by Jon Douglas

IOS

iOS 13: Notable UIKit Additions

Each year Jordan likes to dive into all the new hotness of our favorite framework, UIKit. There is plenty to look at this year, so check out some of Jordans favorite additions.

iOS 13: Notable UIKit Additions by Jordan Morgan

iOS 13: Changes in the ViewController Presentation Style

Apple changed multiple UI styles in iOS 13. One of them is the new way to present a detail view controller. The new presentation style will be enabled by default in iOS 13 and provides some new interactions.

iOS 13: Changes in the ViewController Presentation Style by Jeroen Zonneveld

XAMARIN FORMS

Reusing StaticResources

Mikolaj Kieres has written a post that covers some approaches to improve structure and reuse with your Xamarin.Forms resources.

Reusing Xamarin.Forms StaticResources by Mikolaj Kieres

Xamarin Forms Visual: Unifying User Experience

A while ago, Xamarin.Forms Visual was introduced. With Visual, you are able to bundle styles and behavior for your app. For example, you can define a style for your buttons only once, and use it throughout your entire app.

Xamarin Forms Visual: Unifying User Experience by Bas De Cort

Being Lazy with your views

Jean-Marie shows an approach he has used to optimize the startup time of his pages using a Lazy Loading of views.

Xamarin.Forms LazyView: boost your app reactivity and startup time by Jean-Marie Alfonsi's Picture

Getting started with Local databases in Xamarin Forms

Most of the Applications that we develop need to have a local database to store important information on the device. This allows you to work offline, but also is a great way of boosting performance. In this post, Leomaris shows you how you can use SQLite to do just that.

Getting started with Local databases in Xamarin Forms by Leomaris Reyes

.NET

Add ASP.NET Core's Dependency Injection into Xamarin Apps with HostBuilder

Dependency injection(DI) and inversion of control (IoC) is something that James is starting to come around to, thanks very much to ASP.NET's Microsoft.Extensions.Hosting framework. I can see this approach become the standard as we move forward to a world of .NET 5.

Add ASP.NET Core's Dependency Injection into Xamarin Apps with HostBuilder by James Montemagno

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

Aurora Controls Toolkit For Xamarin.Forms | The Xamarin Show

This week, James is joined by friend of the show Michael Stonis, Xamarin MVP and Development Lead & President at Eight Bot, who shows off his latest creation Aurora Controls for Xamarin.Forms.

Aurora Controls Toolkit For Xamarin.Forms | The Xamarin Show by James Montemagno

Merge Conflict 154: Home Made IoT Lights

Another day in the life of Frank and hacking IoT devices! This time he builds his very own IoT light strips that can speak directly to his Amazon Echo with a tiny little $11 device! Tune in to find out how he did it.

154: Home Made IoT Lights by James and Frank

Xamarin Podcast: Xamarin.Forms 4 And So Much More!

Keeping up with the latest in .NET, C#, Xamarin, and Azure is easier than ever. Co-hosts Matt Soucoup and James Montemagno cover a range of topics relevant to Xamarin developers from designing mobile apps to identity management. This week’s episode includes Xamarin.Forms 4 and the most recent features that were just released!

Xamarin Podcast: Xamarin.Forms 4 And So Much More! by Matt Soucoup

Xamarin.Essentials - MainThread

Xamarin.Essentials provides developers with cross-platform APIs for their mobile applications. On this week's Xamarin.Essential API of the week we take a look at the MainThread API to enable you to check if the code you are about to execute will run on the main user interface thread and a way to invoke code on the main thread if it isn't.

MainThread (Xamarin.Essentials API of the Week) by James Montemagno

RELEASES

Visual Studio for Mac 8.2 Preview

A couple of interesting posts on the Visual Studio for Mac 8.2 preview.

This release is important for as it’s the first one to contain improved editor experience for Android XML resources and Xamarin Forms XAML files both enabled by the port of the Visual Studio editor to the Mac.

Also, it features significant improvements to the XAML editing experience for Xamarin developers. The Xamarin.Forms XAML editing experience on Mac is now powered by the same engine that drives WPF, UWP, and Xamarin.Forms IntelliSense on Windows.

Editing advancements for Xamarin in Visual Studio for Mac by Jérémie Laval

New Xamarin.Forms XAML IntelliSense in Visual Studio for Mac by Pierce

Xamarin Introductions

Introducing Allan Ritchie

If you have been around the Xamarin Community for a while you have undoubtedly heard of Allan Ritchie, he has created some of the "must-have" libraries for Xamarin projects. He is based in Toronto Canada, but his libraries are used all around the world.

Tell us a bit about yourself?

I'm a Microsoft MVP, former Xamarin MVP, new to the Twitch/Blog thing, author of several Xamarin open source projects (Acr.UserDialogs, Plugins.BluetoothLE, & Shiny to name a few), and founder of ACR Solutions.

Tell us one thing we probably don't know about you?

I live in Canada, but I absolutely HATE the cold, can't stake, and don't follow hockey at all! I also do an epic Yoda voice...yes!

How did you first get into Xamarin development?

I had written a couple of PhoneGap apps with Sencha Touch. It was awful. Moved into native development which took too long writing two apps. Started following monotouch just as Novell took over. Went to Xamarin Evolve, saw RX and other Xamarin xplat ideas for the first time. This was the greatest thing I had ever seen since I first figure out that pizza was awesome! After that, I wrote several large enterprise scale apps with it. Xamarin is truly the best cross platform platform around.

What has been the most enjoyable project you have built using Xamarin?

My most recent professional project requires the use of almost every single device hardware service on the mobile phone (BLE, sensors, gps, and more) and uses IOT, a ton of Azure services as well. There is more to UX than UI.

What advice would you give someone looking at getting started with Xamarin development?

Spend as much time on GitHub as possible. Learning the ecosystem is far more important than following a series of docs. Learn some frameworks and libraries for MVVM and general cross platform device access (cough... Shiny, Prism, RX)

What are the MUST HAVE tools, resources and libraries that you use when building Xamarin apps?

Shiny - https://github.com/shinyorg/shiny
Prism - https://prismlibrary.github.io/
ReactiveUI & Reactive Extensions - https://reactiveui.net
Refit - https://github.com/reactiveui/refit
SQLite-NET-PCL - https://github.com/praeclarum/sqlite-net

Where do you think mobile will be in 5 years?

Mobile development in the enterprise has been growing steady which will continue to rise over the next 5 years. I do think the industry will trend towards webassembly, but all of the great cross platform/xamarin/C# skills you possess today will all apply.

Any other things you would like to share or promote?

Please get in touch if you need help with any .NET project. Shiny is always looking for feedback and help - if you're interested in participating, head over to https://github.com/shinyorg/shinyorg

Stay up to date with all the great things that Allan produces:

Blog: https://allancritchie.net

Twitter: @allanritchie911

Github: aritchie

Twitch: allancritchie

Thanks again Allan, for sharing some information about yourself and creating amazing tools for the community!

AND FINALLY...

Two Xamarin Monkeys (Glenn and Kym) visiting the Channel 9 studios. Happy days!