Issue 216

KYM PHILLPOTTS

It's been quite a week, the Xamarin Developer Summit happened in Houston to glowing reviews. I could only watch via Twitter and YouTube but it looked like such an amazing event. So a massive contratulations to all the organisers. I will definitely be going to the next one.

Also, Xamarin UI July is still in full swing drawing out great UI related articles.

Read more about all of these in the posts this week. And very importantly, have your self an amazing weekend.

❤ Kym

NEWS

Recapping Xamarin Developer Summit

The Xamarin Developer Summit has come and gone, and it was an amazing success. Unfortunately i couldn't make it but did watch the live streams. If you missed all the announcements you can check out this post which has the details.

Recapping Xamarin Developer Summit by Maddy Leger

DESIGN

Snppts – Beautiful UI Snippets for Xamarin.Forms

If you are interested in Xamarin.Forms UI design then you need to check out Snppts. Most importantly, if you want to contribute Steven outlines what you need to do.

Snppts – Beautiful UI Snippets for Xamarin.Forms by Steven Thewissen

Designing for iOS 13

In this article, Emil discusses the most important additions and changes to keep in mind when designing for iOS 13, including Apple's new symbol library, Dark Mode, semi-skeumorphic controls and new modal stacks.

Designing for iOS 13 by Emil Baehr

TOOLS

How to have your Xamarin.iOS 13 preview cake and Emit it too

Not sure how we missed this article, but Ryan Davis, who just loves his Emit statements and live reloading wrote about setting this all up with iOS 13 preview. He tackles the very important question: "What good is a preview release if I can't hot reload new PencilKit features in ARKit3 from an embedded REPL?!?""

How to have your Xamarin.iOS 13 preview cake and Emit it too by Ryan Davis

IOS

How Long Apple Supports Older iPhone Models

Some interesting stats and insights into Apples iOS support for various devices. This is particularly interesting for those of us who have to support different versions of iOS and older devices.

Interesting Chart Shows How Long Apple Supports Older iPhone Models by Zaib Ali

XAMARIN FORMS

Creating Custom controls using SkiaSharp

While Xamarin.Forms provides a wide range of native controls, many apps require special controls that are not part of the native kit. SkiaSharp is a cross-platform library to directly draw on the UI canvas and makes it possible to create complete custom controls. In this article, Konrad covers the basics of SkiaSharp but also how to create a full custom control using things like Bindable Properties.

The basics to create custom Xamarin.Forms controls using SkiaSharp by Konrad Muller

Let's Play with CollectionView Layouts in Xamarin.Forms

Another post in the Xamarin UI July series. This post considers layout features CollectionView is providing to Xamarin.Forms developers. CollectionView is a new layout/control which we can be useed in order to show some collection of data. It might be time to move over all those ListViews

Let's Play with CollectionView Layouts in Xamarin.Forms by Almir Vuk

The Run Away! app: Drawing gradient lines on top of Maps with SkiaSharp

Jean-Marie Alfons uses SkiaSharp in an unexpected place by creating amazing overlays on top of maps. He shows how you can build such a thing with his Trail app and Google Maps. As always Jean-Marie's posts are full of good humour!

The Run Away! app: Drawing gradient lines on top of Maps with SkiaSharp by Jean-Marie Alfonsi's Picture

Imaging with Xamarin.Forms and SkiaSharp

David Britch goes deep into SkiaSharp with image processing. He delves into performing convolution on images, which is a somewhat fancy way of saying edge detection and processing. He also is focusing on the performance considerations

Cross-platform imaging with Xamarin.Forms and SkiaSharp II by David Britch

Xamarin.Forms UI Challenges - Art Plant Mall

Javier has done a write up of a Xamarin.Forms challenge to recreate a UI and document all the details in this blog post. It's part of UI July where there are so many great articles to read up on.

[Xamarin UI Challenge] Art Plant Mall (English Version) by Javier Suárez Ruiz

Reload all the things, even your code!

Modern UI frameworks such as Flutter and SwiftUI offer hot reload for declarative UI, in a single programming language. By using CSharpForMarkup with LiveSharp, you can enjoy a similar developer experience in declarative C# for Xamarin Forms today.

Hot Reloading Declarative C# UI for Xamarin.Forms with CSharpForMarkup and LiveSharp by Vincent

Vincent also wrote a good article on why you should care about Declarative UI's

Why is declarative coded UI important for the future of Xamarin Forms? by Vincent

Moar Font Icons

We love everything that makes the process of building beautiful applications easier. Using font Icons in Xamarin Forms apps makes this easier. Having to skip the process of creating and adding manually every icon for our application is just awesome.

Using Bootstrap and Material Font Icons in Xamarin Forms by Doumer

Xamarin.Forms UI Challenges - Day vs Night

Here is an article I wrote for #XamarinUIJuly that covers of recreated a design found on Dribbble. It features a bit of SkiaSharp, gradients, user selectable themeing. Lots of fun!

Xamarin.Forms UI Challenges - Day vs Night by Kym Phillpotts

SECURITY

New Apple Sign-In feature

All about the new Apple SIgn-in and what it means for your app and some considerations from someone who has actually implemented it in all it's glory.

So They've Signed in with Apple, Now What? by Curtis

PODCASTS & VIDEOS

The Xamarin Show - Fastlane Automation For Mobile Apps

This week, James is joined by friend of the show Mahmoud Ali, Microsoft MVP, who shows us how we can be more productive when developing mobile apps with fastlane. He walks us through several tools bundled into fastlane and how to easily integrate them into your day to day development cycle.

Fastlane Automation For Mobile Apps | The Xamarin Show by James Montemagno

Phone Dialer (Xamarin.Essentials API of the Week)

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 Phone Dialer API enabling your app to open the default phone dialer to enable your users to place a phone call.

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

The Heat Is On! Hot(!!)Reload Is Out!

It's July and we're in Houston for the Xamarin Developer Summit!! And it's ???hot hot hot???!!

The Heat Is On! Hot(!!)Reload Is Out! by Xamarin

Merge Conflict 158: Everything Is Awesome

It is official.... worst day in history.... MacBook Adorable is officially gone :( That makes us think.... what hardware should we buy to develop on, what software should we use, and what should we do now.

158: Everything Is Awesome

DevTalk podcast - What’s up with MvvmCross? With Tomasz Cielecki

On episode 15 of DevTalk, Tomasz Cielecki aka Cheesebaron talks all about MvvmCross, a framework for developing native cross-platform apps using .NET and Xamarin.

15: What’s up with MvvmCross? With Tomasz Cielecki by kerry

RELEASES

Announcing XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms

At Xamarin Developer Summit, the team announced XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms, which enables you to make changes to your XAML UI and see them reflected live, without requiring another build and deploy. XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin. And there was much rejoicing!

Announcing XAML Hot Reload for Xamarin.Forms by Pierce Boggan

Xamarin.Essentials welcomes tvOS, watchOS, and Tizen

This week marked the launch of Xamarin.Essentials 1.2 packed full of new enhancements and optimizations. The main highlight is the new file preview features enabling you to send, view, and email files from a single cross-platform API. Also, so many new platforms.

Xamarin.Essentials welcomes tvOS, watchOS, and Tizen by James Montemagno

Xamarin Introductions

Introducing Leomaris Reyes

This week's featured community hero is Leomaris Reyes from Dominican Republic.

Tell us a bit about yourself?

I’m Leomaris Reyes, Software Engineer from the Dominican Republic, with more than 5 years of experience in Software Development. Xamarin Certified Mobile Developer. I’m also vice president of Mujeres Tics Community and Microsoft MVP.

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

In my free time I enjoy drawing. I really love dancing and I love green spaces.💚

How did you first get into Xamarin development?

By working with web and desktop technologies. Also I was very interested in learning about mobile technologies as well, then I started to see native and multiplatform development existing options, I discarded the native option because I felt that I was a bit incomplete just by learning one and if I learned more than one native the learning curve would be longer, at that time I’ve heard from Xamarin and realized that the learning time was much less, because I already knew to program using C # and I could work with "Two in one" (Because I would be working on all the platforms I needed at the same time), it was that way back when I started studying until I totally felt in love with Xamarin!😍

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

One of the projects that made me feel very proud of the work done was the implementation and testing of a Facebook plugin in which I had the opportunity to be an open source collaborator. It filled me with pride, because at the time I developed it, I was totally NEW in the Xamarin world.🙈

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

Xamarin is a very nice tool, I invite you to discover for yourself how powerful it is, all the beginnings are difficult, the most important thing is not to get discouraged and learn all the way. You can start with Microsoft Learn and since the community is so cooperative and amazing you can check the different blogs that exist!

In my case, one of my techniques of each topic learned was to have a kind of "Library" where anything could come back and refresh what I learned, this is where my blog comes in, everything started being a place where I explained and saved what learned and at the same time other persons learn with me.

I wrote an article with recommendations for you to practice XAML, because sometimes we can’t find a way to apply what we’ve learned (If we are not working in the area yet): https://askxammy.com/tips-to-practice-ui-development-in-xamarin-forms-and-not-dietrying/

And if you encourage yourself like me, to let your knowledge help other to learn (Creating your own blog), here I leave you this article! https://askxammy.com/why-becoming-a-blogger-help-you-grow-in-your-career-my-personal-experience-as-xamarin-blogger/

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

Xamarin Essentials : https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/xamarin/essentials/
Prism: https://prismlibrary.github.io/docs/xamarin-forms/Getting-Started.html
PropertyChanged.Fody: https://github.com/Fody/PropertyChanged

Where do you think mobile will be in 5 years?

It will be used by more people and will continue making great contributions to the humanity. 😎

Any other things you would like to share or promote? I wan to present "Mujeres Tics", it is the largest community of girls in technology in the Dominican Republic 🇩🇴, which I have the opportunity to lead with a wonderful board, we work with the main objective to inspire, motivate, train and include more girls in technology. Website: https://mujeresticsrd.org/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1689486757975191/

Also, if you want to read great articles in Spanish I invite you to enter to Xamarin Latino. (http://xamarinlatino.com)

And finally on Fridays I invite you to see the .NET Friday Show, a program in Spanish based on .NET technologies. (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-A9gnsfYxMeY4JGqBvQXrQ)

Make sure you keep up to date with updates from Leomaris:

Blog (English): https://askxammy.com/

Blog (Spanish): https://medium.com/@reyes.leomaris

Twitter: @leomarisreyes11

Github: https://github.com/LeomarisReyes